The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, November 19

Jim Burroway

November 19th, 2014

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Florence Queer Film Festival, Florence, Italy; Mezipatra Queer Film Festival, Prague/Brno, Czech Republic; Side-By-Side LGBT Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Where It's At, July 24, 1978, page 38.

From Where It’s At, July 24, 1978, page 38.

From GPU News, January 1981, page 7.

From GPU News, January 1981, page 7.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Gay Bar Shooting Spree Kills 2, Injures 6: 1980. Ronald Crumpley, 38,  a former Transit Authority policeman and son of a minister, spent the evening cruising the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village in his father’s stolen blue Cadillac. Dressed in a dark wool topcoat, printed shirt, a vest and a black fedora sporting a red feather, he fired three shots from an automatic handgun at Sim’s Deli shortly before 11:00 p.m., wounding at least three people and shattering the front plate glass window. Minutes later, he drove to Christopher Street and stopped in front of two gay bars, Sneakers and Ramrod, which were next door to each other. Dan Hedges, 30, was in Sneakers and watched as the horror unfolded. “The man in the Cadillac waited about two or three minutes, drove around the block, returned, stepped out of the car calmly, walked up to the curb and shot a man standing on the curb waiting for a cab. The man fell to the ground, then he shot another guy who ran around the corner. He started spraying both bars through the plate-glass windows. Then he got back into the car and drove off.” Hedges scribbled the car’s license plate number on a dollar bill and gave it to police.

John Ganrecki, 27, was one of six who were injured. “I heard a noise up front. … It sounded like a string if firecrackers. People were falling on the floor screaming and yelling. My friend, Fred, said ‘Hit the floor! Hit the floor!’ … I was already on the floor, looking at my hand, and it was bleeding. It was like something in Al Capone; there was a row of bullet holes across the glass behind the bar.” Ronald Greenberg, 52, also survived the shooting. “It was a massacre, a bloodbath.”

After Crumpley drove off, he stopped again at 10th and Greenwich and fired eight more shots at another group of men. This time his shots missed, and as police cars approached he sped away. As many as 15 police cruisers chased Crumpley to Broadway and West 10th Street, where Crumpley abandoned the Cadillac. Officers found him trying to pull himself up underneath a parked van’s undercarriage.

All told, two were killed. Vernon Koenig, an organist at Greenwich Village’s St. Joseph’s church, died on the operating table at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Jorg Wenz, Ramrod’s 21-year-old doorman, died soon after surgery. Rene Malute, 23, was in intensive care, and five others were admitted in stable condition.

Crumpley was charged with murder, attempted murder, and possession of illegal weapons. Police found four weapons: a .357 Magnu, a .45 caliber automatic pistol, a 9mm automatic pistol, and an Uzi. Crumpley told police that he attacked the bars and the deli because he hated homosexuals. “I want to kill them all,” he said. “They’re no good. They ruin everything.” Lt. John Yuknes said, “He had a dislike for homosexuals, a rather intense one I would say, under the circumstances.”

The Ramrod's doors during the candlelight vigil (Photo: Bettye Lane/Advocate, January 8, 1981, page 6)

The Ramrod’s doors during the candlelight vigil (Photo: Bettye Lane/Advocate, January 8, 1981, page 6)

The next day, about a thousand people joined a solemn candlelight procession to mourn those killed in the shooting. Arthur Bennett, one of those marching, told reporters, “Everybody’s been almost waiting for something like this. It’s not because we wanted it to happen but because we feared it. There have been a lot of people down here getting beat up.”

During Crumpley’s trail, the prosecution presented 35 witnesses, and the defense five. At issue was Crumpley’s mental state at the time of the shooting. Prosecutors contended the shootings were “deliberate and conscious.” Crumpley’s psychiatrist testified that Creumpley suffered from paranoia. Crumpley himself took the stand and said gay people were “agents of the devil” who were following him continuously for three years and were trying to convert him. The jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. He was committed to Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Wards Island. In 2001, a judge turned down Crumpleys’s request to be moved to a less restrictive psychiatric facility.

ACCC

25 YEARS AGO: American Council of Christian Churches Calls AIDS “God’s Wrath”: 1989. Peter Steinfels wrote in the New York Times about a gathering earlier in November of the U.S. Catholic Bishops in Baltimore. They had met to hammer out a document responding to the AIDS crisis. The bishops overwhelmingly decided to reject the theological proposition that AIDS was in any way a punishment from God, a position held by one in four Americans, according to a recent poll.

J. Gordon Melton, director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara, had published 68 statements on AIDS from 45 different religious groups in the United States, Canada and Great Britain, and found “a remarkable consensus” across liberal and conservative religious groups recognizing that AIDS was not just a gay problem, “that special ministries should be established to serve AIDS victims, their families and friends, and that the civil rights of homosexuals or of those with the AIDS virus should be protected.” But, The Times learned, that consensus wasn’t unanimous:

The Bible repeatedly describes God as employing all kinds of terrors, natural and human, to punish those who disobey his commands. These biblical accounts naturally governed the reaction of the American Council of Christian Churches, a fundamentalist group that recently expressed dismay at the consensus discovered by Mr. Melton. The council, which claims to represent about two million ”Bible Christians,” promptly went on record upholding the idea that AIDS is God’s wrath visited on homosexuals and drug addicts, although for their ultimate benefit if they turn to Jesus.

Morris Kight

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
95 YEARS AGO: Morris Kight: 1919-2003. To some, he was a leading figure in the gay rights movement in Southern California: He founded the Gay Community Services Center (which later became the Los Angeles LGBT Center), and he was a principle organizer of Christopher Street West, Los Angeles’ gay pride parade, in 1970. To others, he was out of control egotistical gadfly, an unabashed radical who alienated many of those who would (and sometimes did, begrudgingly) work with him. His passion for gay rights — and human rights generally — was absolutely undeniable, and it was a passion that roughly matched his drive to occupy the center stage in everything he did.

Kight was born in conservative Comanche County, Texas, and grew up on the family farm. He graduated from Texas Christian University in 1941 with a degree in personnel and public administration. He moved to New Mexico, where he became active in the local gay community. He also married, in 1950. The six-year union resulted in two daughters. In later years when Kight was an activist, he avoided mentioning his marriage, perhaps fearing that it would diminish his credibility as a gay rights leader. In 1958, Kight moved to Los Angeles, where he found a much more vibrant gay community. But his activism was first directed toward anti-war protests as the war in Vietnam escalated.

It wasn’t until the Stonewall rebellion in 1969 that Kight became active in gay rights, when he became one of the founders of the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front. One of the GLF’s first activities was a protest against Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood, which displayed a sign reading “Fagots [sic] Stay Out.” Kight and Troy Perry (see Jul 27) led a protest outside and a series of sit-ins inside. The Sheriff’s office refused to evict the protesters, and after three months, the owner symbolically relented and handed the signs over to Kight and other protesters. Bit once the media attention evaporated, the owner replaced the signs and even had the slogan printed on matchbook covers. (The sign didn’t come down for good until 1984, after the City of West Hollywood passed an anti-discrimination ordinance.)

That “victory,” such as it was, only whetted Kight’s appetite for more media attention. A few months later, a GLF member proposed that some two hundred gays and lesbians quietly move to tiny Alpine County, California, register to vote, and take control of local government. Quiet wasn’t in Kight’s vocabulary. He saw a huge opportunity to garner massive publicity for the GLF while punking the media by playing off the prevailing homophobia. He quickly called a press conference to publicly announce that Alpine would become the new “gay Mecca” (see Oct 19), much to the consternation of Alpine residents as well as other gay rights leaders. (The GLF of Berkeley denounced the plan as “sexist,” “racist,” and “impractical,” something that GLFs generally had not been known to be worried about before.) The stunt quickly fizzled, and the publicity left a bad taste in the mouths of many other gay activists. But actually taking over Alpine County was hardly Kight’s point. As he explained to another gay activist at the time:

Alpine County takeover has really caused a ruckus. Why? GLF has done a lot of crazy things which deserved news before and received the silent treatment from the Establishment media. I believe the reason is that we have threatened straight America. We are taking over! We could take all the gay bars in town, and nothing would be said; but take a county with 300 people and straight America goes outa mind! If GLF wants news it has the tool. Anything which looks like a threat to straight society will get news. P.S. Alpine County is very cold in the winter. There may be places in Nevada or elsewhere with even fewer people and a nicer climate.

The following summer, Kight was a key organizer of Christopher Street West, the West Coast’s first gay pride parade, in 1970. The Los Angeles Police Commission denied the group a parade permit unless the group posted an exorbitant $1.5 million bond. Kight and Perry got the ACLU involved. Just before the parade was scheduled to begin on June 28, the California Supreme Court held that the GLF had a “constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression” and ordered the commission to issue a parade permit constitutional. That parade was a huge success, as were the ones in 1971 and 1972. But by 1973, Kight, who was always a lightning rod for controversy, grew tired of the infighting and, in the words of Jim Kepner (see Feb 14) Kight “sabotaged it (the parade) in its third year,” and the parade was cancelled for 1973.

A personal turning point for Kight appears to have been the devastating Upstairs Lounge Fire in New Orleans that killed 32 people (see Jun 24). With the Christopher Street West parade cancelled for 1973, Kight was in New York to participate in that city’s festivities when he received word of the fire. True to his instincts, Kight launched himself into publicity mode: “I notified the press that I was coming. When I got to Atlanta, the press was at the airport and I said it was a national day of mourning and they interviewed me, and so on. And then I went on to New Orleans and Troy [Perry] was there, along with some other people.” But what awaited him and other activists in New Orleans chilled everyone. The local police were callous about the victims, dismissing them as “thieves and queers.” Churches refused to hold funerals for the dead. It was up to Kight, Perry, and other activists to counsel families, arrange for funerals, and to denounce the police and fire officials to the press. Kight’s media chops paid off: “The Fire Marshall of New Orleans Parish called me and said, ‘We saw your press conference, and you’re absolutely right. We did say terrible things. We will meet with you anywhere you want. You set the location, and we will meet with you to adjust our differences.’ [And we said,] ‘Fine, let’s meet.’ And we adjusted it.” As for the whole experience, Kight later recalled, “It was a shattering experience. We were unbelievably inspired. We were unbelievably brave. We were pushed beyond ourselves.”

Kight soon began to work both as an insider in addition to his more customary role as an outsider. He founded the Stonewall Democratic Club in 1975. In 1976, the reconstituted Christopher Street West welcomed him back as the official ringmaster for the event’s circus tent, and honored him as the first official grand marshal for the 1977 parade. Yet he still managed to piss off other gay activists if he felt he wasn’t getting his due. As Kepner remembered:

…[Kight] became very jealous of these newcomers who were daring to come in and join the movement without kissing the Pope’s toes. And some of these people began doing effective things, which he tried to sabotage. He still had a creative streak to him, but it became more destructive than creative, increasingly. And the movement has drawn in waves between being primarily a radical thrust and primarily a sort of establishment or P.R., or image-conscious thrust. And Morris has not been strong on the latter, although at times he has given in to it a bit. He tried his damnedest to sabotage and stop the first March on Washington in ’79, and at the last minute, when he saw it was actually going to happen, he began moving heaven and earth to become …one of the featured speakers. …And the L.A. Committee, about 90 strong, at one of the weekly meetings, voted unanimously—I had arrived late, and the issue was already on the floor, so I didn’t get into it—to threaten a boycott of the March if Morris were a keynoter.

In the early 1980s, Kight was appointed to the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. He served for two decades, inaugurating the Crossroads Employment Agency specifically to help gay men and lesbians find work. He resigned in 2002 due to deteriorating health, including cancer, heart trouble and a series of strokes. He died on January 19, 2003 at a hospice of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which had donated its services in recognition of Kight’s activism. Kight was survived by his partner of twenty-five years, Roy Zucheran.

If you know of something that belongs on the Agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.

Regan DuCasse

November 20th, 2014

I met Morris on SO many occasions. WHAT a character. I will say, that we had a few lunches and several coffees together. He was interested to know why I was so fierce in the movement, without having a dog in the fight.
I told him DID have a dog in the fight. Several.
The dogs were justice, opportunity, most of all freedom.
When I said that, he told me he’d just fell in love with me.
He was pretty balls out.
And one of those people with so much internal fire, it’s no wonder they are the way they are.
Mostly, we cracked each other up.
I’ve missed him.

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