Pod Insights The Moth The Moth Podcast: Remembering Stonewall About this episode This week, we reair a special episode that originally ran to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. It includes a broad range of voices and perspectives, with two Moth stories from LGBTQ storytellers, Richard Cardillo and Sonia Audi, and two interviews, one with Stonewall Veteran Martin Boyce, and one with poet and activist Kay Ulanday Barrett.
Hosted by: Dame Wilburn
Storytellers: Richard Cardillo, Sonia Audi
Interviewees: Martin Boyce, Kay Ulanday Barrett
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0:57 Speaker 01 Hi, I'm Mark, producer of the podcast. Happy Pride Month. We wanted to share a favorite episode from the archives that we first ran to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. Just as a note, Richard Cardillo's story mentions the effects of suicide on a left one. Stay tuned next week for an all-new episode about pride and family. Until then, enjoy.
1:18 Speaker 02 Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm your host, Dame Wilburn. This week, we're celebrating Pride Month and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, and we wanted to do it right. In the planning of this episode, we recognized how the story of Stonewall has historically been shaped to exclude many voices and perspectives. So today, we're hoping to help create a fuller picture. We have two Moth stories and two interviews that we hope will add to your understanding of Stonewall 50. You'll hear from Martin Boyce, who was at Stonewall on the day of the riot. And at the very end of the episode, we'll hear from Kay Barrett, a poet and activist continuing the fight for LGBTQ+ rights today. We talked with Martin Boyce in the park on Christopher Street, just across the street from Stonewall.
2:03 Speaker 02 He'll set the scene of what New York City was like for a young gay man 50 years ago, before the Stonewall riots took place. And then, on that fateful day. You'll hear that Martin uses the terms queens and street queens as catch-all phrases for a few different sexualities and gender presentations. And that was fairly common in the 60s. Martin also refers to the Rambles in Central Park, which is a very wooded area that feels more like a forest than a city park. Here's Martin.
2:32 Speaker 03 My name is Martin Boyes. I'm a Stonewall veteran.
2:37 Speaker 03 I was born in the old city, the Phil Noah City, the city of danger but of great excitement. I came out in the Rambles in Central Park because my father was a cab driver and he couldn't see me there, carrying on with all these queens, that I had finally found like a crowd that was a home, a psychological home. But I didn't want to appear on the streets. Eventually, you had to, because all I heard about in the Rambles was the village, the village, the village, and why don't you go?
3:06 Speaker 02 At the center of the village was Stonewall, a bar that felt different from the others in the neighborhood.
3:12 Speaker 03 So one night I went in 66 and I met what would become the Stonewall crowd of street queens. And I liked them very much. They were a very interesting group. Stonewall was very different from the other bars because of its location, but more important because it was a dance bar, at a dance floor, at a great jukebox. And that's something we didn't have. We weren't allowed to dance with each other. Couldn't do any of these things that were emotive in any way. We finally had a turf, a street we could call our own. Didn't have to worry about someone coming up the block without any warning attacking you, which I worried on every other street, and every other street three blocks from. But you didn't have to worry. You actually could walk the block. There were gay shops. There were tons of gay people. And you were safe.
3:57 Speaker 02 In 1969, raids by the police were common at gay bars. So when the Stonewall Inn was raided on June 28th, Martin didn't think much of it at first.
4:07 Speaker 03 I was on my way to Stonewall with my friend Bertie Rivera, who was a black Puerto Rican extremely militant. And I was always calming Bertie down, you know, early in the night. He would want to fight somebody who said, because someone always said something. And Bertie always was sensible and always listened to me, you know. But not this night. What happened was someone behind me said, "There's a raid. There's a raid." And then Bertie and I didn't say anything. We just went.
4:31 Speaker 02 Outside of Stonewall, there was a paddy wagon and a police officer detaining a patron of the bar.
4:38 Speaker 03 There was this cop and this queen kicked him and pushed him back from the paddy wagon. He jumped in and started beating her because you could hear it. Her head or whatever against thin metal and we grimaced because you know, we knew what was happening. So the policeman told us, you know, you're sore enough, now get the hell out of here. But when he told us to get out of there and turned around and we started moving towards here and not looking at each other, but the hair went back up on his neck. And he turned around and raised the billy club to say it again, but he didn't say it. He gulped, he blinked, he freaked out, he turned around and headed for the stone wall door.
5:20 Speaker 03 And the riot was on, it was Birdie's night because Birdie was a militant. There was more afraid of Birdie behind me than the police in front of me. Because Birdie demanded retribution for all the times he had to calm down. And now he was looking at me, he said, "You better fight bitch." And I fought, not to face Birdie's wrath. And there was a consensus and everybody started throwing the pennies because it was coppers. And some queens were bringing in ammunition and some queens were guiding out the straight people. And some queens were taking the lead because they had the least to lose. The street queens had nothing to lose. I remember there was one street queen who was amazed at me because in a riot, you can't see much.
6:00 Speaker 03 You're twirling around, so you don't get many stills, you get movement. But I did get the still of Miss New Orleans and she was up on the ledge of stone wall window looking like a lithograph of John Brown, the abolitionist. I never saw such fire in somebody's eyes and she was so poor, so unhealthy, so unhappy. But she was on fire and reinforcements were called in, you know, and backups came in. And they started to chase us, but they couldn't catch us. And there was no leader, so they couldn't cut a leader down. Everybody knew what to do at the right time.
6:41 Speaker 03 And then all of a sudden, the worst or maybe the loudest thing you'll ever hear in a riot, silence. There was silence. The whole street went silent. I mean, no to do. We just went, "What's going on?" And you heard this thumping. Thumping, and the crowd opened and there they were, the tactical police force. I mean, with face shields, body shields, gas, clubs, and sting guns. And we all had our fingers to our mouth like, "What are we gonna do, girls?" Because we didn't expect this. This was something else. So they formed that famous kick line and sang, "We are the Village Girls. We wear our hair in curls. We wear our drunkeries." This is one of our ditties, we sang.
7:25 Speaker 03 They couldn't believe we were doing this, that we're kicking like the Rockettes. And they had to charge. They had to show their masculinity, now was being challenged. The riot petered out because the energy petered out. That was the victory. I mean, there was a cop leaning against a rail, exhausted. And there was a queen nearby, a little bloodied, exhausted. They didn't bother each other. And the summer was coming, and the street was roamed, and there were smells of burnt cloth and wood, and scattering of little debris of different kinds of fabric in the wind, and paved with broken glass, like the sun caught it like diamonds, it would look like. Now, to me, it's the metaphor for the road to freedom.
8:09 Speaker 03 Then it was just an amazingly beautiful accident. It was the beginning of a dawn of the creation of a people, creation of a minority that recognizes itself a minority and demands its human rights as a minority.
8:22 Speaker 02 That was Martin Boyce on Stonewall. Our first Moth story in this Pride episode comes from Richard Cardillo. Richard told this story at a New York City Grand Slam, where the theme of the night was "Out of Bounds." Here's Richard, live at the Moth.
8:50 Speaker 04 My husband Peter and I first met at the Car Wash. Firstly, it's 1992, same-sex marriage was decades away, and that Car Wash, it's not exactly a place that you took your Subaru for a waxing. The Car Wash was the nickname for the back room of a really sleazy gay bar in New York called The Spike.
9:14 Speaker 04 It had these ceiling-to-floor plastic strips that separated it from the bar like a car wash. And of course, being the early 90s, you walk into this dark room, and it had the requisite Safer Sex Science spray painted on the back wall. "Guys, keep your lips above the hips." What was I doing in the back room? Well, I was recently out of the closet, and I was recently out of a Catholic monastery, where for the last 14 years, I was a monk with a vow of celibacy. So I was hot to trot.
9:52 Speaker 04 So there I was, in my cutoff jeans and my Doc Martens, looking fierce as can be and scared witless. All of a sudden, I feel somebody coming by me. He circles, and he touches my side, and I jump, and I flinch, and he looks at me in the most beautiful southern drawl, which I never learned how to imitate. He said, "Precious, what is wrong? Don't you wanna have some fun?" I said, "Yeah, but I'm afraid you're gonna lift my wallet." He said, "Ah, I'm not gonna lift your wallet. Might lift your spirits. Love to lift other things on you too, but I'm not gonna lift your wallet, so take a chance on me." So I did. We go back to the bar area, and we're drinking away, and finally, he invites me to go back to his apartment. And I immediately started making excuses.
10:37 Speaker 04 I said, "Nah, you live on Avenue B, too far away, too dangerous. I gotta work tomorrow." And he gives me this big hug, and he starts dancing with me. And he said, "Precious, just listen to the words of that beautiful ABBA song.
10:54 Speaker 04 Take a chance on me." And I told him I fucking hated ABBA. And I thought their music was drivel, but I said, "If you stop singing, maybe I'll reconsider." And he stopped. I go home with him. The next morning, I wake up really, really early to sneak out of there. He's already awake and fully dressed, waiting for me, 'cause he insisted on escorting me back to my apartment. That began an 18-year, wonderful romance and adventure, where Pete constantly offered me the opportunities to take a chance on him and take a chance on life. And I loved it. It was great. He came up with the wackiest schemes. "Let's invite homeless people to our apartment once a week, so that we can have meals."
11:39 Speaker 04 Let's get in protest marches for this or for that, so that we could be on the right side of social justice. And I'm thinking, this godless lefty is teaching this monk in remission the true nature of spirituality and service. And I was in heaven. It was great. Couple of years after that, Pete gets really, really, really sick and he tests positive for the AIDS virus. And then he got walloped with a horrible, horrible opportunistic infection called toxoplasmosis. It's a bacterial infection of the brain that leaves lesions and scarring. And that began its major descent into deep, deep mental illness and deep, deep clinical depressions.
12:22 Speaker 04 He cycled in and out of psychiatric hospitals all the time. And it pained me to see this gregarious, wonderful man who was so energetic just reduced to this level of despair and darkness. One time I go to visit him and he's crying. I'd visit him every night. He was crying his eyes out. And I'd say, what is wrong? And he said, Richard, all these years I've been asking you to take a chance on me. Now I need to take a chance on you. Please, go out and do what you gotta do for yourself. But for goodness sakes, don't let lightning strike twice and fall in love on a first date. Stay in love with me. He was giving me this tacit permission
13:06 Speaker 04 to go outside the relationship for my needs. And I just couldn't do it. And I loved him even more. I'd visit him every night in those hellholes and I thought he was getting better. After a six-month commitment in a state psychiatric hospital, he finally came home. And on a hot, hot August morning, I gave him this prolonged kiss goodbye.
13:31 Speaker 04 I went off to work, he went off to his day treatment. About 11:30, I get this phone call from him on his cellphone, and there's all this traffic noise and wind, and I said, "Peter, where are you?" He said, "Listen, Richard, just wanted to call and check in, and I want to let you know how very much I love you." And he hung up. I didn't feel good about that. So I went home and waited. And a couple of hours later, two police officers were on my front door, and they gave me the horrible news that Pete had decided to jump from the George Washington Bridge.
14:12 Speaker 04 They had recovered his body from the Hudson River, and I needed to go with them to identify the body. And I just collapsed. When Pete committed suicide, part of me died with him, but slowly, very slowly, and very surely, with the help and love and support of friends and family and a shitload of therapy, I finally started to come back to the land of the living. And then I was filled with this gratitude for him, gratitude for this man that taught me how to live and take chances. In the last seven or eight months, I'm already averaging about one protest march a week right
14:56 Speaker 04 now, even to the point of in April, getting arrested for an act of civil disobedience in Trump Tower. I'm a criminal now. I do all of that in memory of Peter. He taught me how to give this big fuck you to the patriarchy, and an even bigger fuck you to the status quo that keeps people down. He taught me how to keep my eyes and my arms, sometimes my legs, wide open to the power of possibility. And I'm so grateful, he left me with a kick-ass anthem, and someday I want to hear a cover of it sung in a really deep southern drawl.
15:42 Speaker 04 If you change your mind, I'm the first in line. Honey, I'm still free. Take a chance on me. If you need me, let me know, gonna be around. If you got no place to go, if you're feeling down, take a chance on me.
16:11 Speaker 04 Thank you.
16:26 Speaker 02 That was Richard Cardillo. Richard Cardillo is a lifelong resident of the Lower East Side in Manhattan and has been an educator for over three decades. He is a six-time Moth Story Slam winner and has also told stories at Yum's The Word, Story Collider, The Liar's Show, and Risk. Richard is still living out Pete's lessons and remains a passionate activist. To see photos of Richard and Peter, head to the extras for this episode on our website, themoth.org. So now that you've heard the then of Stonewall, it's time to bring things into the present. Our next story is told by Sonia Audi. We met Sonya at the Moth Global Community Program and they told this story in front of just 20 people after a Moth workshop in Iwashaw, Kenya. Here's Sonya, live at the Moth.
17:16 Speaker 05 So it was a Saturday. It was hot and stuffy and I was in class at the university. And really, it was the last place I wanted to be. But then I had nowhere else to be, but to be in classes, I awaited a forum I was so eager to attend. So this forum is a safe space for lesbian, bisexual, and queer women in Kenya to just go and have fun. And such spaces are so important because it's the only place where in a country where you can be arrested for simply looking gay. You can just go there and be yourself and no one is judging you.
17:59 Speaker 05 And so I was so excited that I even dressed up for the occasion. I mean, I got a button down shirt and I was feeling so hot and so dapper. So the whole time in class was just, I was just doodling in my notebook, waiting for this class to end so that I can go. Uh, I was so absent minded until the lecturer called out, you, the person seated next to the exit. And I, I looked up and I looked around, are you, is it me or is it someone else? Apparently it was me, yeah, and she said, come forward. Well, I, I stood up and I walked to the front.
18:40 Speaker 05 And all this time I was aware of all these eyes on me, yeah, cause I really hate when attention is on me. But at this moment, I was aware everyone was looking. But it wasn't the first time, so I was cool, like I could make it through this. So I went and stood beside her and the first thing she did was tilt my head backwards. Back then I had a lip piercing and she said, what is that on your, on your lip? Yeah, and before I could answer it, she were, she started talking about piercings and how they could cause cancer and how young people make choices without thinking about the consequences.
19:23 Speaker 05 I'm like, it's not the first time I've been criticized because of a piercing, so I'm nervous at this point and I can feel myself sweating and it's hot, yeah, but I know I can, I can pull it through. But then the unexpected happens, she asks, are you a boy or a girl? And at this point, I feel myself losing composure. I'm just.
19:51 Speaker 05 I my my breathing is, I can't even feel myself breathe, you know, you you I'm struggling to breathe. And I'm torn between explaining to her my notions of gender, that for me clothes are genderless and that gender is a spectrum and people should be free in their gender expression. And I'm also afraid that she wouldn't be able to understand that. And my mind is also telling me to dash off, that taking a flight is the safest way out of this. But then I'm frozen, I can't.
20:29 Speaker 05 It's like I'm just, I've dissociated from this situation. And at this point, someone starts to giggle, yeah, and their mamas and it's just from afar. And she asks again, are you a boy or a girl? And she keeps repeating this question, yeah? And I really do want to answer, but then I have a lamp in my throat because I'm fighting back tears.
20:59 Speaker 05 And eventually I say I'm a girl, but it comes out as a whisper because of this lamp in my throat. And I repeat, you know, she asks again, are you, what is that you said? Are you a boy or a girl? And I say now louder, I think I shouted, I'm a girl. And someone bursts out laughing, one of my classmates. And I look up and I realize it's one of my friends who's now laughing, yeah? And the entire class joins her.
21:36 Speaker 05 And the lecturer asks, then why are you trying to be a man? Why are you dressed like a man? And.
21:48 Speaker 05 Eventually, we got through class. And after class, there are all these people, my classmates, that are coming over. And some of them were like, it's a joke. That friend who laughed, being one of them, like, don't take it too seriously. It's just a joke. You know, she's old, she's conservative, she doesn't get this. Get over it. And then, some of my classmates were like, why, why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you fight back? Why did you let her treat you that way? And really, I did not have an answer to that. So, I quickly made it to the next forum. The forum I had been excited about all day. And in this forum, people were just happy to be themselves, and people were expressing themselves, and they were talking about what they had gone through.
22:33 Speaker 05 But when it got to me, for some reason, I couldn't share this, what had happened, because it felt so small, and it felt so insignificant. I felt that people go through worse. And, yeah? But later on, as I looked back, I realized that, as a minority in a country that is so conservative, we are taught that silence is a skill. Silence becomes a survival skill where, if you do not draw attention to yourself, then you're safe. But then, to quote my favorite author, Audre Lorde, "When we speak, we are afraid that our words will not be heard or accepted.
23:17 Speaker 05 But even when we don't speak, we are still afraid. So it's better to speak. And that's why I speak today."
23:33 Speaker 02 That was Sonia Audi. Sonya is a Black, queer, non-binary, African feminist, activist, and creative. To see photos of Sonya and their fellow activists on Trans Day of Visibility, head to the extras for this episode on our website, themoth.org.
23:50 Speaker 02 As I mentioned at the top of this episode, the work of people of color, lesbians, and trans people has been widely excluded from the dominant telling of the fight for LGBTQ plus rights. The stories of these pioneers have only just started to break into the mainstream. Following in those footsteps, we sat down with Kay Barrett, who is carrying the torch today. Kay is a trans-disabled poet and a cultural strategist working for the rights of LGBTQ plus people, disabled folks, immigrants, and people of color. We spoke to them about their activism and how they situate themselves in the legacy of these Stonewall leaders. Here's Kay.
24:28 Speaker 06 I'm a queer Filipina, first-generation child of a migrant. I identify as non-binary and transgender. And I grew up working class, essentially, and poor. So I grew up, actually, in the Midwest, in Chicago. And, you know, I was queer as fuck.
24:45 Speaker 02 From a young age, poetry was an accessible way for Kay to express themselves and to better understand their identity.
24:51 Speaker 06 Everybody in their family, queer, straight, whatever, any culture has that one person or that one Lola or grandma who tell a damn good story. And that's a poet, to me, right? So for me, I'm coming from a long lineage of storytellers. And there's a really lovely responsibility in that. I feel like poetry got me to a place where I could be like, what is Filipina, Filipina X for me? What is transgender for me? To use poetry as an archive for trans, non-binary, POC is really what makes me stay. Because I want somebody who's younger than me to be like, oh, yeah, I Googled queer Filipino, and here were all these options, right?
25:35 Speaker 06 Like, to combat that erasure. So when I write, that's hella brown shit. When I write, that's for my trans people. When I write, that's for my disabled, sick folks. Like, our shit is badass. And here's how we reflect our people.
25:50 Speaker 02 And for Kay, Stonewall didn't come out of nowhere. They looked to the organizing around Stonewall as a blueprint for their work today.
25:57 Speaker 06 Understanding Stonewall 50 means to understand what does collective care look like? This has been happening. It was happening before Stonewall. It was happening in the Bay Area. It was happening across nationally. It was a time where queer, trans, non-binary, gay people, lesbians, bisexuals were like, fuck, this is terrifying. We cannot live under these circumstances. Constantly organizing. It's just, we study any other movement, Filipino movement, Puerto Rican movement, Black movement. It's not like that one person. Nah, there was planning. Just, people were just tired of being shat on by the cops. People wanted to wear clothes that belonged to them and their spirits.
26:34 Speaker 02 According to Kay, activism has to start on an individual level before big strides can be made.
26:40 Speaker 06 Sometimes it's like, you just need to sit with somebody in a line to get some fucking food stamps, you know? Like, you just need to sit with somebody when they're having a panic attack. Unfortunately, like, if we're not getting food, housing, medical care, access to jobs and resources, like, how are we gonna create change when we're not getting our basic human needs met? What does that feel like to have collective care where all bodies and all minds can be brilliant and not be considered something broken or fixed? Who knows what it'll be in 20 years, where this planet will be even, right? But what we do know is that when we're taking care of each other, we're creating the protests, we're trying to recreate
27:23 Speaker 06 a new way to imagine being in this earth that hasn't been working, that that in itself is its own revolution.
27:32 Speaker 02 That was Kay Barrett. Kay's next collection of poetry, entitled "More Than Organs", is due in the spring of 2020. When we sat down with Kay, we ended up talking for 40 minutes. There's much more to hear from Kay and from Martin, who tells us about the first Pride Parade, one of his favorite moments in gay history. For all of that and links to how you can make a difference, head to themoth.org. We hope you enjoyed this special edition of The Moth Podcast. From all of us here at The Moth, Happy Pride Month.
28:03 Speaker 07 Dame Wilburn is a longtime storyteller and host at The Moth. She's also the Chief Marketing Director for Twisted Willow Soap Company and host of the podcast Dame's Eclectic Brain.
28:13 Speaker 02 Podcast production by Julia Purcell, with help from Rowan Nemezto at WDET. Special thanks to Michael Guerra, Brandon Grant, Lawrence Fiorelli, and Eric Marcus.
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