This year’s Pride Month comes 50 years after the Stonewall Inn uprising in New York City, a touchstone moment that helped define the course of the LGBTQ+ movement. The anniversary is a chance to reflect on how things have changed in the five decades since those Greenwich Village riots changed the course of history.
Greta Schiller, the director of the 1984 documentary Before Stonewall, has been doing the work of thinking about that moment’s impact for years. In a 1985 review of the film, The New York Times said that the movie “makes abundantly clear” that “social change began long before that,” highlighting the film’s interviews with LGBTQ+ elders that paint a moving portrait of life in the era before Stonewall changed so much. A newly restored version of the film is out now, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the uprising.
Schiller, a happily married lesbian, sat down with Teen Vogue to talk about her film and the experiences that led her to New York City in the early 1970s, where she was exposed to a diverse LGBTQ+ community that motivated her to document LGBTQ+ history.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1954, Schiller came of age in Ann Arbor, where she says a burgeoning queer community made her teenage years formative. As a high schooler, she was hanging out with college kids from the University of Michigan.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about then and now and the trajectory of my own life and what it means to be young and queer today,” she tells Teen Vogue, speaking in a conference room at the offices of the LGBTQ+ elder-advocacy group SAGE. “So much has to do with where you’re born, whether your family accepts or rejects you, whether you’re lucky enough to — just like Marty Duberman says in my film — if you’re lucky enough to find a supportive group of friends and a community. That’s also true today.”
Schiller moved to Ann Arbor around the fourth grade, after her parents’ divorce. Her mom and dad were not surprised when she came out as gay, and she grew up in the college town, benefiting from her proximity to the university’s culture. In particular, that’s where she started working on underground newspapers, writing a healthy share of the articles for a publication called The Daily Dyke, sometimes under pseudonyms, and eventually making movies.
“I was in high school, but I knew already [I was a lesbian],” she says. “I was already having affairs.” While her old friends are sometimes shocked that she was so public about her sexuality in late ‘60s Michigan, she says it was a “vibrant political and social scene,” where anti-war activist group Students for a Democratic Society had roots. In 1974, Ann Arbor elected possibly the first openly gay elected official in the country, City Council member Kathy Kozachencko.
“Last two years of high school, we had these rap groups where we would go into sociology and psychology — the very beginnings of women’s studies — and we would just go, ‘Okay, we’re queer, ask us questions,’” she says. “We just wanted to break down the invisibility.”
“People would be like — especially to femmes — ‘You don’t look like a lesbian,’” Schiller remembers.
Schiller became a huge foreign-film fan, thanks to a student-run film society. It was there, as a lesbian teen, that she made friends with members from other parts of the acronym, particularly gay men.
Around this time she learned what had happened at Stonewall, because her grandfather had a subscription to The Village Voice, the New York–based independent newspaper that famously covered the riots using homophobic language. (In 2009, The Voice acknowledged that it had prolonged the riots with its unfavorable coverage.) Schiller remembers seeing a photo from Stonewall in its pages at the time.
That and a trip to New York, where she got to see a bunch of coffee shops that were “queer as a three-dollar bill,” convinced her at age 18 to join several of her friends in a move to the Big Apple.
“We all just were like, ‘We have to be in New York, that’s where things are happening,’” she says. “I was just graduating high school.” In 1972 or ’73, Schiller says, she moved to New York with one suitcase and $50 to her name. She got an apartment that she rented for $90 a month and a job as a “Kelly Girl,” a term for temporary employees. She needed a year to establish her residency before enrolling at City College of New York, the “Harvard of the proletariat,” as she remembers it being called, which was then tuition-free for residents. She worked odd jobs and stayed out late.
“We loved the clubs and staying out all night,” she says of her friend group. New York City’s crime levels were on the rise at the time, and Schiller says she ended up in a part of town that cab drivers wouldn’t go to. She said that meant there were two options for late nights out on the town: “Run like hell” to get from the cab to her apartment or stay at the club until the sun came up.
Schiller can still recall the names of several of her favorite haunts — dance clubs, bars, and coffeehouses. She remembers seeing LGBTQ+ people at the docks on Christopher Street and a park in the Bronx.
Schiller speaks fondly of the era, smiling at the thought of those late nights and having an easy laugh about her old anecdotes. While many of her memories of the time are rosy, her past now has a taste of sorrow, too: “Most of [my friends who were gay men] died of AIDS,” she shares. “All of them did, except for one.”
When she wasn’t dancing the night away with those friends, she was at a poetry reading or a film screening in venues that didn’t serve alcohol. Her friends organized clothing swaps, vinyl-record swaps, potlucks, and dance nights. Meeting up in a less technologically connected world meant that plans could be a little looser, but the telephone, even in it’s pre-smartphone days, was key.
“We had telephone, telegraph, and tell a queen,” Schiller says, referring to the term used by many drag performers of the time. “You knew the news would get out if you told a queen.”
“You’d get to someone’s house and you’d eat,” she remembers. “You’d have take-out pizza, and then you would dance all night.”
While Schiller was often out on the town with her gay friends, she says lesbian social spaces were often in private homes.
“Partly, it was money; partly, it was privacy,” she says, explaining why lesbians met outside of the public eye. As someone who had gone through her own coming out journey, she knew all too well the nerves involved with approaching a lesbian setting while still in the closet. Her first lesbian potluck, at age 16, at a private home in Michigan, left her pacing with anxiety outside.
“I remember walking up and down in front of the house, getting the courage, like, ‘Should I go in or should I not?’ Looking and seeing if I could see anything in the windows or whatever,” she says. Fortunately, her concerns didn’t stop her: “I went in,” she adds, “and the rest is history.”
That was back in Ann Arbor, but Schiller’s time in New York has defined her life.
“I love the energy of this city,” she says. “Even then, New York had such a diversity of cultures in the queer world — much more than anything I had experienced before.”
The LGBTQ+ community wasn’t without its own divisiveness and prejudice at the time, though.
“There were certain bars where my black friends just didn’t go,” she tells Teen Vogue. “Who wants to go out to party and be harassed by the bouncer or the doorman?”
To this day, Schiller thinks that’s at odds with the lesson of the Stonewall uprising.
“The Stonewall riots were led by people who were rebels, who wanted to be outside this stifling heterosexual-designed culture,” she says. Stonewall represented a major contrast to the homophile movement that had started to take shape as the federal government’s Lavender Scare was happening, prompting gays and lesbians to wear suits and dresses as they protested the federal government kicking gay people out of their jobs.
For Schiller, the radical energy of Stonewall is especially important to remember as modern conversations about the differences between liberation and assimilation continue, complicated as they have been by what she calls “the late stages of capitalism.”
“It was those young people, drag queens, butch women, African-American kids, who were just like, ‘You know what, we’re not going to be a part of the homophile dress and skirts, and wear nylons so we can get a job in the federal government,” she says.
“We used to talk in the ’70s and ’80s about changing how we were as human beings, and allowing everybody to be who they are as human beings and not have to change who you are and who you want to be to fit some little slot,” she says. “A lot of that changed with the whole corporatization of culture.”
“It was the bad old days in many ways,” she remembers. “We were so free. Things were so cheap.”
