Pilgrimage and Rot-Gut Vodka
by Mickey Weems
One great thing about NYC Pride is that you never know who you’ll meet.
I made a pilgrimage to Christopher Park the day before the parade and festival on Sunday so I could take pictures of the Gay Liberation Monument and the Stonewall Inn. The monument is comprised of four bronze statues covered in white paint, two men standing together and two women sitting together.
A documentary was being filmed about the statues when I arrived. Leslie Cohen and Beth Suskin, the models for the women seated in the Gay Liberation Monument, were being videotaped for Written in Stonewall (Bianca Lanza, producer) while sitting with the life-size images of themselves.
The two women who posed for the statues were there right in front of me! Some 30 years later, they still look like their images.
I asked Bianca Lanza if I could take a picture of the women with their statues. When she found out that I am the chief editor of the upcoming Encyclopedia of Gay Folklife, she asked if I wanted to interview them myself. Talk about being in the right place at the right time!
Leslie Cohen related a recent event to me:
“We were walking back to the apartment where we were staying after visiting Long Island, and we decided to visit the statues. There was a homeless man lying up against the statue of me and when he saw us looking he said, referring to the statue: ’I talk to this woman all the time. She is my friend.’
“Then Beth told him we were the models for the statue and at first he didn’t believe us, but when he took a close look at us and then the statues, he went wild, calling all his friends over. It happens every time we’re at the sculpture and anyone finds out we were the models. People get very excited and relate their personal stories and relationships to the sculpture and everyone seems to have one.”
The experience of meeting Leslie and Beth, who have stayed together as a couple for all these years, brought me to tears, which the film crew dutifully documented, all the more proof for my husband that I am a big crybaby.
But there was trouble brewing.
Some of the local characters that frequent the park were making loud noises and fighting amongst themselves. I had the impression that they were displeased with a camera crew coming into their favorite place to relax, and they were purposely acting more raucous than necessary.
I went over to the three loudest people and offered to buy them a beer at Stonewall, hoping to give the camera crew a break. Instead, the loudest one convinced me to accompany him to a nearby liquor store, where we bought cheap vodka and clear plastic cups. So here we were in Christopher Park: me, four Straight street people, a hardcore out-and-proud Lesbian who took no shit, and assorted other players, all of us drinking in public, in an urban drama that I was sure would climax in my arrest.
I pictured myself calling my husband Kevin back in Columbus “Hi baby! I’m on the evening news! Can you post bail?”
But when in Rome…
We ended up having a total blast, with music, liquor, people dancing together (mostly Straight men and myself), and police turning a blind eye. I was the most fun I’ve had with my pants on in a very long time. Tunes from some of my favorite artists, including Evelyn Champaign King (who has recently made a come-back with a hot deep-house song, “One More Time”), pumped from the small portable CD player that the hard-core Lesbian had turned up to full volume, film crew and the rest of the world be damned.
At one point, I was sitting on Beth’s (the statue’s) lap, drink in hand, describing the Stonewall Riots to a group of young women visiting from Baltimore.
I left at sunset with regrets – we were having such a good time. Upon reflection, I realize now that I had experienced my own Stonewall moment, a complex clash of privilege, poverty and territorial dispute that was temporarily ‘ecstasized’ when people were of a mind to party.
