Before he became one of San Francisco’s premier press agents, Lee Houskeeper was just another 20-something in New York City. It was there in the sweltering humidity of the Lower Manhattan summer, in 1969, that he witnessed the Stonewall riots.
But as a straight ally, he hasn’t always been recognized as being a “Stonewall survivor,” and his story hasn’t been widely reported until now.
Houskeeper, 76, was recognized by Congressmember Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), the former House speaker, at this year’s Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club breakfast on Pride Sunday. He wore to the breakfast one of two jackets he made to commemorate the riots. This year marked the 55th anniversary of the uprising in New York City.
“Our diversity is our strength – our unity is our power,” Pelosi said at the June 30 breakfast. “No one has done more to reinforce that ideal, that value than the LGBTQ community as they observe this week what happened at Stonewall – Lee Houskeeper is here with his jacket, on the back of it he says he gave them his garbage can tops to bang away at that – but we have our own observances of justice here as well, and every day you reinforce that, so let’s be very proud.”
One of the jackets that Lee showed the B.A.R. during an August interview states, “On June 28, 1969, I lent my garbage can lids to those brave Stonewall rioters to use as shields against the cops. I was living on Gay Street, NYC, a few doors down from the battle.”
Walker told the B.A.R. that Houskeeper is “determined; he really does feel connected to the thing. Sometimes we forget our allies.”
Lee said in a follow-up phone call that he’s known Walker for “over 10 years.”
“She was on the building commission and so was my client John Konstin from John’s Grill, so we wound up hanging out a lot – that and combined with my being close with [mayor] London Breed, so there'd be these events, these dinners, and we'd meet up,” he said, referring to the building inspection commission post Walker held before becoming a member of the civilian police oversight panel.
The Stonewall riots began on June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. That the event began with someone throwing a brick is mythical, the New York Times reports, but what is agreed on is that it was a response to police harassment of gays, lesbians, transgender people, and other sexual minorities. Homosexuality was illegal in New York state at the time.
“Nobody wanted to admit they were a gay person – there were such consequences,” Houskeeper said, recalling the pre-Stonewall era. “The [Catholic] archdiocese had such a control over the [New York City] police and, so this is the 9th and the 11th precinct, and they were given the marching orders. It took TV cameras to show up, and the New York Times, and European papers and the news media to show up, which didn’t happen for at least a week, for people to go ‘this is looking like our Selma.’”
It was only four years earlier that Alabama Highway Patrol officers attacked Black civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama when they tried to march to Montgomery, the state capital. On March 7, 1965, which came to be called Bloody Sunday, 17 marchers were hospitalized and 50 were treated for lesser injuries. Marchers led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did reach Montgomery during a second march, and then-President Lyndon B. Johnson used the Bloody Sunday events to push for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, famously making the protest anthem “We shall overcome” into the theme of an address before a joint session of Congress.
‘Everybody was at my house’
Houskeeper, who is now a press agent with clients including former San Francisco Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr., had moved to Manhattan after growing up in Illinois and worked in the music industry of the counterculture, including with Jefferson Airplane and the late Janis Joplin. He had an apartment on Gay Street, near the Stonewall Inn, and on a hot night “the air conditioner wasn’t doing its job,” he recalled, referring to a window fan.
“It’s a June day,” he said. “I’m sitting on my stoop and all of a sudden running down the street a few dozen guys, [in] shirtsleeves … and they come by and they look down at my garbage cans and they say ‘can we use your garbage can lids?’ and I said ‘sure,’ without even saying, ‘What’s going on?,’ and they liked that. I was pleasant. I wasn’t combative. I was curious.”
These were old-school, metal garbage cans with lids. Gay Street – named for a family with the surname Gay who lived there during colonial times – is a very short, angled street between Christopher Street and Waverly Place, which intersect at two different points in the direction heading toward the Hudson River. The Stonewall Inn is farther west.
“So they took the garbage can lids and they came around the other side because what the police would do is they’d get into their positions,” Houskeeper recalled. “Their position was to stand and look straight ahead at the Stonewall as they are pulling everybody out and throwing them in paddy wagons, and these guys took the garbage can lids and came up on the rear of their [NYPD] positions and knocked the shit out of them, then came running back around, waited till what they thought was an appropriate amount of time.”
Because Gay Street was so hidden, “the cops never found us,” Houskeeper said. (He was still on his stoop at that time.)
“They came up on the rear of them. They started shoving and chanting. And what that would do is – it was more strategic – it would make the cops turn around and reposition themselves. So what these guys would do is wait the appropriate amount of time and then they’d go around Christopher Street and hit them again. It took them five or six times to figure it out, but there were a whole lot of these guys. … I swear I have no memory of any cops going on Gay Street. They were busy.”
The rioters lucked out with Houskeeper in another way than just his garbage can lids – he had three phones due to his music business.
“Somebody asked to use the john [toilet] and I said OK come up I’ll show it to you,” Houskeeper said. “They ask, ‘Can we use a phone?’ I got three phones because in the music business in doing a record deal I didn’t want to have my phone busy if [record producer] Clive Davis would call … so it became a headquarters of sorts as they [the rioters] were calling one another.”
Houskeeper added that he called several of his music industry contacts to tell them about the unfolding events.
“So I’m on the phone, they’re on the phone, and I get Laura Nyro and Bette Midler and Janis [Joplin] and a few others [on the phone] and I said, ‘You will not believe what is going on down here,’ and everybody [rioters] was in my house. … I’ve got a crowd at my house now, and so it goes on – it seems to me – it was at least 10 days and it was primarily the weekend.”
Houskeeper said he remembers Nyro coming to his apartment after the phone call, that Midler did not, and that Joplin may have but he doesn’t remember with 100% certainty.
The Stonewall riots lasted six days; the next year gay liberation marches were held in Manhattan, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to mark the anniversary. The annual marches have continued since then as the annual LGBTQ Pride parade.
Houskeeper had the jackets made by Debbie Shaffer, an Indianan who sells items on Etsy.
“Doesn’t he have an incredible story?” she said in a phone interview with the B.A.R.
Shaffer said she got a request to make the jacket after messaging Houskeeper back after he’d placed an order.
“He starts telling me what he’s thinking, and the moment we talked it seemed it would be best to start from scratch. I use repurposed items to start with,” she said. “That led to a kind of two-day back-and-forth of texts and emails as we worked on the design. It was a very fun process; a little difficult, because he’s halfway across the country from my studio.”
Each jacket took about 10 hours, she said.
“It’s a process,” Shaffer said. “It was wonderful. … His was by far the most fun to make. It meant a lot to know the person I was designing it for, and what it meant to him and what he had witnessed and how it really changed the course of history.”
The jackets were variations on a jean jacket that can be ordered through Shaffer’s Etsy page.
Walker, an artist herself, said, “I love that story.”
“I do think that people, there are people out there who want to be supportive and they live in places like Indiana where they don't think they can,” Walker said.
Added Houskeeper of Walker, “She was so excited about this.”
Walker said Houskeeper's story shows the importance of allies.
“We don’t make change without our allies in any of our struggles of equity,” she said. “People need to feel it personally, and I think that’s how we can expand the reach of our advocacy around advocating for everybody is to really make it personal. A lot of our fights are won because there are allies giving us garbage can lids.”
John Ferrannini is an assistant editor at the Bay Area Reporter. This article is part of the LGBTQ Media History Month Project coordinated by Philadelphia Gay News.
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