Stonewall by Martin Duberman Read Free Book Online

fixedly. At first he thought it must be his eyebrows again. He had taken to trying on Viejita’s clothes when she wasn’t home, sashaying around the house in padded bras and panties. Then one day he had gotten the idea to shave his eyebrows, but he had botched the job and had to paint them over with Viejita’s eyebrow pencil. That night, completely forgetting, he had washed his face thoroughly and gone into the living room to say good night to his grandmother. “Where are your eyebrows?” Viejita had asked evenly. Faced with disaster, Ray had mumbled something about having lost them down the sink and had said he would go look for them. Viejita had held him fast, but to his surprise had not beaten him. She had quietly gotten out her eyebrow pencil and had repainted Ray’s face.
    But this time, seeing the hickeys on his neck, she was not so benign. Where did he get them? she demanded. Thinking fast but not exactly well, Ray said he got them from Millie, the girl down the hall. “She tried to attack me downstairs!” Sure, sure, said Viejita, try telling me another—and she hauled off and whacked him. “Next thing I know,” she screamed, “you’ll be hanging out with the rest of the maricónes on Forty-second Street!” It was not the first time Ray had heard Forty-second Street mentioned. When he, Viejita, and a group of neighbors from the block had passed the Times Square area on their way to Coney Island for the day, he had heard them make snide comments about the “fags” who hung out there. He had stored the information away, not yet fully understanding it, not quite ready to have a firsthand look.
    But then more trouble developed at school. Ray had started wearing face makeup in the fourth grade, but for a couple of years nobody had seemed to notice, or care. (Nobody, that is, except for his fifthgrade teacher, a married man with eight children who had taken to driving Ray home from school and then one day had seduced him in the backseat.) Perhaps Ray’s athletic abilities in track and gymnastics had given him some protective covering, for if he was effeminate, hewas also wiry and tough, widely known as someone you didn’t mess with.
    But in the sixth grade somebody did. He was skipping rope one day with the girls, and wearing what was then called “full face” makeup (eyeliner and mascara), when a classmate named Glen called him a faggot. Ray whirled on him—“You don’t call me no faggot!”—and although Glen was two heads taller, beat him up right then and there in the playground. Called into the principal’s office, Ray explained what Glen had said. “Now do I look like a faggot, Mr. Sloan?” Ray demanded—which took some bravado, since he was dressed in skintight pants and was still wearing makeup. Mr. Sloan, for whatever reasons of his own, agreed that Ray did not. He suspended Ray for a week—and Glen for a month.
    But that marked the end of Ray’s formal education. In 1962, at age eleven, tired of Viejita’s beatings and the neighborhood mockery, he left home for good. He headed straight for Forty-second Street.

JIM
    J im’s family life shifted so often before he was five years old that he ended up feeling he had no family at all. And he would later let stand some of the rumors that surrounded him about being the son of the chairman of the board of Pepsi-Cola (thus conveniently making Joan Crawford his stepmother), or about his father having been a circus performer. “Circus” is in fact an apt invention and metaphor for the emotional acrobatics that surrounded Jim’s childhood.
    His mother, Connie, ran away from a convent school in New Jersey when she was fifteen to live with thirty-five-year-old James Fouratt, Jim’s father. Connie and James never married: she refused to wed outside the Catholic Church, and he refused to wed in it. She left him after giving birth