The restaurant had a sign in the window that read: “If you are gay, please go away.” Leitsch, Timmons, and Rodwell designated noon for their happy hour-but, says Leitsch, “being gay, we were late.” Mattachine had tipped off the press, who in turn had tipped off the restaurant’s management, which closed the restaurant before the Mattachine men arrived. Marks Place near Third Avenue (site of today’s Gama, an upscale Korean joint).
Then Mattachine would take legal action against the bar and the SLA.Īt the top of Mattachine’s hit list was the Ukrainian-American Village Restaurant on St. The plan-which, historian David Carter wrote, was “both creative and ingeniously simple”-was to walk into a bar as a group, make their homosexuality known, and order a drink, inviting the inevitable refusal. Dick Leitsch, the society’s president, with John Timmons and Craig Rodwell (who later opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop), staged a demonstration that later became known as the Sip-In. The New York chapter of the Mattachine Society, an early gay-rights group founded by Harry Hay in Los Angeles and named after an acting troupe in Renaissance France, decided to take back the night.
At the same time, bars frequented by gays were often targeted by police in entrapment schemes. While there was no law on the books against such a thing, the SLA often penalized bars that served homosexuals on the grounds that their gatherings were “disorderly.” Bartenders ordered patrons to sit facing away from other customers to prevent cruising, denied them drinks, or just kicked them out as precautionary moves under the SLA’s watch. That party is Mattachine, and the incident it honors is the “Sip-In” staged on April 21, 1966, in hopes of overturning the State Liquor Authority’s regulations against serving homosexuals in bars. But this year, at Julius, a West Village bar around the corner from the Stonewall, one party will commemorate a lesser-known event in gay history, which preceded Stonewall by three years. In the weeks leading up to the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, every gay bar in New York, and plenty of straight bars, welcome hordes of proud homo revelers, happy to toast to the power that a drag queen’s high heel could wield in a discriminatory police raid in 1969.