Content area
Full Text
VITO RUSSO WAS up a tree during the Stonewall Rebellion. He had been walking home on the hot and humid June night from his job as a waiter in a Village restaurant when he saw hundreds of people outside the Stonewall Inn, a seedy gay bar on Christopher Street, protesting a police raid: first by chanting, showering coins on the police, uprooting a parking meter, then by setting fires and breaking windows, finally with bloody fighting. The violence frightened him, and he climbed up a tree in the Sheridan Square park to get a good view of the riot that gave birth to the modern gay rights movement.
"I didn't realize that something was happening that had never happened before," Russo says. Twenty years later, on the same block and in the same month, hundreds of men and women held another angry demonstration. This time, there was no violence. The demonstration was organized - choreographed almost - by ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, a group that Vito Russo helped create; and participants were there to heckle the mayor of New York during a ceremony a week ago to change the name of the block to Stonewall Place.
"The hundreds of thousands of gay and lesbian citizens of New York are a vital force in the economic, social, and cultural life of our city," Mayor Ed Koch said, standing on a makeshift stage festooned with the emblems and banners of gay rights, and reading a proclamation declaring the month of June as Lesbian and Gay Pride and History Month.
"Just Go A-way" the demonstators chanted. "Just Go A-way." They held placards in the shape of tombstones, which accused the Koch administration of not having done enough for education, housing or health care for people with AIDS.
"We are making history," Janice Thom said from the stage. An official of Heritage of Pride, the group that is organizing the 20th Gay Pride March on June 25. Thom was trying to quell the crowd.
After the mayor's speech, the Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corps Marching Band played a song whose lyrics include "I am what I am, and what I am needs no explaining" from La Cage Aux Folles, the hit Broadway musical comedy,...