Thursday, July 21, 2011

Forget Dan Savage. Here's how queer youth made it better in the 70s.

"We used to have this thing where many of the gay people would organize, and do strikes, and sit-ins, and shit like that, refuse to do any work, you know. I remember this very good friend of mine, we used to call him Didi, he tied a sheet around his neck. There was this guard, he was giving us an awful lot of trouble, his name was Ivy, Big Ivy, who used to really give us a lot of hell, you know, beat us up and shit like this, and this was a grown-ass man, and we were like fourteen or fifteen years old, you know. What happened was we had planned to get him, you know. First we tried getting him fired by telling lies and saying he was forcing us into homosexual behavior with him, you know, all kinds of shit. And then we couldn't get him fired because he had been there for so long that everybody just wouldn't believe it. So what we did was Didi tied a sheet around his neck, and tied it up to the barred windows, and was standing on top of his bed. So I walked up to the door and started screaming, "Guard, come here! Somebody's trying to hang themselves!" So he ran up to the door and when he opened the door I pushed him in and about like seven or eight gay people ran in and threw a blanket over his head and almost beat him to death and left him there, you know. We used to do shit like that. We were doing more shit in that institution. Anything that went on, we were in it. I remember this straight brother who was very close to a lot of us, he always defended us and stuff like this, he was taken to the hole and they broke both of his arms and both of his legs before they got him there."

“Out of the Closets:  Voices of Gay Liberation”, pp. 104-5

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