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Two rodeo cowboys over a rainbow background (Graphic by Lissa Deonarain)
To celebrate Pride Month, we have a special show featuring stories from the Making Contact archives. We’ll revisit the Stonewall Uprising with the 1989 audio documentary Remembering Stonewall, and then head to the gay rodeo with producer Vanessa Rancaño in a story from 2014.
Remembering Stonewall: The Birth of A movement (1989) “All Around Cowboy: Inside the World of Queer Rodeo” (2014) Music:
Making Contact Credits
More Information:
TRANSCRIPT
Lucy Kang: You’re listening to Making Contact. I’m Lucy Kang. In honor of Pride Month, we have a special show for you this week, featuring two stories from our archives, which means you’ll also be hearing the voices of some past Making Contact producers as well.
In the first half of today’s episode, we’ll hear about a pivotal moment from queer history: the Stonewall Uprising. We want to share part of a very special documentary that aired on Making Contact back in 2015. I’ll let former Making Contact producer Laura Flynn take it from here.
Laura Flynn: When you think of Pride, parades and parties might come to mind. It might be hard to imagine that the worldwide LGBT celebrations were sparked by a neighborhood uprising in New York in 1969. But how many of us really remember what happened back in 1969? On today’s show, we’ll hear about the day that galvanized a generation and the continued fight for LGBT civil rights. I’m Laura Flynn, and you are listening to Making Contact.
The first Pride Parade took place in June 1970, marking the first anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. Michael Schirker brings us this oral history, Remembering Stonewall: The birth of a movement.
Michael Schirker: In 1969, the Stonewall was one of the most popular gay bars in New York City and like all other gay bars was routinely rated by the vice squad. The patrons of these bars, many of whom were frightened at having their identities revealed, would quietly submit to any orders coming from the police. Yet on June 27th, 1969, that all changed. The patrons of this bar, with the drag queens at the forefront, decided to fight back against the police. What happened here on that night would spark a revolution.
Gean Harwood: I am Gean Harwood, and my age is 80.
Bruhs Mero: I am Bruhs Mero.
Gean Harwood: He wants, he also would like to know what your age is. So tell him your age.
Bruhs Mero: My age? 78. Being gay before Stonewall was, was a very difficult proposition because we felt that in order to survive, we had to try to look and act as, as straight as possible. The attitude, the general attitude of society as far as employers were concerned, and landlords, all of these people were very hostile. And to protect ourselves, we had to act as rugged and, and manly as possible.
Sylvia Rivera: Name is Sylvia Rivera. My name before that was Ray Rivera until I started dressing in drag in 1961. The era before Stonewall was a hard era. There was always the gay bashings on the drag queens by heterosexual men, women, and the police.
Seymour Pine: My name is Seymour Pine. In 1968, I was assigned as deputy inspector in charge of public morals in the first division in the police department, which covered South Manhattan from 38th Street to the battery, including the Greenwich Village area. It was the duty of public morals to enforce all laws concerning vice and gambling, including prostitution, narcotics, and laws and regulations concerning homosexuality.
Red Mahoney: My name is Red Mahoney. I’ve been hanging out, drinking, partying, and working in the gay bars for the last 30 years. In the era before Stonewall, all of the buyers, 90% of the buyers, were mafia controlled. Yeah, they were controlled because the mafia had the right connections. There wasn’t that many gay bars. You’d have maybe one, two, uptown in the Upper East side. They would get closed down. And there’d be one or two on the west side. They’d get closed down. And midtown, there’d be 1, 2, 3, maybe open. As they would get closed down, they’d move around. And they were dumps.
Joan Nestle: I’m Joan Nestle, co-founder of what is now the largest collection of lesbian culture in the world. The police raided lesbian bars regularly. And they both did it in the most obvious way, which was hauling women away in paddy wagons. But they did – there was regular weekend harassment, which would consist of the police coming in regularly to get their payoffs.
And in the Sea Colony, we had a back room with a red light. And when that red light went on, it meant the police would be arriving in around 10 minutes. And so we all had to sit down at our tables. And we would be sitting there almost like school children and the cops would come in. Now depending on who was on, which cop was on, if it was some that really resented the butch women, who were with many times very beautiful women, we knew we’re in for it.
Because what would happen is they would start harassing one of these women and saying, “Huh, you think you’re a man? Come outside, we’ll show you.” And the woman would be dragged away. They’d throw her up against a wall, and they’d say, “So you think you’re a man? Let’s see what you got in your pants.” And they would put their hand down her pants.
Michael Schirker: On Friday night, June 27th, 1969, at about 11:45, eight officers from public morals, first division loaded into four unmarked police cars. From their headquarters on 21st Street and Third Avenue, they headed downtown and then west towards the Stonewall Inn here at 7th Avenue and Christopher Street. It was the second time the bar was raided that week.
The local sixth precinct had just received a new commanding officer who kicked off his tenure by initiating a series of raids on gay bars, and New York was in the midst of a mayoral campaign, always a bad time for homosexuals. Mayor John Lindsay had good reason to agree to the police crackdown. He had just lost his party’s primary and needed a popularity boost, and the Stonewall Inn was indeed an inviting target.
Operated by the Gambino Crime Family without a liquor license, this dance bar drew a crowd of drag queens, hustlers, minors, and more masculine lesbians known as bull dykes. Many were Black or Hispanic. It was almost precisely at midnight that the Moral Squad pulled up to the Stonewall Inn, led by Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine.
Seymour Pine: For some reason, things were different this night. As we were bringing the prisoners out, they were resisting. One drag queen, as we put her in the car, opened the door on the other side and jumped out, at which time, we had to chase that person. And he was caught, put back into the car, made another attempt to get out the same door, the other door. And at that point we had to handcuff the person. From this point on, things really began to get crazy.
Robert Rivera: My name is Robert Rivera, and my nickname is Birdie. And I’ve been cross-dressing all of my life. I remember the night of the riots, the police were escorting the queens out of the bar and into the paddy wagon. And there was this one particularly outrageously beautiful queen with stacks and stacks of Olivia style, with this tail style hair. And she was asking them not to push her and they continued to push her. And she turned around and she mashed the cop with her high heel. She knocked them down and then she proceeded to frisk him for her, the keys to the handcuffs that were on them. She got them, and she ended herself and passed them to another queen that was behind her.
Seymour Pine: Well, that’s when all hell broke loose at. And then we were, we had to get back into the Stonewall.
Howard Smith: My name is Howard Smith. On the night of the Stonewall Riots, I was a reporter for the Village Voice locked inside with the police, covering it for my column. It really did appear that that crowd, because we could look through little peepholes in the plywood windows, we could look out and we could see that the crowd, well, my guess was within five, 10 minutes, it was probably several thousand people minimum, 2000 easy. And they were yelling, “Kill the cops, police brutality. Let’s get ’em! We’re not gonna take this anymore. Let’s get ‘em!”
Seymour Pine: We noticed a group of persons attempting to uproot one of the parking meters, which they did succeed. And they then used that parking meter as a battering ram to break down the door, and they did in fact open the door. They crashed it in, and at that point was when they began throwing Molotov cocktails into the place.
Howard Smith: There were a couple of cops stationed on either side of the door with their pistols, like in a combat stance aimed in the door area. A couple others were stationed in other places behind like a pole, another one behind the bar. All of them with their guns ready. I don’t think up to that point I ever had ever seen cops that scared.
Michael Schirker: When the moral squad officers barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall, Deputy Inspector Pine put in a 1041 call, an emergency help request, which can only be placed by a high ranking officer. That call was mysteriously canceled, and the telephone inside the Stonewall went dead. It took nearly 45 minutes for the riot police to get to the Stonewall and rescue the moral squad from the smoldering bar.
Martin Boyce: My name is Martin Boyce, and in 1969 I was a drag queen, known as Miss Mark. I remember on that night when we saw the rip and all of us drag queens, we linked arms like the Rockettes and sang the song we used to sing. “We are the village girls. We wear our hair in curls. We wear our dungarees above our nelly knees.” And the police went crazy hearing that and they just immediately rushed us. We gave one kick and fled.
Rudy: My name is Rudy, and the night of the Stonewall, I was 18. And to tell you the truth, that night I was doing more running than fighting. I remember looking back from 10th Street and there on Waverley Street there was a police, I believe a cop, on his stomach, in his tactical uniform and his helmet and everything else with a drag queen straddling him. She was beating the hell out of him with her shoe.
Mama Jean: My name is Mama Jean. I’m a lesbian and I guess you would label me as a butch. I remember on that night I was in a gay bar, a women’s bar called Cookies. We were coming out of the gay bar, going toward 8th Street. And that’s when we saw everything happen, blasting away, people getting beat up, police coming from every direction, hitting women as well as men with their nightsticks, gay men running down the street with blood all over their face. We decided right then and there, whether we’re scared or not, we didn’t think about it. We just jumped in.
Michael Schirker: The media covered the riot extensively. The Daily News featured it on its front page. There were reports on all the local television and radio stations. By the next day, graffiti calling for gay power had appeared on buildings and sidewalks all over the West Village. Hastily worked up flyers distributed on street corners, touted the night as “the hairpin drop heard round the world.” And the next night. Thousands of men and women converged on the West Village. They came here, back to the Stonewall, to see what would happen next. While trash cans were set on fire, stones were thrown, and sporadic fighting broke out between police and gays, the more than 400 riot police milling around the village ensured that the previous night’s violence would not be repeated.
But on this night, for the first time, gay couples could be seen walking hand in hand or kissing in the streets. Just by being there surrounded by reporters and photographers and onlookers, thousands of men and women were proclaiming to themselves and the rest of the world that they were gay. And the crowds grew and came back the next night and for one more night the following week. What happened here on those nights helped to usher in a new era, both personally and politically for gay men and lesbians.
Jim Fouratt: My name is Jim Fouratt. And in the mid-60s, along with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, I was one of the founders of the Yippie movement. I remember on the third night of the riots, there was this meeting called by Mattachine Society at St. John’s Church on West on Waverly Place. We went, and Randy Wicker was running the meeting.
Randy Wicker: For ten years, I’d been going on television as Randy Wicker, the respectable homosexual dressed in dark suit and tie explaining to people that most homosexuals look like everybody else and behave like everybody else.
And when Stonewall began happening, you had chorus lines of queens kicking their heels up at the police, bonfires burning in the corner trash baskets, and throwing bricks and stones at the police. I was horrified cause this violated everything that we thought of as responsible behavior, that this was not the way respectable citizens behaved.
Jim Fouratt: Evelyn Hooker was a sociologist, I believe Randy had introduced her. And she got up and she suggested that we should have a candlelight march, that we should turn the other cheek because gay people were really different, we were really nice and we had to show how nice we were and stop all this rioting cause people were going to get hurt.
I remember I stood up and I said, no, we are not going back. And people felt the same thing I felt, and we marched out of that room and that was the night that the Gay Liberation Front was born.
Joan Nestle: That night, in some very deep way, we finally found our place in history. Not as a dirty joke. Not as a doctor’s case study. Not as a freak. But as a people.
Michael Schirker: Remembering Stonewall was engineered by Spider Blue. It was produced by David Isay with a grant from the Pacifica National Program Fund. I’m Michael Schirker.
Lucy Kang: That was an excerpted version of Remembering Stonewall: The birth of a movement, as it aired on a Making Contact episode from 2015 hosted by Laura Flynn. The documentary was produced in 1989 and is part of the Pacifica Radio Archives.
After a quick break, we’ll dive into another throwback story from the Making Contact vault. Stay tuned.
Salima Hamirani: I am just jumping in to remind you that you’re listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and want more information, or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at our new website, focmedia.org. And now back to the show.
Lucy Kang: Welcome back to Making Contact. I’m Lucy Kang.
For the second half of today’s Pride episode, we go back to 2014 when we got to visit a gay rodeo on the show. I’ll let another former Making Contact producer introduce the story.
Andrew Stelzer: I’m Andrew Stelzer, and this is Making Contact.
Announcer: There’s only one thing left for us to say. On three, let’s rodeo. 1, 2, 3, let’s rodeo! Let’s rodeo. You got it. Thank you, Pepe. Thank you, Craze. Have a great day.
Andrew Stelzer: Rodeo is a part of life for many Americans, but if you’re an LGBTQ rodeo fan, participating in the sport you love can mean hiding part of who you are to fit in. You don’t often hear the words gay and rodeo together. But as producer Vanessa Rancaño found out across the country a tight-knit group of queer cowboys has found a way to live the country and western lifestyle in their own way. On this edition of Making Contact, she brings us one bull rider’s story.
Jason Strand: So my name is Jason Strand. We’re at Kroner Ranch in Phoenix, Arizona, and this is the first day of the Phoenix Rodeo and first rodeo of the season.
Vanessa Rancaño: It is rodeo season again, and Jason Strand has come from the San Francisco Bay area to be here. He’s one of the very few cowboys here who still competes in the rodeo’s most dangerous event, bull riding. Minutes before his first ride of the season. Jason’s standing behind the shoots. They’re the metal pens on one end of the arena where the crew holds the bulls before the event. The arena spreads out in front of him, surrounded by colorful wooden bleachers where some 300 fans clap and cheer.
At 33, Jason’s pretty young compared to most of the cowboys here. He’s a small guy, blue-eyed and baby faced and overall seems like no match for the huge bull he’s about to get on. I grabbed a cowboy in the crowd to help explain what was happening.
Cowboy: Jason’s getting ready. He’s got his chaps on, he’s got his mouth guard in. He’s cinching up his protective, uh, bull riding vest.
Jason Strand: I’ve had my fair share of injuries.
Vanessa Rancaño: That’s Jason again.
Jason Strand: I’ve been stomped on a number of times. My first full year riding, I had a bull land on my chest in Denver, hit my chest, my shoulder, and cracked my helmet in half. Had my legs stomped on a number of times. I got gored in Chicago last year. I took a horn to my hip. That was probably my worst. I’ve been lucky
You know, any, any ambitions that I have and anything at all that is keeping me from concentrating on where I need to look, on my breathing, on my technique, I try to push it out of my mind because the slightest distraction can cost you big time.
Cowboy: He’s pacing back and forth a little bit. Just waiting for him to get ready for his animal. Oh, I’m sure he’s nervous. We want to do so well each time and, and it’s six seconds, so it’s very quick. All right, now he is getting over the top rail. He’s straddling the animal, just getting down onto the back of it.
Jason Strand: It’s a 15 to 3000 pound animal. And so you’re straddling this, this huge animal and. I mean, if you’ve ever ridden a horse, it, it almost feels like a saddle that just keeps moving on its own.
Cowboy: And there’s the gates open. He’s going, it’s bucking. He is going out. We got a good ride.
Jason Strand: When it bucks, you get to feel that raw power. It’s like four people coming up behind you and just shoving you from the back forward. And then again from the front. It’s, it’s tremendous. For a rider, you, you live for that buzzer. And every second feels like minutes or hours. There’s a point where you start thinking to yourself, “Oh my God, did they not set the buzzer?” And at that point, you’re either still, you’re still fighting, you’re still going with it, you’re going strong. Or your thoughts have gotten the best of you, and you’ve lost track of what you’re doing. And you start to fall. And then as you start to hit the ground, do you hear the buzzer and you’re going, oh [bleep].
Speaker: You know the rodeo is so many different things to so many different people. You’ve got the contestants. You’ve got the officials. You have the royalty contestants, the people competing for Mister, Ms., Mizzter and so forth. You have people that come to the rodeo just to dance. You have people who come to the rodeo as vendors that are trying to sell products, many of which are LGBT focused. You have the spectators. If you want to dress in drag and perform, you can do that at the rodeo. If you want to be a bull rider, whether you’re a man or a woman, you can come out and be a bull rider. You can be whatever you want. And I think that’s just fantastic.
Speaker 2: This is not professional level rodeo, right? Because we’re not, that’s not what we do for a living. You know, we’re teachers and doctors and lawyers and courier drivers, whatever we happen to be. This is just our hobby. This is what we do, but we do it a lot.
Vanessa Rancaño: Like any rodeo, there’s roping events, speed events, and rough stock events, the ones where people get really dirty, like bull riding and steer wrestling. But there’s some special competitions too.
Speaker 3: And the camp events are unique to gay rodeo.
Speaker 4: Well, and they’re called camp events cause they’re campy. That’s the whole point. They’re just for fun.
Speaker 3: And they tend to be some of the more popular events. In the stands, a team of two run out. One holds the legs of a goat; the other one puts underpants on there, jockey shorts, underpants. And they race back. That’s goat dressing. We have another one called steer deco, steer decorating, where one person holds a steer on a lead and the second person ties a ribbon on their tail. And they both run back and hit a timer.
And the third one is really popular. It’s called wild drag. It’s a team of three. There’s a male, a female, and then a third person dressed in female attire. And they have to get the drag person up on the steer. And then they have to come back across the line with the person riding the steer back.
People get into the costumes. A team has come out dressed in nun and priest attire. A couple years ago, there was a team of three who dressed up as Gone with the Wind.
Speaker 5: Our friend Jason Strand has decided to do wild drag as well. And he is in a lovely red cotton candy matted mess of a wing and a little black tutu. Of course, in his wranglers and his cowboy boots as well.
And the cowgirls just handed off the rope to the cowboy. They’re struggling to get it back across the 70 foot line. Oh, the steer flipped over. That is never a good thing. Jason just fell down. That’s not good. Now the two team steers are tangled. Oh, Jason just got flipped over, caught in the rope, tripped by the rope. Lost his hair, and he’s given up.
Vanessa Rancaño: Jason’s husband Will looks tired too. He’s been in the stands all day cheering and photographing and videotaping. Will comes to the rodeos with Jason whenever he can, but he never competes, and it’s clear this is Jason’s thing, not his.
Will Ikeman: I’m Will Ikeman, and I am Jason Strand’s husband, and we’ve been together for 10 years now. Jason and I met in Phoenix when we both lived here. We moved to San Francisco right before the Proposition 8 vote. We decided to get married like the weekend before the proposition because we were worried that the vote was gonna go the wrong way.
Vanessa Rancaño: Jason grew up in Reno, Nevada, where he got introduced to rodeo, but it wasn’t until he moved to San Francisco that he really got into it. It took Will by surprise.
Will Ikeman: He has a friend in San Francisco that participated. He suggested Jason, you know, come, come down and help out with the crew. Well, he got down there and he was so infatuated with it. People sponsored him to enter events. You know, no cowboy gear, no nothing. You know, out there in Sketchers looked at him like, where did this come from? If you know my husband, it’s not unusual. Things do come out of the blue with him. He’s had the bug ever since.
Jason Strand: They think I’m nuts. I mean, my mom, she thinks it’s really cool and she’s happy that I love it. And you know, she backs me a hundred percent, but she thinks I’m nuts. She knows that for me, it’s not just competing. It’s the people. It’s a very tight knit family. And I just, I love it row. I don’t know how I went so long without doing it.
Vanessa Rancaño: Gay rodeo started back in 1975 when a guy named Phil Ragsdale decided an amateur gay rodeo would be a great way to raise money for charity and break some stereotypes in the process. It was a success and similar rodeos started cropping up across the west.
The independent groups eventually got together and formed the International Gay Rodeo Association, IGRA. Gay rodeo emerged as the AIDS epidemic was starting to hit gay communities around the country. The rodeos were a safe haven that meshed gay liberation ideology with the country western party. And they filled a huge need back in the eighties.
Steve Wollert: We were getting very, very, very little support and attention and focus on what ended up being a very devastating disease for our community. My name is Steve Wooler. I live in San Diego, California. I was Mr. IGRA 2006. All of us that grew up in the Midwest or the West, or on farms and ranches as we were coming of age and coming out, were searching for that thing that we identified with because it was very hard to be a gay cowboy.
First time that I went to a gay rodeo and walked into a ballroom where men were dancing with men to country music, I mean – [emotional pause] Sorry. I found my home. Because there’s a lot of us that grew up that way and essentially had to be completely closeted if we wanted to participate in rodeo.
Steve Wollert: I grew up in a small town on a farm. And so I’ve been to many rodeos, and it’s very much the, you know, jeans and big belt buckles and very conservative Christian environment. And I would not have expressed myself in that venue. And I’m very open now, but I would never have never have dreamt. Yeah.
Brian: So if you were to go back home to visit, would you express yourself then?
Steve Wollert: If my family would allow me to go back home and visit? Then maybe. Would you, Brian?
Brian: Well, I’m from LA. So yeah, it’s no big deal anymore.
Steve Wollert: If I had been exposed to that, there are other farmers, ranchers that were just like me and they loved what they did, it could have changed my path. Most definitely.
Darcey Ward: I’m Darcy Ward, and I work the rodeo circuit. I started working it when I was still female. And then in the early 2000s I transitioned to male. So I’m F to M, which is female to male transgender. It’s been very important to me to try to come out more and more to everybody because there’s still, even in the gay community itself, a lot of prejudice towards transgenders. And we’re trying to say, “Hey, we’re here. We’re not bizarre, weird, crazy. It’s just a part of who we are, and it’s another part of the community to embrace.” We’re all dealing with the same crap, and we just want to be who we are and live our lives.
Lucy Kang: That was an excerpted version of a story from producer Vanessa Rancaño, as it aired on a Making Contact episode from 2014 hosted by Andrew Stelzer. The International Gay Rodeo Association is still around, and in fact, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Gay Rodeo. And that does it for today’s show. If you want more information, including where to hear the full length stories, go to our website at focmedia.org. I’m Lucy Kang. Thanks for tuning in to Making Contact.
