“On Manhattan Streets”
An excerpt from the Introduction to Left, Gay & Green: A Writer’s Life
— the autobiography of Allen Young

© 2018 Allen Young

On the streets of Manhattan in New York City one night in March of 1970, I set out to protest the most personal kind of injustice. That night marked the first time I walked proudly in the open air as a pioneering gay activist, chanting “Say it loud! Gay is proud!” Along with a scant few dozen members and supporters of the New York Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), I confronted modern America’s deep-rooted and cruel oppression of homosexuals and took a stand for dignity and justice. I was twenty-nine years old. Starting in my childhood and all through the 1950s and 1960s, I had passed out leaflets, marched, picketed, rallied, and demonstrated for a variety of causes from supporting construction of a new high school in my home town to calling for an end to nuclear bomb testing, advocating school integration in the South, and opposing the Vietnam War. All of that paled by comparison to this action in the streets that was organized by others, not by me.

 I felt I had no choice but to march. Telling no one where I was headed, I started the evening by getting on a subway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My destination was the Church of the Holy Apostles, an Episcopal church on the Lower West Side, for the weekly GLF meeting.

I’d been attending GLF meetings since the beginning of January after having been shown an enticing piece of writing by Carl Wittman in a late-December 1969 issue of the San Francisco Free Press. He defined the valid quest for liberation of gay people. He wrote, “When people feel oppressed, they act on that feeling. We feel oppressed.” I knew that I felt oppressed, and the moment I started attending those chaotic meetings, my entire view of myself as a gay man was transformed. Integrity is the word that comes to mind.

On this night, however, the meeting was not going to take place. There would be no particular wisdom, no arguments, no rambling speeches. When I entered the church, everyone was on the floor with Magic Markers making signs on large poster boards.

“No meeting tonight,” I was told when I entered. “Last night, the cops raided the Snake Pit bar, and 167 people were arrested and taken to the precinct house. While in custody, a gay man jumped out of a second story window and impaled himself on the spikes of a wrought iron fence. His name is Diego Viñales. He is from Argentina and was afraid he’d be deported. He’s at Saint Vincent’s Hospital, and we are going to march along with GAA to the precinct house, and then will establish a vigil outside the hospital.”

I learned that the desperate foreigner was in critical condition. Knowing that federal law did not allow known homosexuals to enter the US at that time, I fully understood the fear he must have experienced when he was in police custody.

Most if not all of us marchers had no illusions, based on our own experiences, about the way the culture and laws reviled homosexuals in those days. We asserted that he didn’t jump out of that window. We explicitly said in our leaflets that he was pushed by society.

I had attended meetings for only a few weeks and had as yet told no more than a half dozen of my straight friends (and no one in my family) that I was gay. Marching in the street as a gay radical activist posed a brand-new challenge. And the chant that emerged from the crowd, “Say it loud! Gay is proud!” couldn’t and wouldn’t be a whisper. Could I have turned around and gone back Uptown and let others do the marching and chanting? Absolutely not. I had already embraced the basic idea of gay liberation – that we needed to reject the idea that we were sub-human. I knew, as did all of us there, that we must resist the oppression of gays in society. I knew that our personal actions – what we called coming out of the closet – were essential to creating change. A man – a gay man who was my “brother” – lay in the hospital, just out of surgery to remove metal from his thigh. When firefighters and first responders arrived at the scene, they needed to use an acetylene torch to cut off the fence spike that had impaled Diego Viñales before they placed him in an ambulance.

We learned that police had released the 167 Snake Pit patrons as usually happened during these habitual raids on gay bars. Indeed, history regards a raid on another bar, the Stonewall Inn, as the start of the modern gay and lesbian liberation movement.

In retrospect, I realize that a timeline would reveal those of us on the streets that night as pioneers. Mid-twentieth-century America – mid-twentieth-century New York City  –  comprised another world with virtually nothing then in the media about gay men and lesbians and with very few openly gay people in any profession or political office. It would be years before people knew about Harvey Milk, Ellen DeGeneres, Barney Frank, Martina Navratilova, Greg Louganis, and other gay personalities.

Did straight friends or acquaintances see me or hear me chanting as we marched that night? I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. Regardless, I decided to go back to the Liberation News Service (LNS) office and write a news story about the march with no byline and no reference to my participation. Here is the article as it was published:

GAYS PROTEST POLICE RAID ON BAR AFTER YOUNG MAN IS IMPALED ON FENCE

NEW YORK (LNS)  –  A young man impaled on the spikes of an iron fence outside a New York City Police Station at the edge of Greenwich Village recently became a macabre but powerful symbol of the oppression of the city’s homosexuals.

The young man, Diego Viñales, jumped from a second-story window of the police station after he and 166 other persons were trapped by police in an after-hours gay bar. Cops moved in a pre-dawn raid on March 8, herding the patrons into vans and then to the Charles Street police station, where they were arrested for disorderly conduct.

Later that night, several hundred gay radicals, men and women, led an angry march against the Charles Street precinct house; the march was joined by other village radicals. Police blocked off the street, creating a brief confrontation in which the protesters shouted for revenge. The demonstrators yelled “Say it loud, gay is proud!” as well as “Power to the people, off the pig!”

One trilogy of chants went: “Who pays off? Who takes the pay-offs? The pigs take the pay offs!” The chants referred to the fact that virtually all of New York’s gay bars are Mafia run. When the Mafia bar owners fail to pay off sufficiently, the pigs get unhappy and move in. The homosexual, who is forced by an oppressive heterosexual society into the Mafia bar in the first place, is caught in the crunch.

That’s why New York’s Gay Liberation Front plans a community center as its first step in a program to serve the needs of the gay community and to organize gay people as a force in the city’s broader liberation struggle.

The homosexual’s oppression, more than anything, is fear -the fear of exposure and ostracism in a society which has condemned any but a heterosexual form of love and sexual expression. It was that fear, as gay activists noted in a leaflet, which drove the young man to leap from the police station window. It is a similar fear, created by the hatred straight people feel towards homosexuals, which has driven most gay people into the ghetto life – with the gay bar as the main institution of the ghetto.

As for Diego Viñales, five spikes went into his thigh and pelvis. Members of a Fire Department rescue squad cut a section of the fence with torches while Viñales was still impaled on it. They transported both the fence and the man to nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he is reported in critical condition. Police charged Viñales with resisting arrest.

The inclusion of that article in the next LNS packet led a few of my colleagues at LNS to inquire if I were gay. Triumphantly, yet perhaps with residue of fear, I said “Yes.” I was working for an organization that had both “liberation” and “news” in its very name, so it was the perfect moment for me to take the next step in the process of coming out, a process that has led me to where I am today.