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CounterPunch
October
5, 2002
Class War in
the West Village:
FIERCE! Youth vs. "Residents
in Distress" and other Gentrifiers
by BENJAMIN SHEPARD
On September 7th, a gender-variant crowd of West
Village Street youth, drag queens, anarchists, and local vagabonds,
led by FIERCE! and the Radical Faeries, pounded drums and paraded
in platform shoes in support of the continued presence of young,
multiracial queers in the neighborhood. Global justice and other
public space activists joined jugglers, students and hundreds
of colorful people dressed as flames in bright oranges, reds
and yellows and "flamed through the streets," dancing
in solidarity with these young people who have recently been
profiled by 6th Precinct cops and harassed by other Village residents.
The carnival roamed the Village in support for those most targeted
by the "Quality of Life" campaign initiated by Guiliani
and perpetuated by Bloomberg. The action was a part an eight-year
battle between those in favor of "quality of life"
for the rich and activists helping preserve New York's colorful
street life. In many ways their clash amounted to a sex panic.
Sex in the
City: Panic and Repression
"During a sex panic, a wide array
of free-floating cultural fears are mapped onto specific populations
who are then ostracized, victimized, and punished," notes
Eric Rofes. Historian Allan Bérubé defines a sex
panic as "a moral crusade that leads to crackdowns on sexual
outsiders." Stereotyping used as a political tool turns
prostitutes into "fallen women," street youth into
"Bloods vs. Crips," and cruisers into "vagrants"
and "drug dealers." By the mid 1990s, New York City
had fallen into the grips of a sex panic neutralizing opposition
to a war on public sexuality. Those who owned apartments sought
to "clean up" their neighborhoods, purging the area
of a vital pulse which has always been part of public culture
in New York City. The City's war against sex pitted land-owners
against those who filled the streets in front of their homes.
The real estate land grab was painted as a morality campaign.
During the fall of 1995, the New York City Council passed a XXX
Zoning Law. "We changed the rules," the mayor argued:
...by adopting the same laws that apply
to drug dealers and zoning regulations, we have cut the number
of sex shops drastically. We made sure that no sex shop could
operate within a set number of feet from schools, churches and
community centers. Basically, with the tight new regulations,
it will be nearly impossible for a sex shop to open in this city.
In my opinion, one is too many (Shepard, 2002).
Mayor Giuliani hoped to shut down nearly
every adult business which dealt with sexual materials--strip
clubs, bookstores, video stores, movie houses, and others. The
zoning turned 98 percent of Manhattan into a censorship zone,
squeezing New York City's sexual cultures--its arcades and clubs,
and Christopher Street's T-rooms out of existence.
The backlash against public sexual culture
in New York unfolded as New York's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani began
his "quality of life" campaign to clean up New York.
To stabilize the city, the mayor argued civil liberties would
have to be sacrificed. On May 17, 1994, he told the New York
Times: "Freedom is about the willingness of every
single human to cede lawful authority a great deal of discretion
about what you do and how you do it." Welfare moms, promiscuous
queers, street people, strippers, and artists became targets
of this cleansing. To the extent that undesirable communities
embodied the city's decline, they were driven from public view
as chain stores took their place. The result was an expanding
blandification of a place considered one the most colorful in
the world. The goal: to make the city welcoming for tourist dollars.
And it was working.
In 1998, Eric Rofes wrote: "Among
the most effective ways of oppressing a people is the colonization
of their bodies, the stigmatizing of their desires, and the repression
of their erotic energies." The criminalization  of the public expression of sexual intimacy
and the policing of public sexual culture were all part and part
of the project. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm
Reich posits that ideological repression is best produced "by
the embedding of sexual inhibitions and fear in the living substance
of sexual impulses." Repression keeps masses from developing
a consciousness about social disarray. Anti-sex ideology "inhibits
the will to freedom," Reich explains. "Those forces
that comply with authoritarian interests derive their energy
from repressed sexuality." To a certain extent, this process
Reich describes was unfolding in New York City. Vast majorities
of New York's public sexual cultures were shut down, boarded
up, and cruising grounds fenced off and privatized.
The Disney Company had successfully lobbied
New York's mayor to shut down Times Square's red light district
in exchange for Disney's business there. In Mayor Rudy Giuliani's
New York, small-town family values were set firmly against burlesque.
Either you were for the redevelopment program. or you were for
decay. This dichotomy, in turn, reinforced norms of white, procreative
heterosexuality. Times Square's queerness was seen as a threat
to a cultural heterosexuality, the normative power of which sought
absolute hegemony. There would be very little room for those
who lived less than "straight" lives in the new Times
Square and New York's other formerly public,sexual spaces.
While the powers that be have mastered
the art of prohibitive policies, demand never quite disappears.
While much of its public sexual culture was profoundly restricted
over the last decade, street life continued to thrive, with the
inevitable clashes between those who supported the Disney-fied
Times Square and those who preferred a little character which
are part of NY political culture. One such flurry or panic occurred
during the Spring of 2002.
Still a Queer
Mecca
For over 30 years, homeless queer youth
and queer youth of color have been congregating in the West Village,
seeking refuge in the historical heart of the modern queer revolution
where the streets reverberated in 1969 with the Stonewall Riots.
"This is their boulevard of broken dreams," explained
long-time resident and Stonewall veteran Bob Kohler. The equivalent
of a town square for these marginalized youth, the Christopher
Street Piers have traditionally provided a space for them to
gather, build communities and create kinship networks. Despite
the attacks on public space in queer New York, Christopher Street
has remained a mecca, with queer runaways who'd decided not to
hitch their way to San Francisco, still arriving at Port Authority
every night. Consider this: If the choice at hand is life on
New York City Streets or life with parents who think a daily
beating will cure their child of his or her abominable queerness,
the streets of New York are remarkably appealing.
Two things have happened to New York
City over the last decade. As crime has gone down, rents have
gone up, and demographics have shifted. An influx of wealthy
residents and merchants moved to the Village in droves when the
AIDS epidemic wiped out many of the area's longer-term residents.
At the same time, the funkier types without rent-stabilized apartments
have been forced to move to the outer boroughs because they couldn't
otherwise afford rent. At the same time as the funkier types
were moving out, the street kids who kept moving to the city
looked less and less like the "little orphan Andy,"
the hyper masculine gay clones with hiking boots and handle-bar
moustaches of the 1970s, and more like the gender-insubordinate
Black and Latino drag queens, transgender folk and street youth
of the 1990s. And while rents may have risen, Christopher Street
remained a place for gay/ queer kids to walk, meet, and cruise.
The problem was, most of the public spaces where queer youth
had historically cruised--the peers, the ramble, the clubs--had
been fenced off or shut down. Bars were too expensive. What was
left were the street corners, the vestibules, Sheridan Square.
For those turning tricks, the process could be a little riskier.
What followed was a crackdown on the neighborhood's queer youth.
Misdemeanor arrests of queer youth began to grow. Vigilante residents
began patrolling the streets, throwing ice and urine from windows
at the kids below, while preventing social services vans from
entering the neighborhood. A class war was brewing.
Cultural Anxieties
and Conservative Politics
In the weeks after Rudy Giuliani left
office, many New Yorkers got nervous. For many, including those
who had recently moved to the city, the former Mayor represented
all that was good and safe with New York's revival, particularly
since 9/11. And then he was gone. The overall crime rate in New
York City declined by 7 percent during the first four months
of this year, compared with a year earlier, sustaining a long
term trend. Statistics showed that overall crime in the Sixth
Precinct, covering Greenwich Village, was down nearly 10 percent
compared with the same months of the previous year. Nonetheless,
residents remained anxious, particularly as the news reported
budget cuts would reduce the numbers of police on the street.
Fear of a return to the "rotten apple" days of the
mid 1970s through the early 1990s persisted. Early in March,
an engineer was murdered in a manner that harkened back to that
earlier era. Subway riders complained they were witnessing an
increase in panhandlers, prostitutes and homeless people.
In response to their concerns, a small
group of village residents got together to form a group called
Residents in Distress, or RID. Their goal was to regain control
of the village from the runaways, the prostitutes and transgendered
people who frequented the their neighborhood. During the early
months of 2002, RID organized to get more police into the West
Village. On January 19th, the New York Times published an article
(Tolerance in Village Wears Thin Drug dealing and prostitution
are becoming a hazard in a normally quiet West Village area)
promoting RID's calls for more police in the West Village. It
specifically referred to quality of life issues related to the
presence of "Gay and Black kids" as well as the "transvestites"
and related "public safety" issues. By February, RID
would sponsor a community forum with Community Board 2 and the
6th Precinct over the problems of street youth loitering, pissing
in their vestibules, and prostituting themselves. Local politicians
and the police commissioner attended police/neighborhood love
fest. Abrie Lees, Chairperson of Community Board 3, lead the
proceedings. She outlined her legislative charge to purge the
youth that gather at the Piers, currently closed for "renovations."
For queer activists, it looked like another
chapter in a long series of battles that had taken place over
street youth over the 33 years since the Stonewall Rebellion
marked the beginning of the gay liberation movement right there
on the corner of 7th Ave and Sheridan Square. It appeared another
morality campaign to contain, arrest and displace transgendered
and queer folks who are youth, of color, homeless, or sex workers.
In response " FIERCE!," an organization for transgender,
lesbian, gay, and bisexual (TLGB) youth, drew up a flyer calling
for neighborhood members to respond to the attack by stacking
the scheduled community board meeting. Their flyer offered the
question, "Whose quality of life are we talking about
when" continuing:
Block associations are organizing to
"clean their streets" (whose streets?!!) of Transgender,
Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual (TLGB) youth of color and homeless
youth. Many residents are calling the police "on" us;
we have been told that we are not wanted in the neighborhood
because we are "lowering their property value."
The flyer noted an increase of police
sweeps and harassment of transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual,
(GLBT) youth of color and homeless youth in the West Village,
charging the police with profiling them on the lines on "race"
and "gender."
The author attended the community board
meeting at hand, watching as the processes discussed throughout
this entire paper played out over and over. At issue was the
question of the West Village Piers. Public space activists are
painfully aware that when the Piers re-open, these public spaces
will be privatized, under constant surveillance and designed
for up-scale users. While FIERCE! called for a "Queer Pier,"
designed by street youth who've been on the street for a generation,
concerned citizens called for more policing and arrests of "those
people." Self-proclaimed "community members" argued
with "interlopers." Code terms with racial overtones
such as "those people" were used as other residents
suggested the street kids were bringing drugs and crime into
the neighborhood. The police said they would do more to "get
tough on the problem" using a classic vocabulary of punitive
motives. One resident even stood up to proclaim that the neighborhood
was becoming like, "the Crips vs. the Bloods" a reference
to the LA street gang wars charged with the symbolism of racial
violence. Calls to "clean their streets" read as calls
for class cleansing of the outsiders. Complaints about permissive
behavior resonated as anxiety around sexual libertinism. Other
community residents called for increased arrests for quality-of-life
crimes, such as public urination.What was driving the anxiety
of the "Residents in Distress"? Perhaps the demographic
shifts taking place throughout the country, perhaps an anxiety
about multiculturalism, or even class animosities between land
owners and the homeless, or tensions around sexual politics,
or the cultural strain and ambiguity resulting from social change
in the Village. As with historic panics, the object of the moral
panic was not so much the street youth as the sexual liberation
the highly stylized youth represented. It was all part of the
discourse of panic. Yet, FIERCE! fought back.
"We're sick of Big Business, wealthy
residents, and police using curfew laws, misdemeanor arrests
and physical violence to target transpeople, queer youth of color,
sex workers and the homeless," said Aries de la Cruz, a
17-year-old member of FIERCE!. "We were here first!"
Waves of Carnival
"Where's the quality of life, and
who's it for?" Tim Doody, a Radical Faerie living in NYC,
pondered before the rally, cosponsored by FIERCE! and the Radical
Faeries, on September 6th. "Bloomberg is continuing Giuliani's
priority of profits before people. Community centers face eviction
and community gardens face bulldozers. The attempted purge of
queer youth of color from the West Village is an odious part
of this trend."
The two groups affiliated with the protest
were FIERCE! and the Radical Faeries, a collection of gay men
who generally share spiritual and political beliefs, striking
costumes that mix and match gender and who share and meet in
intentional communities scattered in predominantly wooded areas
around the U.S. Tim Doody said, "We're here to show support
to this next generation of queer youth and to make a stand for
public space. Nothing says resistance like an angry six-foot
drag queen in six-inch heels. And we've got at least 60 of them."
Everyone met at the fountain in Washington
Square Park. A man with a beard, red face makeup, and a bright
red skirt passed out green flyers proclaiming: "QUEER CARNIVAL
OF RESISTANCE, STARRING FIERCE, RADICAL FAIRIES AND YOU!!!"
The flyer proclaimed: "As privileged allies, we're hitting
the streets today, in the spirit of Stonewall We insist that
civil liberties and OUR public space not be compromised for the
benefit of the wealthy! Please help us create a just and more
caring society." As usual on a Saturday night, the space
was bustling. Just to the south of the Washington Square arch,
a group sang from the 70s anthem, "Carwash" contributing
to the joviality in the air. A crowd of men in feather boas,
orange headpieces and high heels met with a "comms"
or communications team composed of many anarchists from global
justice movement circles. The struggle against the privitization
and commercialization of public space is a core task of the movement
against corporate globalization. Activists involved with Critical
Mass, now in its tenth year, from Times UP!, Reclaim the Streets
and the More Gardens Coalition helped marshal the event. Members
of ACT UP, the standard bearer for the current activist resurgence,
were on hand.
The Radical Faeries began the evening's
ritual, ushering the spirits of the East, West, South and North,
as East Village activists joined West, creating a solidarity
between queer and social justice movements. Activists ate fire
and screamed. Many roared with approval as members of FIERCE
spoke about the challenge of maintaining the West Village as
a "community" which could include sex workers, the
homeless, queer youth, transgender people and the like. An ad
hoc core of drummers, some playing trash cans, others water buckets,
and one particularly effective bald-headed gentleman with a real
drum, formed a samba band, setting the beat. Dancers in orange,
lavender, and red symbolic flames flared as the march took off
into the night.
The Radical Faeries, a number of whom
were sporting beards, blouses and 12-inch high heals, led the
march West out of Washington Square. "Whose Village? Our
Village!!!!" many chanted. We marched up MacDougal to West
Eighth, past Seventh Avenue, gradually taking Christopher Street,
occasionally contending with two or three police, but very little
difficulty in terms of clashes. We zipped down Christopher, revitalizing,
the Grenwhich Village night, meandering past the cruisers, converging
along the West Side Highway. Onceopen space, today this place
is lined with fences, separating the cruiserswho still converge
there. As one of the few places in the city where someone can
sit without disturbance or entrance fee, the space still draws
large numbers who continue to utilize it as a place for cross
race and class contact.
That night, the march crowd stopped on
West 10th Street for dancing. A speaker noted that queers have
used this space for a generation, and now it's being developed
into a park designed more for families and entrance-fee-paying
tourists than the crowds of nude sunbathers who first made use
of the space from 1970s through the early 1990s. In homage to
Stonewall Veteran Sylvia Rivera, who had lived in these piers
and died earlier in the year, the crowd ate Hershey's Kisses
and reclaimed the pier as a queer space, with a mass kiss-in
and much dancing. Only when the police arrived did we move again.
Feeling more provoked by the police, the crowd became ever rowdier,
never once stepping on the sidewalk retracing its steps through
the village night back to Sheridan Square. "Whose Village?
Our Village!!!!" chants and "Keep the Village Queer!!!!
filled the night air, the drummers tapping on lamp posts, water
bottles, and traffic light, with police lights and the Stonewall
Inn in the distance. The ubiquitous bearded man climbed up on
a street light to gaze into the night as activists blocked with
their dancing. For an evening at least, the West Village was
queer and gay and joyous yet again.
Note: The next FIERCE
action to protest gentrification and police brutality in the
West Village will be 1 PM--Midnight Saturday, Oct. 5th Sheridan
Square.
Benjamin Shepard
is co-editor of From
ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the
Era of Globalization (Verso, 2002) and author of White
Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco
AIDS Epidemic (Cassell, 1997). He can be reached at benshepard@mindspring.com.
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October 2,
2002
Carol Wolman,
MD
Is the
President Nuts?
Diagnosing Dubya
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Something
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When
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Janet Reno: America's Saddam?
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