Craig Perry, university administration employee.

Judy Garland, dead. That’s where it started. Dead five days before, in London, “an incautious overdosage” of barbiturates, according to the coroner, and her body had just come back to New York for burial. Twenty–thousand people lined up to pay their respects. Every gay man in Manhattan must have gone, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go see her in that coffin and disturb the delicate Dorothy Gale I had in my head. I don’t know, I needed to move, to walk, to run. To do something. So I headed for the Hudson River Piers.

My sadness buoyed me up, made me feel like I was looking down on the entire city. I watched the sky go blue and orange and red and purple and indigo as the sun set, then watched the lights come on across the river in Jersey City. June, 1969: The wet Manhattan air was like sick breath coming out of our collective throat.

I felt it in me, then. A spark. I didn’t see it for what it really was, but I felt it.

That’s why I went to the Stonewall.

Sadness is a better spark than rage. I remember thinking, Revolutions are born on nights like this. So many people would be mourning Judy. We’d all be miserable together. What couldn’t we do, if we were all on the same page like that? Now it sounds like I’m trying to be portentous, given what ultimately went down that night, but I really did have that feeling.

 

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop.

I checked with the sarge that afternoon. I always did, when I was off–duty and felt the urge and knew I couldn’t fight it, knew I’d have to find a place to dance it out of me. I was lucky I was a cop and could check to make sure I wouldn’t get swept up in a raid. Nothing was on the list for the Stonewall that night. That’s how I know for a fact that what went down that night was not your standard gay club raid. Someone upstairs was pulling strings.

I spent the whole week agonizing over whether or not to go. That’s how it always went. I’d wrestle with my fear and shame, and win, and go, and then feel so miserable and ashamed afterwards that I leapt back into the closet for another few weeks. I needed some action, some booze, and some sweat and some sex with a stranger. Quentin and I had gone to the gym together, that afternoon, and I knew he had to work that night. He didn’t ask where I was going, when I went out. Even twins are allowed to have little secrets. But he was the reason I stayed in the closet, and was always so careful to not get dragnetted. Seeing my name in the paper in a story on a gay bar raid—that would kill Quentin quicker and deader than any bullet.

 

The world changed in two huge ways that night.

In the first place, the world changed because the gays fought back. The police and the press were equally dumbfounded by the idea that a bar full of fairies would refuse to submit to one of the raids that were standard—if monstrously unjust—operating procedure. The Stonewall itself had been raided less than a week before. The night of June 28, 1969, should have been no different.

Secondly, the Stonewall Uprising was the first public demonstration of the supernatural phenomenon that would later be called by names as diverse as collective pyrokinesis, group magic, communal energy, polykinesis, multipsionics, liberation flame, and hellfire.

None of the eleven different city, state, and federal government agencies that investigated the events of that night have ever confirmed or even acknowledged the overwhelming number of witness testimonies describing the events that caused the police to so catastrophically lose control of a routine operation. The facts, however, do not seem to be in doubt. Ten police officers were vaporized that night, vanishing so utterly that the NYPD still considers them missing persons. Three more were cooked alive, charred to the point where dental records were needed to identify the bodies. No incendiary or flammable substances were found at the scene. Five paddywagons full of arrestees were stopped when their engines spontaneously overheated, and the metal doors of the wagons were melted away to free the people inside—yet no blowtorches or welding equipment were found at the scene.

Since testimonials are all that’s left to those of us frustrated with the Official Version, the oral history format seems to be our best bet. I know that many of the most outspoken voices of the Stonewall Uprising have reacted with anger and hostility at the news that I, of all journalists, was planning to compile such a history, and are urging their comrades not to speak with me. I understand their objections, and have precious little to show by way of proof that I’ve changed. I simply cannot not tell this story.

—Jenny Trent, Editor (formerly of The New York Times)

 

Craig Perry, university administration employee.

I know it’s dumb, but I felt like I had failed. Rage hadn’t gotten me anywhere. Being Black, being gay, I’d been raising hell my whole life. Screaming nonstop, at the top of my lungs, at the bullies and the cops and the priests and the rest of the hateful sons of bitches, trying to get my brothers and sisters to stand up together, and for what? The world was still so rotten that beautiful creatures like Judy Garland couldn’t wait to get out of it. Sadness felt like the only rational response to a world like that.

Walking wasn’t enough, so I went to the gym to get my mind off things. It didn’t work. The twins were there, but not even the sight of them could cheer me up. One bearded and one mustachioed, both of their bodies the same impossible lumberjack–rugby–player shape, wide–necked and wide–thighed, who did not seem to have aged a day in the seven years I’d been going to that gym. Sadness kept swallowing me back up, distracting me from the spectacle of them, happy and secure in their bubble of hetero–bro–confidence. By the time I walked out of there, I was feeling incurably alone.

All I kept thinking was, Tonight, more than any other night, I need to dance. I need to be among my people.

 

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop.

Stonewall was fucking depressing. People paint it as this great place where you could be who you really were. If that’s who you really were, you were really fucked. Run by the mob, painted all black inside, stinking of mold and charred wood because it had been boarded shut for twenty years after a big fire. I mean, every gay bar was a piece of shit—what did you expect when you couldn’t operate legally? The State Liquor Authority wouldn’t issue licenses to gay bars, and nobody runs illegal businesses but the mob. They didn’t even have running water, just a big plastic trough behind the bar, where they’d dunk the used glasses and then use them again. Not even any soap. The summer it opened there was a hepatitis outbreak.

But you went, because where else were you going to go? How else could you escape from the crushing weight of your waking life, and be among your own sick, twisted, beautiful kind?

 

Sergeant Abraham Asher, NYPD—6^th Precinct Police Chief.

We knew it was a full moon. Basic rule of policing: Don’t do crowd–control–type stuff on full moon nights. I don’t know why—people just lose their minds a little easier. This one had some pressure from upstairs, though, and was kind of a last–minute decision. But I can tell you this for goddamn sure: If I’da known Judy Garland had just died, we’d never have gone anywhere near the damn place.

That night essentially ruined my life. I got demoted. Every article painted me as a colossal idiot, and that’s taken a huge toll on my family. But I got no cause to complain, because a lot of my men didn’t come back from that night.

I used to think that faggots were poor creatures who couldn’t help their perversion. I’ve changed my mind about that. Now I know for a fact they’re born of hellfire and bent on burning us all up. And that we ought to put them all on a big boat, put it out to sea, and torpedo the son of a bitch.

 

Shelly Bronsky, bookstore owner.

I was a waitress then, at the Stonewall, although “waitress” is a stretch. We picked up glasses and gave them to the bartenders, and we kept the cigar boxes full of money—no cash register, ever, or the cops would take it away during a raid as evidence that we were selling liquor without a license, as opposed to holding a private party, which is what the mob lawyers would argue to get the case against the building owner thrown out. We mopped up the toilets when they overflowed, which was always. At the end of every night, we’d go through the garbage of the neighboring bars and steal empty bottles of top–shelf liquor, so the next night when the mob guys came through, they could fill them up with their own shitty diluted bootleg stuff.

 

Sergeant Abraham Asher, NYPD—6^th Precinct Police Chief.

I hated the raids. We had to do them, because you can’t just let filth and sickness fester in your city, but going into those places made my officers really lose their shit.

By midnight, we were in position around the corner, thirty cops, waiting for the signal from the undercovers we’d sent inside. That was standard for a raid—undercovers went in early, always women, to finger the people who worked there, because those were more serious charges. The Stonewall had a big heavy door with wooden reinforcements, so every time we raided the place, it would take us six or seven minutes to break it down and get inside, and in that time the workers would drop everything and blend in with the crowd. Once we were in, it’d be like no one worked there.

But that night, it was weird. We kept waiting and our girls inside did not come out, and I tried to radio headquarters and couldn’t get through. So we got pretty antsy pretty fast.

 

Tricksie Barron, unemployed.

You got to talk to somebody else for that. I was there, but I was so drunk that night that we might have called up a bunch of flying monkeys to burn it down. All I remember is, I met the man of my dreams that night. I meet him most nights, but this one was extra special. Complimented my dress and everything. While we were dancing, he grabbed me by the ass, pulled me close, and said, “I like a girl who’s packing more heat than me.

 

Craig Perry, university administration employee.

It was a rough night for the older queens. Men wept like babies for Judy. I stood in their midst, baffled. What was wrong with them, these fools, these people, my people, dancing like all was well in the world? I wanted to grab them, shake them, fill them up with the rage that choked me.

A lot of them were men I’d been seeing there for the longest. Many had lost everything over the years, for being who they were, for living in the world they lived in. But they were too beaten down to ever fight back. Less than a month before, when I tried to organize a campaign against The New York Times for its policy of publishing the names of men arrested in vice raids—lists that invariably got everyone on them fired or divorced or sometimes institutionalized and lobotomized against their will—not a one of them wanted to do a damn thing.

Judy Garland got played again and again, sparking fresh tears and howls each time a song started. A bunch of women I had never seen before, who looked like they wandered into the wrong bar by mistake, joined in on a sing–along to the fifth straight time someone played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Now I know they must have been the undercovers, but then I just thought they were confused tourists.

I watched them dance, the poorest of our poor, the kids who got beaten and thrown out and sometimes way worse. Smokey Robinson said Take a gooood look at my face and they all sang along, even the boy with the scar across his face shaped like the iron his mother burned him with.

Again I thought about the twins at the gym, men of steel or stone, their bodies as perfect as the bond between them. I had never known any bond remotely like that. I was forty that summer, and I had come to believe that loneliness was an essential and ineluctable aspect of gay identity, or at least my own.

Diana Ross came on the radio. We danced, and we sang I hear a symphony, and we were the symphony, for as long as the song lasted.

 

Annabelle Kowalski, stenographer.

Judy who? Child, please. Don’t you let the gay boys hoodwink you. Sure, some old queens were crying in their beer to Over the Rainbow that night, but divas die every day and nobody bursts into flames. That shit happened because we made it happen.

 

The raid itself came at one in the morning. I was in bed already. I lived a block and a half away. I heard the screams and shouts. I went to the window and saw two young Black men, laughing, running. I hollered down, asked what was happening.

“Riot at the Stonewall!” they shouted. “Us faggots is fighting back!”

And I don’t know how, but I knew this was my story. My chance. I pulled a jacket on over my bedclothes, and ran.

—Jenny Trent, Editor (formerly of The New York Times)

 

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop.

What you need to know is that I was always scared, when I did stuff like that. Meeting men in darkness under the West Side Highway, accepting hurried blowjobs on late–night subway platforms, entering the Stonewall, I always expected the worst. It’s ridiculous, but I wished Quentin could have been there. I never felt whole or safe without him. But of course he couldn’t be.

We were dancing, all of us, packed together in that shitty room, hot and sweaty and happy. And for once, I wasn’t scared. For once, I felt good and happy about who and where I was. We were safe there, from the cops and the mob and all the other bad men, safe in the heat our bodies made together.

I don’t know what was different. I never liked dancing before. For me, like for a lot of the Stonewall boys, dancing was what you did to figure out who you were going home with. But what I felt that night was a lot like what I had always felt at the gym, the same sense of power and energy, except without the constant shame and terror that I always felt around Quentin. The fear that he’d see me staring at some boy’s backside, or spot some infinitesimal fraction of an erection, and Know Everything.

What I felt that night was joy. There is no other word for it.

This, I kept thinking. This is sacred. This is joy.

My twin brother and I added up to something, together. Quentin made me feel love, power, and safety, but never joy. We were locked into each other, a closed loop that gave us much but took away more.

People have told me that maybe if I had been honest with him, things would have gone down differently. I’d still have him. They’re right, of course, every time. And every time, I want to punch them in the face until my fist comes out the other side.

 

Craig Perry, university administration employee.

The frenzy was on me by then, and I was dancing like I might die when I stopped.

I danced up on a short built sparkplug of a man with his back to me. The shape of his ass assured me he’d be a prime catch.

That’s when the house lights came up, blindingly bright and white, flickering like a theater warning us intermission was ending. I’d been caught up in a raid before. Taken to the precinct along with twenty other guys, and one of them got so scared because his name would be in the paper and his parents would find out and disown him, he jumped out the second–story window—and got impaled on the points of a wrought–iron fence. Took them six hours to get him off of there, with blowtorches and everything, and when they brought him to St. Vincent’s, he still had spikes of iron in him. He survived, but he wished he hadn’t.

So a lot of us knew what to expect when the Stonewall gave the signal. A lot of us screamed, high theatrical exaggerated wails, and laughed, and faked swooning, and to be honest I heard myself laugh. Kind of a crazy laugh, though, because I could finally feel the sadness start to ebb out of my rage. I didn’t want to run. I wanted to fucking kill somebody.

The sparkplug, on the other hand, wasn’t laughing.

“Fuck,” he said, looking around in a panic, looking for another way out. Of course there wasn’t one, because the fucking Stonewall was a death trap with no fire exit. He turned around. I saw his face.

“Hi,” I said, absurdly, cheerfully, finding room in my rage for more laughter, because it was the bearded one of the twins from the gym.

 

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop.

Nobody told me that the flashing white lights meant a raid. I thought there was a fire, or somebody won a raffle I didn’t know about. It took me a while to pick up what was happening from what people were saying around me.

“What do we do?” I said, to Craig, except he wasn’t Craig then, he was just the weirdly–friendly Black dude standing behind me.

“We wait, and keep our fingers crossed they don’t take anybody in.”

But I knew they’d be taking us in. An unscheduled raid, less than a week after the last one, meant this was more than just the shake–up each precinct was obliged to give from time to time. And for a minute I was fine. Relieved, even. When the worst thing you can possibly imagine happens, you’re free from the fear of it for the rest of your life.

But sometimes the worst thing you can imagine isn’t the worst thing that can happen.

“Everybody up against the walls,” said a loud scary cop voice, and then repeated it, and the second time I knew who was speaking.

Quentin led the brigade into the back room, two rows of cops, each with a dozen sets of handcuffs at the ready. The dance floor emptied out, but I couldn’t move. He stopped, five feet from me, snarling with rage at having to repeat himself, because someone had not immediately obeyed. And then he saw who it was.

“Benjy?” he said. His face, that perfect cop blank slate, cracked under the weight of what he was seeing. His twin brother, the man whose side he’d hardly ever left, the man with whom he’d joined the police force and struggled valiantly to fight the forces of evil, who now stood before him in a sweaty tight T–shirt in a den of iniquity, had been keeping from him a secret so terrifying that it threatened to strip the flesh from both our bones. The man who he knew better than anyone, he had not known at all.

Some lady with a gruff voice beside me hissed “Oh Hell no.”

Quentin said my name again, no question mark now, and that was the last word he ever said.

 

Shelly Bronsky, bookstore owner.

Those gay boys parted like the Red Sea for the boys in blue. The cops marched in and men fell over themselves, running for the walls. One guy didn’t, and that’s what gave me the courage to pry myself free from the crowd and step forward. The scary–mustache cop who led the brigade stopped short, not five feet from me, and I saw something like fear come over his face.

“Oh, Hell no,” I hissed.

Someone behind me yelled “Yeah!”

Some Black gay protest queen, who I’d been seeing around since forever, stepped forward to join the two of us. “Hell no!”

The shouts spread. Oh no honey, no you won’t, and Ain’t you got no real criminals to arrest. I thought of the beautiful boy I knew from school, whose father pressed his face to the burner on the stove to make the men leave him alone, and the cigarette burns on my own upper arm where my mother tried to burn the lez out of me. We’d been swallowing fire for so long, fire and violence and hate, and in that moment of panic and fear and anger everything fell into place to feed the fire back.

And that’s what we did.

 

Sergeant Abraham Asher, NYPD—6^th Precinct Police Chief.

I was born and bred in the Bronx, but I went to fight in Europe during World War Two. As a Jew, I felt I had to play my part in ridding the world of the fascist menace. Later on I’d join the police force for the same reason, because I felt it was my duty to make my city safe.

In the war I saw some rough things, went on some scary missions. And I’ve never in my life been more frightened than I was in that fag bar.

I’ll tell you what I’ve told everyone else: It was too dark and too full of screaming and the smell of cooked flesh for me to say one way or another whether a wave of devil fire really shot out of nowhere to murder my men. If some of our boys who survived said that’s what happened, I’m not going to call them liars.

 

Accounts of the uprising have been unsurprisingly whitewashed. All the major news outlets have blocked any mention of multipsionics—or whatever you want to call it. My own articles have been rejected by dozens of papers and magazines because I’ve refused to take out what they call “supernatural elements.” Time, for example, is the least biased of the bunch, and their most enlightened pronouncement on the subject of sexual difference is that “homosexuality is a serious and sometimes crippling maladjustment.”

Responsible parties have conducted exhaustive experiments. They won’t talk about them publicly, but through my connections to the Stonewall veterans, I know that almost everyone who has gone on record about that night has subsequently been approached to participate in studies by the U.S. government, foreign governments, defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, and leading organized crime families.

While the phenomenon has since been observed in hundreds of minor and major incidents, it simply refuses to submit to science. Studying individuals or groups, with or without duress, in labs or on the street or in the still–smoldering remains of the Stonewall itself, no one has been able to replicate those events, not so much as the lighting of a lone candle on a birthday cake.

—Jenny Trent, Editor (formerly of The New York Times)

 

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop.

Fire sparked in the air all around us. It hung there like the burning of invisible torches, and then it spread, like fire does. It moved, writhed, twisted into a ring, surrounded the three cops that had led the battalion into the back room. Three that included my brother Quentin. The flames rushed in, fast as flood water when a levee breaks, and incinerated them.

The rest of those cops ran. Fifteen of them, but the door from the back to the front rooms only let them out one at a time, and the anger of my fellow queers was quicker and smarter. Somehow, so swiftly, they had learned to control the flames. Without saying a word, the crowd turned its full rage on them—and the fire lashed out with such white–hot hunger that ten men simply vanished from this planet. Flame broke them down into the atoms they were made from, and carved a huge hole in the stone wall between the front and back rooms, too.

Everyone was screaming and yelling by then, rushing out into the street after the rest of the cops. Streaks of fire zinged and whooshed through the air around them. They left me alone with the charred heap of my brother.

 

Tyrell James, security specialist.

I was there. I felt it. I know what we did. And I’ve been going all over the world, training people who’ve been pushed too far for too long, telling them how to fight back when the moment comes when their backs are up against the wall. And one day very soon, the people who like to push other people around are going to wake up and find out everything’s changed.

 

Sergeant Abraham Asher, NYPD—6^th Precinct Police Chief.

I find it offensive, what those people are saying. They expect you to believe all you’ve got to do is get a bunch of people together who are mad and scared and then fire will rain down on the evildoers? So, the Jews who went to the gas chambers weren’t scared enough? The slaves weren’t mad? It’s a bunch of manure, if you ask me.

I’ll tell you this much. Cops are a pretty cynical bunch, and we don’t buy ghost stories. But there isn’t a man or woman of the 20,000 on the force that doesn’t know in our guts that something really real and really scary happened that night. Finding a couple fairies in a park and ticketing them for disorderly conduct used to be an easy count towards your quota, but to this day most officers will think twice before they do it. And we don’t ever raid gay bars.

 

Craig Perry, university administration employee.

It’s not that no one in the whole history of human oppression was as pissed–off and fucked–over as we were that night—I think it’s happened lots of times, except we’re reading history the wrong way. We read it the way The Man wrote it, and when he was writing it, I bet he didn’t know what to do with multipsionics. But I’ve studied this shit. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising happened on Passover, after all, and the Haitian Revolution began with a spontaneous uprising at a vodoun religious ceremony. When people come together to celebrate, that’s when they’re unstoppable.

 

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop.

People say the world changed for us that night, but I’m not sure I buy it. The world is the same, only more so. People still hate and fear us, they just hate and fear us more. People still bash and kill and lobotomize us, they just do it more. And we still know in our hearts, under the shame and self–loathing and all the other shit society has heaped on us, that we were born blessed by God with an incredible gift.

I’ve steered clear of all the scientists and scholars and reporters trying to turn that night into a research paper, but there’s one thing I do know. It was us. The heat of us, of all those bodies full of joy and sadness and anger and lust, and the combination of the three of us: Me and Craig and that dyke. I can’t explain it, that’s just what I felt in that moment. We were the match and the sandpaper, coming together. All I know is it was us.

 

Craig Perry, university administration employee.

We all went a little mad that night. Nobody knew what the hell had happened, but we knew nothing would be the same again. People danced and whooped and hollered and laughed. Three men skipped into the distance with their arms locked, singing We’re off to see the wizard.

I don’t know why I didn’t want to be with my people, then. I felt empty. Like I’d put my whole self into wanting something, and now I had it. I’d licked envelopes and organized protests and screamed at the top of my lungs for a decade or several, and the revolution had finally come… but answered prayers are always terrifying. What are you, when you get the thing you’ve built your life around trying to get?

My rage had burnt itself out. So instead of joining the jubilant crowds, I went to the Day–O Diner, where the Meatpacking District meets the Hudson River, where the coffee is strong and cheap and nobody goes there but bloody meatmen ending their shifts, or clean meatmen beginning theirs.

The twin sat by himself. His back was to the door but after what had just gone down I would have known that rugby–wide neck anywhere. I strolled past, pretending to be selecting a bar stool, to confirm that he wasn’t sobbing. His face was blank, staring into scalding black coffee for answers we both knew were not there.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” I said, cautiously.

He looked up. “I know you from the gym,” he said.

“He didn’t know,” I said, “did he? About…”

He shook his head.

“I’m sorry. I can’t imagine. I just wanted to say—but you must want to be alone—”

“Don’t go,” he said. “Being alone is what I’m worst at.”

He began to weep then, with his whole body. I sat and ordered refill after refill of black coffee, for both of us, until the sun came up.

 

I’ve interviewed Craig Perry a dozen times since Stonewall, and I don’t think he’s ever recognized me, ever made the connection. But he had come to see me, two weeks before the fire. He visited me at the office of The New York Times. He came to demand we stop printing the names of gay people caught up in vice raids and decency arrests. I think he thought I was merely the secretary, which is why my face didn’t stay in his mind, but I was not. I was the one who wrote those articles. I had been writing them for eight years by then. Later on I went through all my old clippings and did the math: Thirteen hundred names, thirteen hundred people whose deepest darkest secret I spilled. If I put in the time, I could probably track down how many of them killed themselves, how many got fired or dishonorably discharged or institutionalized, but that wouldn’t help anything but my own guilty need to suffer. Telling the story, the real story, is a much better way to pay off the crippling karma–debt I built up in the years before I knew better.

Craig before Stonewall was a different person. His rage was enormous, overwhelming, cutting him off from the rest of the human race. He wanted the revolution, right away, wanted it to come with fire and brimstone and the blood of every heterosexist son/daughter of a bitch to be spilled in the streets. I don’t want to speculate on what changed, what he had after that he didn’t have before, what aspect of what went down inside the Stonewall broke down his old anger. I don’t know him like that. Journalists tend to write about people like they know what makes them tick, why they do the things they do, and at the end of the day it’s the stories people tell about themselves that matter.

—Jenny Trent, Editor (formerly of the New York Times)

 

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop.

No matter how many hours I spent at the gym after that, it was never the same. My muscle tone was never as sharp, my stamina never the same, and two months after Quentin died, I noticed wrinkles in my forehead for the first time. Whatever we were, together, the weird magic of us against the world, was broken.

Craig and I slept together for a while, but that wasn’t meant to be. We wanted different things in bed—plus what we both needed then was not a boyfriend. I had never had a best friend before. I loved Quentin with my whole heart, more than I loved myself, but until he was taken away I never had to think about how much happiness I had sacrificed by living my whole adult life with the paralyzing fear that he’d find out what I was.

Every year, on my birthday, Craig brings over two cakes and we blow out the candles with our minds. And every year he wonders why stopping fires is so much easier than starting them. For us, anyway. I don’t tell him my theory, because he’d just laugh at it, but I believe joy is the only thing stronger than sadness.

 

(Editors’ Note: “The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History” is read by C. S. E. Cooney, and Sam J. Miller is interviewed by Deborah Stanish in the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 3.)

© 2015 by Sam J. Miller

Award Honors: World Fantasy Award Finalist- Best Short Fiction