Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff.
Speaker 1: You were twice a week reminder that when we fight,
Speaker 1: we win, not always like win the fight itself, but
Speaker 1: fighting is winning because it's refusing to be beaten down.
Speaker 1: That's what this podcast is about. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
Speaker 1: and with me today is Shrine Unas. Yeah that's me,
Speaker 1: Hi yay, and not with us today the producer Sophie. Sophie,
Speaker 1: she is still very sick, and I hope she's feeling okay,
Speaker 1: but yeah, yeah, she will be missed. But now we
Speaker 1: can say anything we want. I know, like I can
Speaker 1: finally tell everyone about the time that I and then
Speaker 1: there were six of them and only three of us.
Speaker 1: But then and I don't know, I haven't been the
Speaker 1: same since. Well, So thank you so much for telling
Speaker 1: me that that's really vulnerable of you. I really appreciate
Speaker 1: you opening up about the experience. And I'm the audience
Speaker 1: knows now too, because I feel like they're going to
Speaker 1: be so much closer to you, I know, and I
Speaker 1: feel like it's like I've been meaning to get it
Speaker 1: off my chest since the pocket, like it's important context.
Speaker 1: So Ian is our audio engineer and our theme music
Speaker 1: was written for us by an women and this week
Speaker 1: we are continuing the story from last week, the story
Speaker 1: of Stonewall. Well, in a lot of ways, we're telling
Speaker 1: the story kind of around Stonewall, since the story of
Speaker 1: Stonewall itself is fairly well known, although it's still worth
Speaker 1: telling again. So I'll tell it too, but I highly
Speaker 1: recommend you go back and not you sharing you you
Speaker 1: were there, but anyone who hasn't heard it should go
Speaker 1: back and listen to parts one and two. Margaret's right
Speaker 1: because similar to most things in history, there's like a
Speaker 1: singular event sometimes that gets so much attention, and knowing
Speaker 1: all the other events that led up to that mountain
Speaker 1: sometimes is really helpful because it's not just like one
Speaker 1: day it changed, right, And I think it's really helpful
Speaker 1: to know everyone else the fall so hard before the
Speaker 1: big event that's in your history books, I guess you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Plus you get to hear about someone with a parrot
Speaker 1: beating up NIVB Yes, and a cheetah right or leopard
Speaker 1: leopard Yeah, I like to think that leopard fucked some
Speaker 1: transphobes up. I mean, you have to go out with
Speaker 1: the bang, I'm sure so yeah, I mean, like I
Speaker 1: feel safer with my forty pound dog near me. Imagine
Speaker 1: how much safer you feel as a trans person when
Speaker 1: you're a fucking leopard invincible. Yeah, that should that should
Speaker 1: be like band guns, legalized leopards. That's my take, leopards
Speaker 1: for queers. Yes, exactly. So now that we've sort of
Speaker 1: set the scene, not with the talking about leopards, but
Speaker 1: you know, the larger thing. We haven't set New York scene,
Speaker 1: but we've set the scene LGBT shit in the US
Speaker 1: in the fifties and sixties. And I know that every
Speaker 1: city is like unique and beautiful and cool, but like
Speaker 1: in the broadest sense of New York City was one
Speaker 1: of the other major cities during all this What I'm
Speaker 1: trying to say is the New York City is extra
Speaker 1: unique and cool. Social oppression pushed more and more queers
Speaker 1: into big cities during all this time, right, and to
Speaker 1: go back to like the twenties and shit prohibition meant
Speaker 1: that since bars were illegal anyway, all the illegal shit
Speaker 1: tends to hang out together. So gayness was more present
Speaker 1: overall in the drinking culture in New York because all
Speaker 1: the bars are illegal. So it makes sense what's one
Speaker 1: more illegal thing? Yeah, and so we're going to start
Speaker 1: today with Okay, not the like showiest person, but like
Speaker 1: probably my favorite person. Wow, from all of this, Eva
Speaker 1: could more favorite than Frank Frankton. Shit, poor guy, he's
Speaker 1: wanting to be an astronomer. I just feel for that
Speaker 1: when someone some peaceful marches. Yeah he tried, you tried, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Eva Cotchever, or, as he's often remembered, Eve Adams. She
Speaker 1: is a Jewish lesbian anarchist who moved from Poland to
Speaker 1: New York in nineteen twelve. She spoke seven fucking languages. Well,
Speaker 1: and I think she moved with her partner, but I'm
Speaker 1: not one hundred percent certain on that. I read one
Speaker 1: thing that said that she did, and soon enough. Her
Speaker 1: job in the US, she's a traveling like door to
Speaker 1: door salesperson, saleswoman who sells anarchist magazines. This is in
Speaker 1: the sixties, no, the nineteen twenties, twenty okay, sorry sorry, yeah, yeah, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's okay, So in the nineteen twenties and the nineteen
Speaker 1: tens actually, And when she first moves there, she's like
Speaker 1: traveling around being like selling Emma Goldman's Mother Earth and
Speaker 1: if you want to hear more about that, listened to
Speaker 1: our episode on birth control pioneers. And so she's distributing
Speaker 1: these like illegal underground newspapers and shit everywhere, probably in
Speaker 1: a bunch of different languages I assume at least Yiddish
Speaker 1: and English and a couple other. She goes to Chicago
Speaker 1: for a while, she lives there for a while, and
Speaker 1: she makes her living teaching Russian. So I guess that's
Speaker 1: another one of her seven languages. Well, and she runs
Speaker 1: a gay literary salon called the Gray Room. Wow, she
Speaker 1: does a lot of six stuff. I want to be
Speaker 1: a polygon and have a gray Room. Well, I know,
Speaker 1: I know. That's like I always think about this whenever
Speaker 1: people are like, what's yours? What if you could have
Speaker 1: a superpower would it be? I don't want to fly.
Speaker 1: I want to be invisible. I want to know every
Speaker 1: language in the world, and that would be the best superpower.
Speaker 1: Like I there are so many and there's no way
Speaker 1: I could learn even like a handful of them in
Speaker 1: my lifetime. Well enough, yeah, but that is the best superpower.
Speaker 1: So all of the polygots out there, you're doing it right.
Speaker 1: You're doing it right. Just I agree, And one of
Speaker 1: my biggest frustrations is that, like I'm a jack of
Speaker 1: all trades and I can't have a conversation in any
Speaker 1: language but English. I can like read enough Spanish to
Speaker 1: like not be fucked over, and if I'm inn like,
Speaker 1: and I've like used Spanish as my like language in
Speaker 1: other countries that aren't like Italy. In France, I get
Speaker 1: around with my Spanish and stad of my English or whatever,
Speaker 1: but I don't speak it well enough. And I'm so
Speaker 1: good at learning shit, and I'm so bad at learning languages.
Speaker 1: So much I know and so like just so much
Speaker 1: respect for everyone who puts in net work and like
Speaker 1: So from nineteen twenty one to nineteen twenty three, she
Speaker 1: lives in Chicago and she runs the gay literary salam
Speaker 1: The Gray Room, And then she moves back to New
Speaker 1: York and she publishes a book. She's really subtle about
Speaker 1: what she's about. The book is called Lesbian Love Wow Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not subtle. Anarchists are not known for being shy about
Speaker 1: Her name is Eve too, Like it's so so ironic.
Speaker 1: Her name is Eve. I love it, yeah totally. So.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty five, she opens what might be the
Speaker 1: first lesbian bar or even gay bar in the United States.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of people being like, oh, the first bar,
Speaker 1: or these bars like one in New Orleans and I
Speaker 1: think one in the Bay or whatever. But those are
Speaker 1: in the thirties, and I think that what is happening
Speaker 1: here is that people aren't counting prohibition era ones because
Speaker 1: they speakeasies, so they're not like legal bars. I don't
Speaker 1: fucking care what's legal. Yeah, it's all made up, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: It is completely unrelated to what's ethical. Um. So she
Speaker 1: opens what might be the first gay bar in the
Speaker 1: United States, and it's called Eve's Hangout or Eve Adams's
Speaker 1: Tea Room. Adams two is great, what a great name.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Yes, I know, I know she spells
Speaker 1: her name at least in this context with two d's,
Speaker 1: So Adams like the Adams family. This is the second
Speaker 1: anarchist queer connection to the Adams family that I've made.
Speaker 1: We talked about in the episode up about Up against
Speaker 1: the Wall, motherfuckers, But the woman who played Granny Adams
Speaker 1: in the nineteen ninety one one was a queer anarchist
Speaker 1: pacifist m wow, like theater person from a connection from
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties. Who was a good connections Yeah, who
Speaker 1: was a big part of inspiring a lot of the
Speaker 1: subcultural shit that the hippies did through the up against
Speaker 1: the wall motherfuckers. Wow, yeah, that's so cool. I know
Speaker 1: Adam's family secretly like why I actually always thought they
Speaker 1: were cool, but secretly like anarchists too. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And so an Eva gets called the Queen of the
Speaker 1: third sex because the third sex was yet another way
Speaker 1: of describing gay folks at the time. I see that
Speaker 1: all more time, the third sex, the third sex, Yeah,
Speaker 1: was a way that people would talk about there's like
Speaker 1: men women in gays interesting, m Yeah, and it's one day.
Speaker 1: I don't know. When I do more of a nineteenth
Speaker 1: century homosexuality episode will like dive more into and I
Speaker 1: will know more about exactly how third sex relates to yah,
Speaker 1: homophile and all of these other things that are going on. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So they didn't mean it, but it's biological sex. Obviously
Speaker 1: they made it more like like what did they what
Speaker 1: does what does they mean by sex? Back then? So
Speaker 1: I don't This is the part I don't totally get,
Speaker 1: but I'm under the impression by third sex they meant
Speaker 1: like kind of like, yeah, third sexuality interesting, but also
Speaker 1: I think that they kind of understood it as this
Speaker 1: like in it thing, this like part thing that's part
Speaker 1: of you, so it's also a thing that you like.
Speaker 1: It's basically if you're if you can be bored with
Speaker 1: the sex of a woman, you can be born the
Speaker 1: third sex too, So that's kind of like I think,
Speaker 1: so not too bad. No, and the third sex was
Speaker 1: not a pejorative. I believe. I believe it was used
Speaker 1: by um, by the gay movement. That's cool. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be really funny when one hundred years from
Speaker 1: now people are like, and this podcast host she was
Speaker 1: a transgender woman, which is I know it sounds kind
Speaker 1: of fucked up to say, but you have to understand
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three, you know, like, because the way
Speaker 1: that we think about sex and gender is constantly changing.
Speaker 1: And that's totally fucking fine. That's so true. It's so true.
Speaker 1: Um just kidding this time we got it right and
Speaker 1: everyone else is wrong. So um. Yeah, this club, it's
Speaker 1: definitely ten years earlier than Mona's for forty club in
Speaker 1: San Francisco, which is open in nineteen thirty six. And
Speaker 1: gets called the first lesbian bar. It depends on definitions.
Speaker 1: This one also in a lot of ways, it was
Speaker 1: less of a bar. It was almost certainly a speakeasy.
Speaker 1: Most tea rooms were coded as we're just speakeasies, And
Speaker 1: it's usually described as a speakeasy. But it's more of
Speaker 1: an event space, and it's like a place to go
Speaker 1: to poetry discussions and shit than it is to get
Speaker 1: drunken dance. Love that. Yeah, I know, i'd like actually
Speaker 1: do a way better at this. I mean I would rather.
Speaker 1: I mean I always say I'm not a big drinker
Speaker 1: or bar person, but just put me into like a
Speaker 1: tea room or poetry place, like that's the ship. You know,
Speaker 1: that should be more normalized. I really think about that
Speaker 1: every time. That's seldom times I have to go out.
Speaker 1: I just want to go to a bookstore and drink
Speaker 1: some tea. That should be normalized. I don't need to
Speaker 1: go to a freaking bar and pretend to like alcohol.
Speaker 1: I agree. And so there's this sign up at this bar.
Speaker 1: Maybe probably not, but historically this is the story. It's
Speaker 1: probably apocryphal, which is sad because sometimes our enemies make
Speaker 1: up the coolest things about us. You know, this was
Speaker 1: like yeah, like like the lavender lads. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And in this case, the news articles that were like
Speaker 1: condemning this place claim that there's a sign up at
Speaker 1: the bar that says men are admitted but not welcome.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Yeah, you know, we rule. Do they work
Speaker 1: for us? I know? Yeah. The same source that claims
Speaker 1: the sign existed was a nineteen twenty six article in Variety,
Speaker 1: and it basically the rest of the article is like,
Speaker 1: this place is an evil sex den where Mannish women
Speaker 1: prey on our innocent girls. So she runs a cool
Speaker 1: lesbian bar, an important social center for New York's bohemian
Speaker 1: scene and for immigrants and lesbians and working class intellectuals.
Speaker 1: It's a popular after theater club. A lot of the
Speaker 1: big writers at the time, Henry Miller and Nias Ninn,
Speaker 1: all those people are hanging out at this place. But
Speaker 1: then an NYPD vice squad kind of killed her in
Speaker 1: a roundabout way, in a roundabout way. But I blame
Speaker 1: the vice squad for her death because she was a
Speaker 1: Jewish lesbian anarchist, right, And that is literally three Nazi
Speaker 1: death sentences. Yeah, each one of those is enough to
Speaker 1: die from the Nazi point of view, and so some
Speaker 1: piece of shit undercover woman cop not the only time
Speaker 1: that a woman lesbian cop is going to come up
Speaker 1: bad in the stories. This week, she goes into the
Speaker 1: place and she declares it a den of sin or whatever.
Speaker 1: Like theoretically, is a couple different ways of stories heard
Speaker 1: like either like Eva's like, yo, check out my book
Speaker 1: Lesbian Love, What's up? Or the cop like goes on
Speaker 1: this like elaborate date with her and like goes with
Speaker 1: her to hotel and shit, And I've no idea if
Speaker 1: they bang either way. At the end of it, because
Speaker 1: Eva like possibly might have hit on this cop, she's
Speaker 1: arrested for obscenity and she's deported from the United States
Speaker 1: to Portland and so I po poland even worse, um
Speaker 1: well at the time in nineteen twenty seven, she's deported
Speaker 1: to Poland. Oh shit, and she she gets by for
Speaker 1: a while. She she moves to Paris. She makes her
Speaker 1: money selling naughty books to American tourists, which rules, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's possible. I read like one line that claimed, but
Speaker 1: with no further information, that she went to Spain to
Speaker 1: throw down in that whole Spanish Civil War thing. That.
Speaker 1: You can listen to me talking too about with Jamie
Speaker 1: Loftus if you want to hear more about that. Yea.
Speaker 1: Then came back to Paris after that whole thing fell,
Speaker 1: and then she tried to get out of Europe, right
Speaker 1: because she's a it's a really bad time to be
Speaker 1: a three strikes girl, right, and the US won't let
Speaker 1: her in and she couldn't raise enough money to get
Speaker 1: herself to Palestine, which is like, you know, the only
Speaker 1: other place to try and get herself as a Jew.
Speaker 1: Her and her partner were arrested by the Nazis in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty three and they both died Noschwitz. Well, so
Speaker 1: I blame that fucking cop straight up who went in
Speaker 1: and then trapped her. God, that just really proves to
Speaker 1: show that you can be anything. You can be. You
Speaker 1: can be a woman, you can be gay, you can
Speaker 1: be black. If you're a cop, that trumps everything in
Speaker 1: my opinion, you know what I mean, Like it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter how like marginalized you are if you choose to
Speaker 1: be a cop. To me, that that trumps everything because
Speaker 1: that happens, yeah, because you've you've chosen what position you
Speaker 1: want to have in the systems. Of oppression and power. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Well that's so fucked up. Yeah, she looks have been
Speaker 1: pretty young too, right like she I think she was
Speaker 1: in her forties when she does, I know, I know,
Speaker 1: but it's yeah, god, that's so that's tragic. Well I'm glad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she had a good run. Yeah, that's cool. Do you
Speaker 1: think she's Do you think her bar was not considered
Speaker 1: the first bar because it wasn't legal back then and
Speaker 1: was the first bar that you mentioned, Like, that's considered
Speaker 1: the first bar after prohibition ended. Okay, so that's my
Speaker 1: best guests as to why these ones don't count, because
Speaker 1: I assume there were other ones. Actually there's even another
Speaker 1: literally the stone Wall in was well we'll get to that, okay,
Speaker 1: a little nugget so spoiling. Yeah, yeah, totally. But after
Speaker 1: the war, New York City stays pretty gay. Even though
Speaker 1: they had their mini lavender scare, you know, where they've
Speaker 1: fired the gay teachers or whatever, it stays pretty gay,
Speaker 1: much like San Francisco. The gay beats were a big
Speaker 1: part of this, you know, like some of like New
Speaker 1: York's cultural icons were like writing about how they have
Speaker 1: gay sex and it rules, you know. William burrows and
Speaker 1: shit like that. So the government does it's government thing,
Speaker 1: and it starts in trapping well, I don't know if
Speaker 1: it's started, but at this time it's in trapping gay
Speaker 1: men and blackmailing them. It cracks down on gay people
Speaker 1: drinking or existing in public. The liquor board starts pulling
Speaker 1: licenses away from any business that might become disorderly. And
Speaker 1: I'm putting scare quotes around that. Basically any bar that
Speaker 1: is like known to be a gay bar and have
Speaker 1: its liquor license pulled because that accounts as disorderly and so.
Speaker 1: And there's all of these different laws at different times
Speaker 1: that are like get kind of conflated to each other.
Speaker 1: And I don't totally understand the timeline, but there were
Speaker 1: laws like you're not allowed to be a woman who
Speaker 1: drinks in public, you're not allowed to be a gay
Speaker 1: person who you're not allowed to serve alcohol to gay people.
Speaker 1: But sometimes these things that people say like oh, this
Speaker 1: was the law, it's actually this was what the police enforced,
Speaker 1: not a specific code. Of course, that's that makes sense.
Speaker 1: That still happens today, Like what's yeah, well, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: so absurd. So if there's no legal way for gay
Speaker 1: folks to gather. Then they all just stop pink gay
Speaker 1: and become heterosexual and happen. No, just kidding, they drink illegally,
Speaker 1: enter the mafia. Oh I'm interested in this. So the
Speaker 1: Geneva se family is the crime family is the oldest
Speaker 1: and largest of the quote five families of organized crime
Speaker 1: of New York City. And they're this Italian American mafia group.
Speaker 1: They're still around. Um oh were they called the ken
Speaker 1: Jenova essay? Um? I might be pronouncing that last name
Speaker 1: for mafia, I know. And they're like the fucking if
Speaker 1: you think of the Italian mafia in New York, Like,
Speaker 1: there's several other ones, but this one's the big, biggest one. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So like the Sopranos, this is like, yeah, there are
Speaker 1: literally two people named fat Tony in this story. Well
Speaker 1: that's that's amazing. Yeah, that's how you know they're the
Speaker 1: top dog mafia. He thought just one, there's two fat
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. And so they do crime stuff, heroin dealing, gambling, rigging,
Speaker 1: boxing matches, all that shit, running legal bars during prohibition
Speaker 1: and after prohibition. And they are like more complicated morally
Speaker 1: than I can easily get into one day, we'll do
Speaker 1: an episode about how the mafia and the US government
Speaker 1: like work together to fight fascism or whatever. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: you gotta teach me about that suit. Yeah, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: I'm excited to learn more about it. There's this Jewish
Speaker 1: gangster named Meyer Lanski who like organized mafia Jews to
Speaker 1: go beat up Nazis in the US with like crowbars
Speaker 1: and shit. Why do we learn about that stuff? That's
Speaker 1: what I fucking that's right. Interested in fucking history with
Speaker 1: gold Rush or whatever? The ship? Yeah, yeah, totally. And
Speaker 1: if you get tell the story of the gold Rush,
Speaker 1: you need to tell the story of all the like
Speaker 1: gay lesbian prostitutes who like fucking make all their money
Speaker 1: and like run their own bars and like don't have
Speaker 1: pimps because you know, like yeah, another So we'll get
Speaker 1: to I need to look that up as soon as
Speaker 1: we're done. But that sounds incredible, and you're right, you're right. Yeah. Overall,
Speaker 1: I'm not a big fan of the mafia or whatever,
Speaker 1: but we all got to accept everything's complicated in the
Speaker 1: in the fifties and the sixties at least, and I
Speaker 1: think actually earlier than that, the mafia is running the
Speaker 1: gay bars in New York. Mostly they do it for money.
Speaker 1: They can charge a ton for water down, bootleg, homemade, stolen,
Speaker 1: et cetera, liquor the radically at the Stonewall there was
Speaker 1: like literally not a drink that wasn't watered down. I
Speaker 1: read one thing that was like, if you knew the
Speaker 1: right people, they'd go out back and get the like
Speaker 1: they'd have like the bottles of liquor, and they'd be
Speaker 1: like labeled, but it would all be lies, you know,
Speaker 1: and they like really liked you, they go out back
Speaker 1: and get the real I don't know enough about liquor
Speaker 1: to give you an example of a compliment fancy liquor.
Speaker 1: And also by running gay bars, they can extort anyone
Speaker 1: who fucks with them because the customers are gay, and
Speaker 1: gay people are easy to extort in a time of
Speaker 1: shame and you know, cry or it's illegal to be gay,
Speaker 1: they're easy targets for sure. Yeah. The mafia gets away
Speaker 1: with this by paying off the cops. What gets called
Speaker 1: gayola instead of payola. Wait really yeah, at least at
Speaker 1: the time I think it was called gayola. Yeah that's
Speaker 1: pretty funny. Yeah, yeah, no, totally. And they pay the
Speaker 1: cops a fucking ton of money. Stonewall was paying the
Speaker 1: cops two thousand dollars a week, which is more than
Speaker 1: sixteen thousand dollars in today's money. WHOA, that's a that's
Speaker 1: a fat sum. That is a fat sum of money.
Speaker 1: And how was that was possible through the mafia? The
Speaker 1: mafia was. Yeah, it was the money that the mafia
Speaker 1: is making both off of the overpriced drinks, but also
Speaker 1: they were like running other crimes out of the establishment,
Speaker 1: mostly drug dealing. There's arguments about the level of sex
Speaker 1: work that was happening at the at Stone Wall, but yeah, basically,
Speaker 1: by selling overpriced drinks to gay people, they have to
Speaker 1: turn around and pay sixty five thousand dollars a month
Speaker 1: in modern money. Oh well, which adds so much money,
Speaker 1: I know, it's almost it's three quarters of a million
Speaker 1: dollars a year. Well, and after paying the cops so
Speaker 1: much fucking money, the cops still raid the mafia bars
Speaker 1: because they have to keep up appearances or whatever. And
Speaker 1: also the mafia people don't care if they fuck with
Speaker 1: some of the gay people, but they do it on
Speaker 1: week nights, they do it early in the night and
Speaker 1: usually they and they give a tip ahead of time
Speaker 1: to the bartenders so they'll like get most liquor out
Speaker 1: or like kind of give heads up to the customers.
Speaker 1: They actually like like, hey, at seven pm today, you
Speaker 1: don't want to be here, you know, and cops would
Speaker 1: raid and they would like there's a lot of different
Speaker 1: accounts of these types of raids, but usually basically it's
Speaker 1: like they show up and like make sure you're wearing
Speaker 1: gender appropriate clothing is like a huge one. And who
Speaker 1: decides that just like skirts and pants that's no whatever. Well,
Speaker 1: well no, and actually this is important because the thing
Speaker 1: that people talk about is they say that there was
Speaker 1: a law at the time that said you have to
Speaker 1: have three articles of clothing that matched ther your ID marker,
Speaker 1: Like you're on your idea. It probably wasn't a law.
Speaker 1: It was probably the rule that the cops used. And
Speaker 1: we'll get into some of the things that people did
Speaker 1: to work around that. But yeah, so you mean like
Speaker 1: three arcis of cloth if if it said, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm a woman, I have to have three articles of
Speaker 1: clothing that proved I was a woman, like quote unquote
Speaker 1: proved Yeah, Like like who just that's so interesting to know,
Speaker 1: like what's on each list, I wonder, Yeah, no, and
Speaker 1: they will literally like m fondle your genitals and like
Speaker 1: you know, expose you to everyone, and like they will
Speaker 1: like you know, and they'll take people to jail over it,
Speaker 1: and like you know, it's obviously never nice to be
Speaker 1: in jail, and it's like extra not nice to be
Speaker 1: a gay man in jail, and like you know, just
Speaker 1: about one violation after the other after the other. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And we'll talk about this a little bit more too later.
Speaker 1: But and the cops did it because no one stopped them,
Speaker 1: like they kind of like literally cops from this period.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about how gay folks were like easy marks,
Speaker 1: you know, because they were like ashamed and beaten down.
Speaker 1: So Stonewall in it was originally called Bonnie's Stonewall with
Speaker 1: A and stonewall was two words, and it was opened
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty and it claimed to be a tea room,
Speaker 1: but it was a speakeasy. And I've read accounts to
Speaker 1: say it was heterosexual. And I've also read accounts that
Speaker 1: it was named after a lesbian's autobiography called the Stone
Speaker 1: Wall from like the nineteenth century, And so I'm guessing
Speaker 1: it started off as a lesbian bar, and it wasn't
Speaker 1: too straight, and people just like to ignore lesbian's that's
Speaker 1: my best guess, right, Yeah, that sounds about right. And
Speaker 1: it might have eventually just stopped being a gay bar
Speaker 1: before for a while, I don't know. In nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: four it moved to Christopher Street, where it more famously is.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty four it was the interior was destroyed
Speaker 1: by flames and it closed down. But do you know
Speaker 1: what will make you flame proof? Responsored by fiberglass walls.
Speaker 1: That's a that's a great How did you How did
Speaker 1: you land that one? That's that's pretty good. That's pretty yeah. Thanks.
Speaker 1: I'm a professional podcaster. They teach you at podcasting Academy
Speaker 1: how to do awkward ad transitions and try to make
Speaker 1: them funny. Thank you, thank you. Well, actually a stone
Speaker 1: wall would make you more fire resistant. You're not wrong.
Speaker 1: So if the next year's ad is for a masonry company,
Speaker 1: then it's the right one. And if it's not, you
Speaker 1: should complain to Sophie. That would make me believe in God,
Speaker 1: I think, and we're back. I hope you enjoyed the
Speaker 1: ad for all of the bricks and brick related services, only,
Speaker 1: of course, for making things more fire resistant, not proving
Speaker 1: that cops can't fuck with you easily. It's not like
Speaker 1: all of our rights that anyone has ever had started
Speaker 1: with someone throwing bricks at cops. No, of course not.
Speaker 1: But also for the folks that did the right thing.
Speaker 1: And listen to the first two episodes, the progress from
Speaker 1: donuts to brick is incredible to me. Yeah, yeah, totally,
Speaker 1: like that's just again chef's kiss for all that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the place burns, the interior is gutted in flames,
Speaker 1: and it's destroyed, and it closes. Two years later, in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six, the mafia bought it. Three mafia guys
Speaker 1: bought it and turned it into a gay bar. And
Speaker 1: they did. They phoned this in. They spent like a
Speaker 1: couple thousand dollars repairing the place and covering up the damage.
Speaker 1: Mostly they just painted it black and kept it dimly lit,
Speaker 1: so just like like just concealed with darkness the damage. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: They didn't bother plumbing it. There was no running water
Speaker 1: behind the bar. There was running water in the bathrooms. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's good at least, so they kept the glasses in
Speaker 1: a big tub of water and gave each one a
Speaker 1: little rinsey rinse in the same gross tub. God um
Speaker 1: before serving it to someone else. Damn. Yeah, just think
Speaker 1: of it in COVID times. Let's just I wonder how
Speaker 1: many people got sick? Well, no, I don't want to
Speaker 1: think about it. Well, yeah, I'm gonna tell you anyway.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. This was blamed in a gay newsletter at
Speaker 1: the time for a nineteen sixty nine outbreak of hepatitis
Speaker 1: among gay men in New York City. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: It was three mafia guys who bought the place. And
Speaker 1: it wasn't uncontentious that they decided to do this. I mean,
Speaker 1: game mafia people did own gay bars, but it was
Speaker 1: still like a little Well, let's talk about fat Tony.
Speaker 1: Fat Tony number primary, Okay, okay, number primary. That's a number.
Speaker 1: The controlling interest was held by this guy named Tony
Speaker 1: Lareya or Fat Tony. He was a very large man.
Speaker 1: He weighed like, you know, four hundred some pounds. Wouldn't
Speaker 1: it be funny? I just realized how funny it would
Speaker 1: be if Fat Tony was not fat I know, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: another level of yeah yeah, or maybe they felt pressure
Speaker 1: being named Tony to be fat yet it might have
Speaker 1: been you know, I don't know. It can go either way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: more power to you, whatever size you want to be
Speaker 1: with any name you want. But his dad was not
Speaker 1: so excited about him. His dad, who was a mafia guy,
Speaker 1: was not excited about him hanging out with the gays.
Speaker 1: Fat Tony's roommate was an openly gay Italian guy who
Speaker 1: bartended at Stonewall and he was the guy who was
Speaker 1: trusted to move the money around. I haven't heard him
Speaker 1: referred to as mafia, but he lived with Fat Tony
Speaker 1: was Italian, bartended the mafia bar and was the one
Speaker 1: who was trusted to move the money around at the
Speaker 1: very least. He's like a middleman. Yeah whatever, like and
Speaker 1: because like one of the things is that people want
Speaker 1: to people want to downplay the mafia connection with Stonewall
Speaker 1: because they want to kind of whitewash our history. But so,
Speaker 1: because of fear of raids and such, the money was
Speaker 1: carried home from the bar several nights a week, several
Speaker 1: several times a night. Sorry, like you know, because the
Speaker 1: cops are going to comment and still all fucking money
Speaker 1: because they're just I mean, these are basically just two
Speaker 1: crime organizations, the NYPD in the mafia, just trying to
Speaker 1: figure out delicate balance together. But Fat Tony he got
Speaker 1: very into the culture. He started shooting I know, okay,
Speaker 1: he started doing two things. He started shooting meth and
Speaker 1: he started fucking dudes. But not as roommate. That was
Speaker 1: a very important point in the book. I was reading, Um,
Speaker 1: they stayed platonic, him and him and his roommate. Interesting
Speaker 1: that that was. Yeah, it was a important thing to note.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's nice to know that friendships French ship withstood,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, totally, and like, I don't know, actually
Speaker 1: a weird way. It is like important, and I'll be like,
Speaker 1: whoa gay people to just be friends with each other,
Speaker 1: you know exactly. Yeah, yeah, there's like a level of like, oh,
Speaker 1: like I respect you, and yeah, even though I'm doing
Speaker 1: gay things now, I still respect you. Yeah, totally totally.
Speaker 1: Fat Tony's story is kind of tragic. A little while,
Speaker 1: I got really confused because there is another fat Tony
Speaker 1: who rises really high and prominence in the family and
Speaker 1: lives a long and healthy life, and so I was like, yeay,
Speaker 1: our Tony's doing good, not our Tony. His family stopped
Speaker 1: talking to him as a result of him being gay,
Speaker 1: or him doing drugs, or some combination of the both,
Speaker 1: and the rumor is eventually that his family killed him. No, Tony, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I don't know. Once again, it's like when you're
Speaker 1: a dead gay mobster, it's hard to know whether you
Speaker 1: get killed for being gay or for being a mobster
Speaker 1: or what. You know, Damn, this happens. His death happens
Speaker 1: after all the events of today. Okay, but I think
Speaker 1: his story matters because people talk about the mafia is
Speaker 1: this opportunistic thing that was ripping off gay folks. But
Speaker 1: the thing that people need to remember about any story
Speaker 1: about anything that has to do with sexual sexuality. We're everywhere,
Speaker 1: like pick a profession and there's gays doing it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, um for good and bad. He wasn't the
Speaker 1: only game mobster in the New York scene. Big Bobby
Speaker 1: who worked the door next Big Bobby, These are great names.
Speaker 1: Big Bobby worked the door at a place called Tony Pastors.
Speaker 1: He was in love with a Chinese drag queen named
Speaker 1: Tony Lee. Everyone is fucking named Tony. You want to
Speaker 1: say Tony, every bar, every person all Tony's all the
Speaker 1: way down. It's so funny. Isn't Tony correct wrong? Isn't
Speaker 1: it like short for Anthony? Or is that not? I
Speaker 1: think so? Or yeah maybe I think yeah, yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: Tony is a wow. What a name? What a name?
Speaker 1: I know. So everyone's named Tony except for a freelance
Speaker 1: circulating bouncer named Pete. And Pete was the most exaggerated
Speaker 1: cliche archetypical Italian mobster who wore black shirts and ties.
Speaker 1: He exaggerated his like Italian accent, which I saw referred
Speaker 1: to as a street Italian accent, which made me realize
Speaker 1: that the Italian accents of New York City are not
Speaker 1: necessarily I'm from Italy Italian. It's like Italian American accent
Speaker 1: that is a New York accent. You know. Pete was what,
Speaker 1: at least in the nineties, we called a two beer
Speaker 1: queer because he was a straight man who would then
Speaker 1: get drunk, and he slept with both gay men and queens,
Speaker 1: which were sort of seen as two different sort of
Speaker 1: genders of people to sleep with in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: much like you would now when we say queens, we're
Speaker 1: talking about drag queens, but we were talking about a
Speaker 1: culture in which drag queen, trans vestite and trans women
Speaker 1: are very um. There is a spectrum there, and it
Speaker 1: is a spectrum that people are often moving around inside of. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like a lot of the queens would later come
Speaker 1: out as trans women once. The sort of way we
Speaker 1: talked about these things changed, but not all of them
Speaker 1: right And for a long time Pete was sweet. He
Speaker 1: would get his partners better jobs and shit with all
Speaker 1: his connections. Later he runs off out of the city
Speaker 1: with a queen and they lived as a heck couple
Speaker 1: until he freaked out and killed her. No, yeah, it
Speaker 1: pet which is why trans women have trust issues to
Speaker 1: say yeah, to say the least, wow that pet Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's also just weird that this guy saying Pete, I
Speaker 1: can feel like, seriously, you know what, you'd have to
Speaker 1: take him seriously. That's kind of crime guy. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I also think it's telling that some of the power
Speaker 1: players in early gay history were either revolutionists like the
Speaker 1: lesbian anarchists who opened the first bar or the gay
Speaker 1: communist who set up the first organization, or they were
Speaker 1: professional criminals like Tommy the lesbian of Fedora and a
Speaker 1: Bar in San Francisco or Poor Fatony in New York.
Speaker 1: So Stonewall, let's talk about Stonewall it self. Okay, it's
Speaker 1: big standout feature versus all of the other gay bars,
Speaker 1: including the crime bars. While all the gay bars were
Speaker 1: crime bars, it allowed dancing. It allowed same sex dancing.
Speaker 1: All the other gay bars no same sex dancing, um,
Speaker 1: because that was for fear of like like a police action, yeah,
Speaker 1: getting shut down, getting alled at and all this shit. Um.
Speaker 1: Within Stonewall, there were two dance rooms. One was called
Speaker 1: the White Room and one was called the Black Room
Speaker 1: in a bad way. Um, so like segregated, segregated way,
Speaker 1: so yes, but with like a little asterisk or something
Speaker 1: to make it really obvious as a race thing. The
Speaker 1: black room is also called the Puerto Rican Room. Okay,
Speaker 1: both both rooms are painted black because they're hiring fire damage.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't formally segregated. It was kind of culturally segregated,
Speaker 1: and it was culturally segregated along race lines. But even
Speaker 1: more than that, at least as it's been presented it
Speaker 1: as I see it, as I've seen it, it's segregated
Speaker 1: between like different like vibes, where like the white room
Speaker 1: was like couples dancing mostly, and the black room was
Speaker 1: like everyone trying out the new big group dances and
Speaker 1: all the devil Yeah, like I'm being monogamous and normal
Speaker 1: versus like I'm going to be a devil today. Yeah exactly,
Speaker 1: And so yeah, whatever the latest dance craze was happening
Speaker 1: in the black room and then the white room I'm
Speaker 1: standing or whatever, and it and the white room skewed older,
Speaker 1: it's skewed more cusgendered, it scwed whiter. And I don't
Speaker 1: know that these were official names or these were like
Speaker 1: what people just called them. There's a lot of different
Speaker 1: reports about the clientele because everyone wants to own Stonewall
Speaker 1: because it fucking what happens here rules, right, And everyone
Speaker 1: like argues about Stonewall because yeah, because they want to
Speaker 1: own it. Um. Yeah, it seems likely that the clientele
Speaker 1: shifted over time and was constantly in flux. It was
Speaker 1: almost exclusively gay men and or people assigned mail at birth,
Speaker 1: but gay women started showing up too. The way I've
Speaker 1: heard it said is that it started off all men,
Speaker 1: and then they started letting in women, and then they
Speaker 1: started letting in drag queens. Okay, and there were exceptions
Speaker 1: all along to the drag queen thing, but like, for
Speaker 1: the most part, if you showed up and you were
Speaker 1: like in address, they'd turn you away because in order
Speaker 1: to get in, you have to show up and there's
Speaker 1: like this big, thick, fucking crazy door and there's a
Speaker 1: gangster on the other side who's like looking through the
Speaker 1: people and like trying to figure out whether to let
Speaker 1: you in or not. You know, password, Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: if he recognizes you from having been there before, he'll
Speaker 1: let you in. So you kind of kind of go
Speaker 1: your first time. You have to go with your friends
Speaker 1: who've been there before. But so eventually they start letting
Speaker 1: in people in full drag, but for the longest time
Speaker 1: they don't. And when women showed up and lesbian showed up,
Speaker 1: they were kind of perceived, as I got told or
Speaker 1: as I read, they're perceived as like honored guests, so
Speaker 1: it wasn't their space, but everyone was like, what the
Speaker 1: fuck was that lesbian doing in here? Instead everyone's like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, you know that rules, thanks for coming,
Speaker 1: you know. It was still kind of like also segregrade
Speaker 1: in that way probably too, just like totally yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean It's like, and if the point of the
Speaker 1: bar is getting laid, then it sort of makes sense,
Speaker 1: right that lesbians go to the lesbian bar and the
Speaker 1: game I go to the gay bar. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: It's true. It's true. That's true. But I mean I like, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's complicated for me to fit
Speaker 1: in and anywhere, but like, you know, I would like
Speaker 1: us all just hanging out. But yeah, same. That's why
Speaker 1: I like the word queer because and I yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean too, I love the word queer totally. But also,
Speaker 1: I mean when it's co mingled, if separately, it feels safe,
Speaker 1: but commingled also feels safe too. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: Like it's still not like like, uh, there's you're you're
Speaker 1: amongst Yes, exactly exactly. So I feel like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it makes sense back then that maybe they
Speaker 1: were like m for us only. Yeah. And so one
Speaker 1: of the main clientele at this place um at Stonewall
Speaker 1: was street queens, and street queens was a specific youth
Speaker 1: subculture of homeless queer youth, most of whom many of
Speaker 1: whom all of them I don't know, did sex work.
Speaker 1: A bunch of them lived in the park across the
Speaker 1: street and were protected by some of the older queers,
Speaker 1: one of whom will actually talk about. And this is
Speaker 1: where a lot of the more famous characters around Stonewall
Speaker 1: come from this culture. But you know what culture you
Speaker 1: can belong to buy consuming stuff capitalism, the culture capital yeay,
Speaker 1: everything's the same capital see for culture and capitalism. I
Speaker 1: know they come from the same root word. See that.
Speaker 1: Yeah it's actually really true. I never thought of it
Speaker 1: that way. Yeah, yeah, I learned so much on this podcast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: true things, much like the True Deals. Here you go,
Speaker 1: ads and we are back. I'm talking about the street queens,
Speaker 1: who I want to give their own episode one day probably,
Speaker 1: But I will say the podcast Queer as Fact did
Speaker 1: an episode about Stonewall that's really worth listening to, and
Speaker 1: it talks more about the bar itself and the culture there,
Speaker 1: and it draws from a bunch of firsthand accounts. So
Speaker 1: if you want to hear people talking about like what
Speaker 1: their time was like at Stonewall, Queer as Fact is
Speaker 1: a fucking awesome podcast. And since amab folks assigned mail
Speaker 1: at birth, folks weren't allowed to come in dresses, they'd
Speaker 1: come in quote scare drag, which is a sick name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's amazing. Yeah, so since like if it was rated,
Speaker 1: you're supposed to know as illegal, do not of at
Speaker 1: least three articles of clothing that matched the idea you
Speaker 1: sex or id or whatever it was. Again, probably a guideline,
Speaker 1: not a specific law. But so scare drag is dragon pants.
Speaker 1: You get some tight fitting pants and a wig and makeup,
Speaker 1: and you tie a men's shirt around your waist, so
Speaker 1: if you need to transform, you just rip off the
Speaker 1: wig and button up your shirtbook. I know. It's also
Speaker 1: a fucking sick look. It's like a superhero like just
Speaker 1: like it's time to go not Poka anymore, Ye Superman.
Speaker 1: That's so cool, I know. But I think a great loophole. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: And so they have this whole culture that they built
Speaker 1: around scare drag and or aesthetic that they built around it.
Speaker 1: And I like it because this black block. But for
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty street queens, you know. Yeah, and while some
Speaker 1: of the well the street queens were hustlers, right, they
Speaker 1: generally weren't at Stonewall for work but to hang out. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm sure some of them did do work there. Like
Speaker 1: everything is like Oh, sex work wasn't a big thing there,
Speaker 1: and I think it wasn't the people. I think the
Speaker 1: people saying that aren't trying to downplay sex work. They're
Speaker 1: literally being like, this is where people go to like
Speaker 1: let loose rather than get work. But there is a
Speaker 1: guy who connects them to sex work very directly, and
Speaker 1: he is one of the most interesting characters in this
Speaker 1: whole story. Oh, the bouncer at Stonewall is an Irish
Speaker 1: Italian Catholic man named Ed the Skull Murphy. Wow. Wow,
Speaker 1: what name. Wow. I wonder how he got that name.
Speaker 1: First of all, ill, okay, great, Yeah, we're gonna talking
Speaker 1: about We're talking about Skull Murphy. Yeah, there are so
Speaker 1: many great names. I know gay history. I know when
Speaker 1: the Skull was like eleven or so, he probably wasn't
Speaker 1: named the Skull yet. He bashed a cop in the
Speaker 1: head with a milk bottle for trashing his shoeshine. Stand. Wow,
Speaker 1: out of all the skulls to bash, that is the
Speaker 1: one I would want to to bash. To be named
Speaker 1: the skull, Yeah, that's amazing. Okay. But so he fought
Speaker 1: in World War Two and then he come back and
Speaker 1: he becomes this professional wrestler where he got the name
Speaker 1: the Skull right, and he's a big fucking guy. He's
Speaker 1: like taking steroids and his signature fight move is that
Speaker 1: he head butts people um ed. Oh yeah, I love that,
Speaker 1: and it's between bouncing gigs for gay bars is the
Speaker 1: other thing he starts doing for the mafia when he
Speaker 1: comes back from the war. He also has another job.
Speaker 1: Oh he shows on the ad transition here because of
Speaker 1: the next part's about gold. But if you want some
Speaker 1: gold and you don't want to buy it, the joke
Speaker 1: here for anyone who's listening is that sometimes we get
Speaker 1: ads for gold buying gold, and then usually make fun
Speaker 1: of that because he's usually a bad investment. Yeah. Also
Speaker 1: people I don't know people listen to I can happen here. No,
Speaker 1: I'm allergic to gold, so that's another that's right, I
Speaker 1: have gold teeth. Yeah yeah, allergy can't. Yeah, stay away.
Speaker 1: So he liked to rob dentists. That was his other hobby.
Speaker 1: This guy is so cool, so not from dentists. He
Speaker 1: does some sketchy stuff, like some bad stuff, but yeah,
Speaker 1: but he is. He is one of the most complete
Speaker 1: characters of like Good and Bad. All Yeah, I'm just
Speaker 1: really excited to hear what you would take make of him. So,
Speaker 1: okay him and is one of his gay friends. I
Speaker 1: don't know if they are lovers or not. Um. So
Speaker 1: the gold thing was because he would steal stuff from
Speaker 1: dentists and sell them, like the steal gold teeth from
Speaker 1: dentists and sell them. Yeah. Yeah, that was was making
Speaker 1: that trance. Like literally he would go and he's he's
Speaker 1: steal their stash of gold teeth or like the gold
Speaker 1: that they used to make crowns. Honestly genius move, no,
Speaker 1: I know, And it worked for a very long time. Um.
Speaker 1: One time they go rob this dentist and the dentist
Speaker 1: is like, please don't take my diamond ring. It was
Speaker 1: a gift. It was given to me by my father
Speaker 1: for his buff for my bar mitzvah. And so they
Speaker 1: let the guy keep his diamond ring because they're classy, right,
Speaker 1: And so they just steal the gold teeth and then
Speaker 1: they leave. But the next day there was a news
Speaker 1: headline that reads, quote dentist CON's robbers out of ring.
Speaker 1: So they go back. Yeah wow, so he like mis
Speaker 1: represented of the story. Yeah yeah, So it's like he
Speaker 1: convinced them to let me keep this. Yeah, because a
Speaker 1: bunch of suckers. So they go back and they beat
Speaker 1: him up and they take the diamond ring. That's hilarious.
Speaker 1: On their seventy third dentist robbery. He gets caught a
Speaker 1: lot of robberies before you. I know, I would say
Speaker 1: the lesson here is that make sure you only rob
Speaker 1: like seventy dentists or fifty if you want to play.
Speaker 1: It's safe. It is completely safe to rob. The more
Speaker 1: you rob, the higher the probability goes that you're doing
Speaker 1: a caught. So just keep my mind when your numbers
Speaker 1: go up. Yeah, totally. So he gets caught and he
Speaker 1: does ten years. He gets out, he starts bouncing for
Speaker 1: the mafia gay bars again, and he's perfect for it.
Speaker 1: He's a crook, he's part Italian, he's scary as fucking hell.
Speaker 1: He's the huge. Yeah, he earns a new nickname. Okay,
Speaker 1: his new nickname. It was pretty good, so I know
Speaker 1: this one's somehow even better. The two go really well together,
Speaker 1: not like in the same word, but mother mother, because
Speaker 1: he looks after and makes work connections for all the
Speaker 1: street hustling youth. Mother is such an interesting name for
Speaker 1: that kind of person. I know, I know, that is
Speaker 1: so cool. And now here's where he gets messy. Oh no,
Speaker 1: he starts in a new crime ring. And this new
Speaker 1: crime ring they extort gay rich men. The scam is
Speaker 1: called the Chicken and the Bull, and it's a reasonably
Speaker 1: simple scam. You get a rich gay man to take
Speaker 1: home a young sex worker who's called the chicken to
Speaker 1: a hotel room. Then and either the worker the chicken,
Speaker 1: just grabs the guy's wallet and runs and then you're
Speaker 1: just like done, you know. Or the bull, who's either
Speaker 1: a corrupt cop or someone like our man ed pretending
Speaker 1: to be a cop, comes into the room and it's like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to arrest you unless you give me a
Speaker 1: bunch of money, and if the target is important enough,
Speaker 1: like they come in and they're like, oh sha, that's
Speaker 1: a fucking senator, because this absolutely gets some senators and shit,
Speaker 1: they're like, actually, you know what, we're actually going to
Speaker 1: blackmail you now and basically hold this over your head
Speaker 1: that we know that you're game. We have pictures and shit,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah yeah yeah, And so this isn't like blackmail, yeah,
Speaker 1: and so this isn't just Ed doing it as this
Speaker 1: whole extortion ring and it's mostly run by cops, including
Speaker 1: a Chicago cop who was taking ten percent of every
Speaker 1: extortion and was providing the fake police credentials and all
Speaker 1: that shit. Well, okay, and this scam was fucking huge.
Speaker 1: It's actually the same scam run by veteran of the Pods,
Speaker 1: Sophie Lions, who is Ueen of the Underworld. If you
Speaker 1: want to hear my episode about her from last fall.
Speaker 1: Hers was straight and she did it alone, and she
Speaker 1: didn't somehow manage to entrap some of the most powerful
Speaker 1: people in the country because they did this to a
Speaker 1: bunch of prominent people, including Liberaci, whoa an admiral and
Speaker 1: a congressman. Oh shit, the Admiral William Church killed himself
Speaker 1: when the whole thing was uncovered and he was revealed.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting. It's when the crime is uncovered, when
Speaker 1: the criminal ring goes down, it drags all the blackmailed
Speaker 1: people into the limelight and it outs them. It's the
Speaker 1: thing that they'd been paying to have not happened. The
Speaker 1: government then does to them, right. That sucks. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: it actually parallels some one of the things that we
Speaker 1: talked about you and I when we talked about the
Speaker 1: gay resistance to Nazis. How early German gay rights activists
Speaker 1: in the nineteen tens and twenties used to out prominent
Speaker 1: closeted people, which led to a bunch of suicides. It
Speaker 1: was there like activism. It's like fucked up. But yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I don't think this is good, but this
Speaker 1: is what happens. The Mattachine Society that we talked about
Speaker 1: them last time, the sort of more reformist organization. They
Speaker 1: actually help with the government's investigation of this because they
Speaker 1: want to stop this extortion ring, this targeting gay men,
Speaker 1: and they serve as the go betweens between the victims
Speaker 1: and the cops because the cops don't want to talk
Speaker 1: directly to the Sorry, the victims don't want to talk
Speaker 1: directly to the police. So ed the skull Murphy. When
Speaker 1: the ring gets busted, he starts snitching. No mother, I know.
Speaker 1: He still gets five years, but he didn't serve at all.
Speaker 1: Rumor has it, which does not mean this is true.
Speaker 1: Rumor has it he has blackmail photos of FBI director
Speaker 1: j Edgar Hoover, and he held for the rest of
Speaker 1: his life. He held that Hoover was gay. And liked
Speaker 1: a cross dress and is later It's later been claimed
Speaker 1: that the reason Hoover didn't go after the mafia was
Speaker 1: because of these photos. Oh we shit, right, I mean
Speaker 1: I thought the other as you mentioned, we're big fish.
Speaker 1: But that's the biggest fish. Yeah, I know. Wow, that
Speaker 1: is I mean I kind of believe him. Why would
Speaker 1: he lie about that? Yeah, I see no particular reason.
Speaker 1: Like my gut instinct is that this is true, but
Speaker 1: I haven't really looked into it, and I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to like specifically say I know that this is true, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but just like all all science point to Yes, that's
Speaker 1: so interesting. Yeah. Well so he gets out of prison. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: and he goes back to bouncing gay bars. Um, he's
Speaker 1: the main doorman at Stonewall and he's there the night
Speaker 1: of the riots. He sells drugs, he's pimping, or rather
Speaker 1: he's making introductions for which he took tips. And he
Speaker 1: also protects young sex workers. Like there's like a story
Speaker 1: about like, um, the street queens love him, right, and
Speaker 1: so I think that's telling about his relationship in the
Speaker 1: work environment for them. When when customers try to assault
Speaker 1: the young sex workers, there's mother showing up and he's
Speaker 1: fucking scary, right is he sorry if you mentioned this?
Speaker 1: Is he gay? Yes, but he's not out? Oh shit,
Speaker 1: yeah yet? Okay, yeah he's gay the whole time. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to make sure. Yeah. Yeah. He also
Speaker 1: at the bar, he's running a ring of street queens
Speaker 1: stealing wallets. I don't know if this is directly related
Speaker 1: to the chicken extortion or not, but or if he's
Speaker 1: just still like, yeah, what's up, Like if you ever
Speaker 1: want to steal a wallet, I'll like move it for you,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't. I don't know exactly. He's also
Speaker 1: snitching to the mafia about which patrons are so rich
Speaker 1: that they can be extorted. He's also maybe informing the
Speaker 1: cops about what's happening at Stonewall. And this is the
Speaker 1: one thing that I feel is like contentious and we
Speaker 1: don't know, I've read both things. He also very adamantly
Speaker 1: is like I ain't no snitch or kind of like
Speaker 1: one and done. You know that he and he had
Speaker 1: also snitched on cops, so it's like a little bit
Speaker 1: right MESSI he also was and he's this white guy
Speaker 1: and he's specifically known for defending people of color, and
Speaker 1: after Stonewall, later bars sometimes wouldn't hire him because they
Speaker 1: were convinced he'd quote turned the club black because he,
Speaker 1: like you know, was friends with all people. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was an ally, yeah, yeah, I mean he was also gay,
Speaker 1: but as far as race, yeah, damn. I mean it
Speaker 1: is messy though, You're right, because he sounds like he
Speaker 1: was a really good person that people respected in the community, right,
Speaker 1: even though he's doing these things that are actually unconsciousable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about his like I think
Speaker 1: probably next episode. This isn't me skipping to next episode.
Speaker 1: There still a bit more in this episode, but he's
Speaker 1: going to come back into the story after Stonewall, and
Speaker 1: he has a really interesting arc from there too. Okay,
Speaker 1: cool the acid dealer at stone Wall, it's talking about
Speaker 1: someone else. There is one of the bartenders, and she's
Speaker 1: a queen named Maggie Jigs. These names I know. So
Speaker 1: here's to the Maggie's of the world. I will say YEA.
Speaker 1: Her partner, Tommy Um I think both romantic and um
Speaker 1: and business kept a toy duck on the bar and
Speaker 1: would quack it anytime someone left a tip. I love
Speaker 1: I know, I love that it's like this sketchy crime bar,
Speaker 1: but everyone's like kind of having fun and quack in
Speaker 1: the duck and it's simple community where people feel safe
Speaker 1: and yeah, so if like, yeah, you're gonna get a
Speaker 1: wallet's stolen, but no one's gonna fucking treat you like
Speaker 1: ship for being gay. Everyone loved Maggie even though shecasonally
Speaker 1: stole shit from you. Her attitude towards money was two
Speaker 1: for the bar, one for myself. I respect that she
Speaker 1: was really good at setting up three ways. Okay, fucking
Speaker 1: hero Maggie Jigs And I almost am certain this is
Speaker 1: an independent investigation. This is a kai googled Maggie jigs Um.
Speaker 1: She gets her name from a comic strip at the
Speaker 1: time called Bringing Up Father, which is this Irish American
Speaker 1: couple Maggie and Jigs and they're like dealing with class
Speaker 1: stuff where like they they suddenly become rich rich, but Jigs,
Speaker 1: the husband wants to like still like stay down and
Speaker 1: dirty and hang out with all his poor friends, whereas
Speaker 1: like Maggie is like a nag and wants to be
Speaker 1: like rich or whatever. Also at the bar, a nearly
Speaker 1: naked go go dancer dance in a gilded cage on
Speaker 1: the bar m Risque. Yeah, it's a really interesting place.
Speaker 1: Some people loved it, some people hated it. It had
Speaker 1: a reputation, like there's a lot of his there's a
Speaker 1: lot of the people who are involved, even in the
Speaker 1: Stonewall riots. A lot of them were like, I don't
Speaker 1: go to fucking Stonewall. Fuck that place, right because it
Speaker 1: was just like too risky. So no, because it well,
Speaker 1: like one, it was like too crimy I think for
Speaker 1: a lot, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, And it also had
Speaker 1: a place sense. It's kind of intense, I know. And
Speaker 1: it had a reputation as a place where chicken hawks,
Speaker 1: older men cruising for younger boys hung out. And so
Speaker 1: I think some people are a little bit like, nah,
Speaker 1: that's sketchy, right no, right, yeah, so that's the bar.
Speaker 1: And let's hear about the riots. So on Wednesday, whoa
Speaker 1: we did it? Wow? Yeah, that's so interesting, so many
Speaker 1: good names. I know. I can't wait to hear about
Speaker 1: the end of the skulls arc. It's so good. I'm
Speaker 1: so excited. Yeah. No, there's like, well, y'all just gonna
Speaker 1: have to wait for part four. Cliffhanger, I know, So
Speaker 1: what else people don't have to wait for is to
Speaker 1: connect with you with your You can follow me on
Speaker 1: the internet if you want to. You don't have to.
Speaker 1: I get it, but I'm Shiro Hero on Instagram a
Speaker 1: Shiro Hero six six six on Twitter. They will follow
Speaker 1: you wherever you make up. I actually don't know the
Speaker 1: legality of me singing songs on here um from a
Speaker 1: like copyright point of view. I know I saw you
Speaker 1: were singing, but it reminded me of the Gilmore Girls song.
Speaker 1: Yeah great, whatever, some old I don't fucking shit about
Speaker 1: what I'm singing at any given time. If you want
Speaker 1: to follow me on the internet, I'm at Magpie Killjoy
Speaker 1: unless you have something that you disagree with about what
Speaker 1: I said, in which case I'm on Twitter at I
Speaker 1: write Okay, and I'm on Instagram at Margart Killjoy and
Speaker 1: we'll see you all Wednesday. Cool People Who Did Cool
Speaker 1: Stop is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
Speaker 1: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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