The Moth Podcast: Remembering Stonewall

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Hi, I'm Mark, producer of the podcast.

Happy Pride Month.

We wanted to share a favorite episode from the archives that we first ran to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall.

Just as a note, Richard Cardillo's story mentions the effects of suicide on a loved one.

Stay tuned next week for an all-new episode about Pride and family.

Until then, enjoy.

Welcome to the Moth Podcast.

I'm your host, Dane Wilburn.

This week we're celebrating Pride Month and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, and we wanted to do it right.

In the planning of this episode, we recognized how the story of Stonewall has historically been shaped to exclude many voices and perspectives.

So today, we're hoping to help create a fuller picture.

We have two moth stories and two interviews that we hope will add to your understanding of Stonewall 50.

You'll hear from Martin Boyce, who was at Stonewall on the day of the riot.

And at the very end of the episode, we'll hear from Kay Barrett, a poet and activist continuing the fight for LGBTQ plus rights today.

We talked with Martin Boyce in the park on Christopher Street just across the street from Stonewall.

He'll set the scene of what New York City was like for a young gay man 50 years ago before the Stonewall riots took place and then on that fateful day.

You'll hear that Martin uses the terms queens and street queens as catch-all phrases for a few different sexualities and gender presentations.

And that was fairly common in the 60s.

Martin also refers to the rambles in Central Park, which is a very wooded area that feels more like a forest than a city park.

Here's Martin.

My name is Martin Boyes.

I'm a Stonewall veteran.

I was born in the old city, the Fill Noir city, a city of danger, but of great excitement.

I came out in the Rambles in Central Park because my father was a cab driver and he couldn't see me there carrying on with all these queens.

that I had finally found like a crowd that was a home, a psychological home.

But I didn't want to appear on the streets.

Eventually you had to because all I heard about in the Rambles was the village, the village, the village.

And why don't you go?

At the center of the village was Stonewall, a bar that felt different from the others in the neighborhood.

So one night I went in 66 and I met what would become the Stonewall crowd of street queens.

And I liked them very much.

They were a very interesting group.

Stonewall was very different from the other bars because it's location, but more important because it was a dance bar, at a dance for, at a great jukebox.

And that's something we didn't have.

We weren't allowed to dance with each other.

We couldn't do any of these things that were emotive in any way.

We finally had a turf, a street we could call our own.

You didn't have to worry about someone coming up the block without any warning attacking you, which you got worried on every other street and every other street three blocks from.

But you didn't have to worry.

You actually could walk the block.

There were gay shops, there were tons of gay people, and you were safe.

In 1969, raids by the police were common at gay bars.

So when the Stonewall Inn was raided on June 28th, Martin didn't think much of it at first.

I was on my way to Stonewall with my friend Bertie Rivera, who was a black Puerto Rican extreme militant.

And I was always calming Bertie down.

You know, in the early in the night, he would want to fight somebody who said,

someone always said something.

And Bertie always was sensible and always listened to me, you know.

But not this night.

What happened was someone behind me said, there's a raid, there's There's a raid.

And then Bertie and I didn't say that.

We just went.

Outside of Stonewall, there was a paddy wagon and a police officer detaining a patron of the bar.

There was this cop

and this queen kicked him and pushed him back from the paddy wagon.

He jumped in and started beating her

because you could hear it.

Her head or whatever against thin metal.

And we grimaced because, you know, we knew what was happening.

So the policeman told us, you know, you saw enough, now get the hell hell out of here.

But when he told us to get out of there and turned around and we started moving towards him and not looking at each other, but the hair went back up on his neck and he turned around and raised the billy club to say it again, but he didn't say it.

He gulped, he blinked, he freaked out, he turned around and headed for the stonewall door.

And all right, it was on.

This is Bertie's night, because Bertie was a militant and was more afraid of Bertie behind me than the police in front of me.

Because Bertie demanded

retribution for all the times he had to calm down.

And now he was looking at me and said, you better fight, bitch.

And I fought

rather than face Bertie's wrath.

And there was a consensus.

And everybody started throwing the pennies because it was coppers.

And some queens were bringing in ammunition.

And some queens were guiding out the straight people.

And some queens were taking the lead.

because they had the least to lose.

The street queens had nothing to lose.

I remember there was one street queen who was amazed to me.

Because in the right, you can't see much.

You're twirling around.

So you don't get many stills.

You get movement.

But I did get the still of Miss New Orleans.

And she was up on the ledge of Stonewall window, looking like

a lithograph of John Brown, the abolitionist.

I never saw such fire in somebody's eyes.

And she was so poor.

So unhealthy, so unhappy.

Well, she was on fire.

And reinforcements were called in, you know.

And backups came in.

And they started to chase us, but they couldn't catch us.

And there was no leader, so they couldn't cut a leader down.

Everybody knew what to do at the right time.

And then all of a sudden, the worst, or maybe the loudest thing you'll ever hear in a riot, silence.

There was silence.

The whole street went silent.

And we didn't know what to do.

We just went, what's going on?

And you heard this thumping,

thumping.

And the crowd opened and there they were, the tactical police force.

I mean, with face shields and body shields, gas and clubs and sting guns.

And we all had our fingers to our mouth, like, what are we going to do, girls?

Because we didn't expect this.

This was something else.

So they formed that famous kick line and sang, we are the village girls.

We wear our heron curls.

We wear our dungarees.

This is one of our diddies we sang.

They couldn't believe we were doing this and we were kicking like the rockets.

And they had to charge.

They had to show their masculine energy.

Now it was being challenged.

The riot petered out because the energy petered out.

That was the victory.

I mean, there was a cop leaning against a rail, exhausted.

And there was a queen nearby, little bloody,

exhausted.

They didn't bother each other.

And the sun was coming, and the street was ruined.

And there were smells of burnt cloth and wood and scattering of little debris of different kinds of fabric in the wind, and paved with broken glass, like the sun caught it like diamonds.

It would look like

now to me, it's the metaphor for the road to freedom.

Then it was just an amazingly beautiful accent.

It was the beginning of a dawn of

the creation of a people,

the creation of a minority that recognizes itself a minority and demands its human rights as a minority.

That was Martin Boyce on Stonewall.

Our first moth story in this Pride episode comes from Richard Cardillo.

Richard told this story at a New York City Grand Slam where the theme of the night was out of bounds.

Here's Richard live at the moth.

Okay.

My husband Peter and I first met at the car wash.

Firstly, it's 1992.

Same-sex marriage was decades away.

And that car wash, it's not exactly a place that you took your Subaru for a waxing.

The car wash was the nickname for the back room of a really sleazy gay bar in New York called the Spike.

It had these ceiling-to-floor plastic strips that separated it from the bar, like a car wash.

And of course, being the early 90s, you walk into this dark room and it had the requisite safer sex sign spray painted on the back wall.

Guys, keep your lips above the hips.

What was I doing in the back room?

Well,

I was recently out of the closet and I was recently out of a Catholic monastery where for the last 14 years I was a monk with a vow of celibacy.

So I was hot to trot.

So there I was in my cutoff jeans and my Doc Martens looking fierce as can be and scared witless.

All of a sudden, I feel somebody coming by me.

He circles and he touches my side and I jump and I flinch and he looks at me and in the most beautiful southern droll, which I never learned how to imitate, he said, precious, what is wrong?

Don't you want to have some fun?

I said, yeah, but I'm afraid you're going to lift my wallet.

He said, I'm not going to lift your wallet.

It might lift your spirits.

Love to lift other things on you too, but I'm not going to lift your wallet.

So take a chance on me.

So I did.

We go back to the bar area and we're drinking away.

And finally, he invites me to go back to his apartment.

And I immediately started making excuses.

I said, nah, you live on Avenue B, too far away, too dangerous.

I got to work tomorrow.

And he gives me this big hug and he starts dancing with me.

And he said, precious, just listen to the words of that beautiful ABBA song.

Take a chance on me.

And I told him I fucking hated ABBA.

And I thought their music was dribble.

But I said, if you stop singing, maybe I'll reconsider.

And he stopped.

I go home with him.

The next morning, I wake up really, really early to sneak out of there.

He's already awake and fully dressed, waiting for me because he insisted on escorting me back to my apartment.

That began an 18-year wonderful romance and adventure where Pete constantly offered me the opportunities to take a chance on him and take a chance on life.

And I loved it.

It was great.

He came up with the wackiest schemes.

Let's invite homeless people to our apartment once a week so that we could have meals.

Let's get in protest marches for this or for that so that we could be on the right side of social justice.

And I'm thinking, this godless lefty

is teaching this monk in remission.

the true nature of spirituality and service.

And I was in heaven.

It was great.

A couple of years after that, Pete gets really, really, really sick and he tests positive for the AIDS virus.

And then he got walloped with a horrible, horrible opportunistic infection called toxoplasmosis.

It's a bacterial infection of the brain that leaves lesions and scarring.

And that began his major descent into deep, deep mental illness and deep, deep clinical depressions.

He cycled in and out of psychiatric hospitals all the time.

And it pained me to see this gregarious, wonderful man who was so energetic just reduced to this level of despair and darkness.

One time I go to visit him and he's crying.

I visit him every night.

He was crying his eyes out.

And I'd say, what is wrong?

He said, Richard, all these years I've been asking you to take a chance on me.

Now I need to take a chance on you.

Please.

Go out and do what you got to do for yourself.

But for goodness sakes, don't let lightning strike twice and fall in love on a first date.

Stay in love with me.

He was giving me this tacit permission to go outside the relationship for my needs, and I just couldn't do it.

And I loved him even more.

I'd visit him every night in those hellholes, and I thought he was getting better.

After a six-month commitment in a state psychiatric hospital, he finally came home.

And on a hot, hot August morning, I gave him this prolonged kiss goodbye.

I went off to work.

He went off to his day treatment.

About 11.30, I get this phone call from him on his cell phone, and there's all this traffic noise and wind.

And I said, Peter, where are you?

He said, listen, Richard, just wanted to call and check in, and I want to let you know how very much I love you.

And he hung up.

I didn't feel good about that.

So I went home and waited.

and a couple of hours later two police officers were on my front door and they gave me the horrible news that Pete had decided to jump from the George Washington Bridge.

They had recovered his body from the Hudson River and I needed to go with them to identify the body

and I just collapsed.

When Pete committed suicide, part of me died with him, but slowly, very slowly, and very surely, with the help and love and support of friends and family and a shitload of therapy, I finally started to come back to the land of the living.

And then I was filled with this gratitude for him.

Gratitude for this man that taught me how to live and take chances.

In the last seven or eight months, I'm already averaging about one protest march a week right now, even to the point of in April getting arrested for an act of civil disobedience in Trump Tower.

I'm a criminal now.

I do all of that in memory of Peter.

He taught me how to give this big fuck you to the patriarchy and an even bigger fuck you to the status quo that keeps people down.

He taught me how to keep my eyes and my arms,

sometimes my legs, wide open to the power of possibility.

And I'm so grateful he left me with a kick-ass anthem.

And someday I want to hear a cover of it sung in a really deep southern drawl.

If you change your mind,

I'm the first in line.

Honey, I'm still free.

Take a chance on me.

If you need me, let me know.

Gonna be around.

If you got no place to go, if you're feeling down,

take a chance on me.

Thank you.

That was Richard Cardillo.

Richard Cardillo is a lifelong resident of the Lower East Side in Manhattan and has been an educator for over three decades.

He is a six-time Moth Story Slam winner and has also told stories at Yums the Word, Story Collider, The Liars Show, and Risk.

Richard is still living out Pete's lessons and remains a passionate activist.

To see photos of Richard and Peter, head to the extras for this episode on our website, themoth.org.

So now that you've heard the then of Stonewall, it's time to bring things into the present.

Our next story is told by Sonia Audi.

We met Sonia at the Moth Global Community Program and they told this story in front of just 20 people after a moth workshop in Aivasha, Kenya.

Here's Sonia live at the moth.

So

it was a Saturday.

It was hot and stuffy and I was in class at the university and really it was the last place I wanted to be.

But then I had nowhere else to be, but to be in classes, I awaited a forum I was so eager to attend.

So, this forum is a safe space for lesbian, bisexual, and queer women in Kenya to just go and have fun.

And such spaces are so important because it's the only place where, in a country where you can be arrested for simply looking gay,

you can just go there and be yourself, and no one is judging judging you.

And so, I was so excited that I even dressed up for the occasion.

I mean, I got a button-down shirt, and I was feeling so hot and so dapper.

So, the whole time in class was just

doodling in my notebook, waiting for this class to end so that I can go.

I was so absent-minded until the lecturer called out, You, the person seated next to the exit.

And I

looked up and I looked around.

Are you, is it me or is it someone else?

Apparently it was me.

Yeah.

And she said, come forward.

Well,

I stood up and I walked to the front.

And all this time I was aware of all these eyes on me.

Yeah, because I really hate when attention is on me.

But at this moment, I was aware everyone was looking.

But it wasn't the first time, so I was cool.

Like I could make it through this.

So I went went and stood beside her, and the first thing she did was tilt my head backwards.

But then I heard a lip piercing, and she said, what is that

on your lip?

And before I could answer it, she started talking about piercings and how they could cause cancer and

how young people make choices without thinking about the consequences.

I'm like, it's not the first time I've been criticized because of a piercing, so I'm nervous at this point and I can feel myself sweating and it's hot, yeah,

but I know I can pull it through.

But then the unexpected happens, she asks, are you a boy or a girl?

And

at this point, I feel myself losing composure.

I'm just...

My breathing is,

I can't even feel myself breathe, you know.

I'm struggling to breathe.

And I'm torn between explaining to her my notions of gender that for me, clothes are genderless and that gender is a spectrum and people should be free in their gender expression.

And I'm also afraid that she wouldn't be able to understand that.

And my mind is also telling me to dash off.

that taking a flight is the safest way out of this, but then I'm frozen.

I can't.

It's like I'm just, I've dissociated from this situation.

And at this point, someone starts to giggle.

Yeah, and there are murmurs, and

it's just from afar.

And

she asks again, are you a boy or a girl?

And she keeps repeating this question.

Yeah.

And I really do want to answer, but then I have a lump in my throat because I'm fighting back tears.

and

eventually I say I'm a girl but it comes out as a whisper because of this lump in my throat and I repeat

you know she asks again

are you what is that you said

are you a boy or a girl and I say now louder I think I shouted I'm a girl

and

someone bursts out laughing one of my classmates and I look up and I realize it's one of my friends who's now laughing.

And the entire class joins her.

And

the lecturer asks, then why are you trying to be a man?

Why are you dressed like a man?

And

eventually we go through class.

And after class, there are all these people, my classmates, they were coming over.

And some of them were like, it's a joke.

One, that friend who loved being one of them, like, don't take it too seriously.

It's just a joke.

You know, she's old, she's conservative, she doesn't get this, get over it.

And then some of my classmates were like, Why didn't you say anything?

Why didn't you fight back?

Why did you let her treat you that way?

And really, I did not have an answer to that.

So, I quickly made it to the next forum.

The forum I had been excited about all day.

And in this forum, people were just happy to be themselves and people expressing themselves and they were talking about what they had gone through.

But when it got to me for some reason, I couldn't share this, what had happened, because it felt so small and it felt so insignificant.

I felt that people go through worse.

But later on, as I looked back, I realized that as a minority in a country that is so conservative, we are taught that silence is a skill.

Silence becomes a survival skill where if you do not draw attention to yourself, then you are safe.

But then, to quote my favorite author, Audrey Lloyd,

when we speak, we are afraid that our words will not be heard or accepted.

But even when we don't speak, we are still afraid.

So it's better to speak.

And that's why I speak today.

That was Sonia Audi.

Sonia is a black, queer, non-binary African feminist, activist, and creative.

To see photos of Sonia and their fellow activists on Trans Day of Visibility, head to the extras for this episode on our website, themoth.org.

As I mentioned at the top of this episode, the work of people of color, lesbians, and trans people has been widely excluded from the dominant telling of the fight for LGBTQ plus rights.

The stories of these pioneers have only just started to break into the mainstream.

Following in those footsteps, we sat down with Kay Barrett, who is carrying the torch today.

Kay is a trans disabled poet and a cultural strategist working for the rights of LGBTQ plus people, disabled folks, immigrants, and people of color.

We spoke to them about their activism and how they situate themselves in the legacy of these Stonewall leaders.

Here's Kay.

I'm a queer Filipinex

first generation child of a migrant.

Identify as non-binary and transgender, and I grew up working class essentially and poor.

So I grew up actually in the Midwest, in Chicago, and you know, I was queer as fuck.

From a young age, poetry was an accessible way for Kay to express themselves and to better understand their identity.

Everybody in their family, queer, straight, whatever, any culture has that one person or that one lola or grandma who tells a damn good story.

And that's a poet to me, right?

So for me, I'm coming from a long lineage of storytellers.

And there's a really lovely responsibility in that.

I feel like poetry got me to a place where I could be like,

What is Filipina, Filipinex for me?

What is transgender for me?

To use poetry as an archive for trans non-binary POC is really what makes me stay.

Because I want somebody who's who's younger than me to be like, yo, yeah, I Googled queer Filipino and here were all these options, right?

Like to combat that erasure.

So when I write, that's hella brown shit.

When I write, that's for my trans people.

When I write, that's for my disabled sick folks.

Like our shit is badass.

And here's how we reflect our people.

And for Kay, Stonewall didn't come out of nowhere.

They looked to the organizing around Stonewall as a blueprint for their work today.

Understanding Stonewall 50 means to understand what does collective care look like.

This has been happening.

It was happening before Stonewall.

It was happening in the Bay Area.

It was happening cross-nationally.

It was a time where queer, trans, non-binary, gay people, lesbians, bisexuals were like, fuck, this is terrifying.

We cannot live under these circumstances.

constantly organizing.

It's just, we study any other movement, Filipino movement, Puerto Rican movement, black movement.

It's not like that one person.

No, there was planning.

Just people were just tired of being shattered by the cops.

People wanted to wear clothes that

belonged to them and their spirits.

According to Kay, activism has to start on an individual level before big strides can be made.

Sometimes it's like you just need to sit with somebody in a line to get some fucking food stamps, you know?

Like, you just need to sit with somebody when they're having a panic attack.

Unfortunately, like, if we're not getting food, housing, medical care, access to jobs and resources, like, how are we going to create change when we're not getting our basic human needs met?

What does that feel like to have collective care where all bodies and all minds can be brilliant and not be considered something broken or fixed?

Who knows what it'll be in 20 years, where this planet will be even, right?

But what we do know is that

when we're taking care of each other, we're creating the protests, we're trying to recreate a new way to imagine being in this earth.

It hasn't been working.

That that in itself is its own revolution.

That was Kay Barrett.

Kay's next collection of poetry entitled More Than Organs is due in the spring of 2020.

When we sat down with Kay, we ended up talking for 40 minutes.

There's much more to hear from Kay and from Martin who tells us about the first Pride Parade, one of his favorite moments in gay history.

For all of that and links to how you can make a difference, head to themoth.org.

We hope you enjoyed this special edition of the Moth Podcast.

From all of us here at the Moth, Happy Pride Month.

Dame Wilburn is a longtime storyteller and host at the Moth.

She's also the Chief Marketing Director for Twisted Willow Soap Company and host of the podcast Dame's Eclectic Brain.

Podcast production by Julia Purcell with help from Rowan Nemasto at WDET.

Special thanks to Michael Guerra, Brandon Grant, Lawrence Fiorelli, and Eric Marcus.

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