Sarx

N June of 1969, the “Homosexualist” movement was having a hard time. The cops were closing down gay bars (again) and no one was helping. The mafia – which owned all the bars – was making payments on time, but the cops and the mafia had agreed: we’ll close down your gay clubs rather than the respectable ones up town. No one will care.

Then, in June of that year, Judy Garland died of a drug overdose. While there have been gay divas since her, no one had been there before her. She filled a role, a hug gap. To make matters worse, other cities, more liberal cities like SF, had fought back the cops with the help of wealthy civic patrons and cultural elite. In a huge show of support, many clergy in the San Francisco Episcopal Diocese had been arrested at a Gay Ball. That would never happen in NYC – although God knows enough of the clergy were gay. They’d never come out.

Judy died.

And every cross-dressing performer who’d ever sung “Somewhere over the Rainbow”, no matter how badly, wept in tribute.

And then all went out to one of the few bars left open to drown their sorrows.

The Stonewall Inn wasn’t the best place to go: mafia hustled you for money, straights in the area harassed you. But in the end, it was kinda “home”. And it was open.

On June 29th, 1969, a group of cops were doing their duty – harassing the patrons and threatening to shut the place down – when, from out of the crowd cornered in the bar, a beer bottle shot up and over and hit a cop square on the head. Officer down: then as now, it brings out the best and the worst in the city’s uniformed finest.

The riots that followed lasted three days. A woman reported to the Village Voice, Bohemia’s Hometown Paper, that it was like living in a war zone: police barricades, trash cans burning at night, fire hoses, you know… the things we think of as part of the 60s. But one side of the barricades was filled with men in dresses, teens with long hair and their nails done, women in flannel. It was not what the rest of the 60s were about.

This is why – 40 years later, to the day – cities around the world will celebrate Gay pride. The stonewall was our Vienna and the police were the Ottoman Turks. Where there had been nothing but defeat this was, suddenly, a victory.

When it was all over a new idea had been born: we can fight back!

Totally different message – but I want you to hold in your head an image of the Stonewall as the Tomb of Christ for just a moment – a few paragraphs. Don’t worry – there is no parallel here between Gays and Jesus. That’s not where I’m going. Follow me…

A few years later the bar closed. Like all gay bars owned by the Mafia were (and still are) it was transient. They never stay in one place very long. The come and go. Nearly all the bars in NYC Greenwich village are owned by heterosexual persons who have a gay member of the board (often only one of four or five men) who is the public face of the bar. But not one gay bar in NYC was “gay owned” – even the ones that claimed it. This is not a bad thing or a good thing: I just want to relieve the reader of the stereotype. It was (and is) straight people who, largely, profit from gay people’s oppression into cultural ghettos.

The bar closed. The community moved on. The building had always been split in two. The half that was the bar (seen in pictures as the part with the bar’s sign hanging on it) was taken over by a family-owned dry cleaner. The other half of the building – not the bar – was, when I started school at NYU, a clothing store – and then two clothing stores.

In the mid-1990s some enterprising gentlemen, funded in part by the usual suspects, purchased the lease to the clothing store: the dry cleaner didn’t want to sell. And, actually, the chemical clean up would have been financially prohibitive.

They opened a bar where the clothing stores had been and, instead of “The Stonewall Inn” they called it “Stonewall”.

Good on ‘em. And Mazel tov. But a bar with the same name, located in a different part of the same building, opened 30 years later… isn’t really the same thing.

Still have that image of Jesus’ tomb?

315 years after the death and burial and resurrection of Jesus – when even the local Christians had no reason to keep track of the tomb – some local enterprising gentleman, funded by the usual suspects, “discovered” the tomb of Jesus – and the very Cross, itself! (Even though there is no reason to imagine the cross of Jesus as anything like a “Cross” nowadays.) But there it all was, almost as if it had been made that way exactly by God himself… and not by some local business man anxious to bring tourists in.

So what if the local bar isn’t really the place? We all think it is.

Well, I don’t. But a new generation of gays will leave their flights at the airport for a layover to come into Manhattan to venerate the holy walls.

Like in Jerusalem.

So I wonder here, what makes something holy?

Because it’s not history.

Or rather… it is not history as we think of history – facts, dates, archaeology. It’s mythological history. It matters not that something is provably not what it says it is or that history happened rather differently at the time than (eg) is reported by whatever publicity agent wrote the wiki article on the new bar. It matters not that the thing that claims to be holy has no proof at all, in fact its veracity is in doubt from science, history, religious studies of the native (jewish) population, etc; other than a few mythological stories and the political support of the entirety of the Byzantine line of monarchs. It is holy – like the bar – in the minds of the people.

And that’s where the right kind of history is made.

How is it that when facts fail us we resort to non-facts? How is it that most often these non-facts work for us better than the real thing?

The wiki makes it clear that no Christian doctrine requires that one believe in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This is Good: cuz we’re about 6 cubits from failure. It’s rather like Genesis and the flat earth. We don’t need to believe that either.

It’s not the reality that makes it holy – it is the faith in the mythical reality that does so.

Liturgically – it matters not that Jesus didn’t say mass this way. Or that the Eastern liturgy moved through evolutionary development right up until the last century. What matters is the vast belief in it held by certain parties.