DISORDERLY MEN
by Edward Cahill
Fordham Univ. Press. 342 pages, $28.95
SOMETIMES our pre-Stonewall history can feel downright prehistoric. Few of us lived through Senator McCarthy’s red-baiting and the “lavender scare,” when LGBT people were purged from jobs in the federal government. Some of us do, however, remember times when our bars and clubs were routinely subjected to police raids, which continued into the late 1970s. Patrons could be roughed up by rogue cops, arrested, fingerprinted, and photographed like criminals. Worse, their names, ages, addresses, and places of employment were published in newspaper accounts of the raids, causing them to lose their jobs, their family ties, their homes, and sometimes their very lives. Such raids were commonplace in American cities in the 1960s, including in New York, where things came to a head at the Stonewall Inn in 1969.
Edward Cahill’s novel Disorderly Men begins with just such a police raid on the fictional Caesar’s bar in New York’s Greenwich Village in the early 1960s.
These men and others are all thrown into a police wagon and hauled off to NYC’s sixth precinct, but they experience different degrees of humiliation and ruin in the aftermath of the raid. Typical for the time, the men who appear to be more “respectable,” more affluent, are treated rather gingerly: the police interview them and then set them free. Thus, Roger and Julian get off with a stern talking-to but no arrest and no criminal record. (The real reason for their being let go becomes clearer and more sinister soon afterward.) Danny isn’t so lucky. He has just been thrown out of his mother’s house by Quinn (who thinks Danny’s purple necktie confirms his gayness). During the raid, he is beaten severely with billy clubs and kicked around by a tall blond “Nazi” cop; he is arrested, fingerprinted, photographed, and charged with frequenting a “disorderly house.” He pleads guilty and is let go, but is still publicly outed in a newspaper report of the raid. Gus, the artist, seems to be the unluckiest: he pleads not guilty and is sent to Riker’s Island to await trial.
The primary reaction of all the characters swept up in the raid is fear of what comes next. Mostly they fear losing their jobs and reputations. They have reason to be afraid: the aftermath of the raid includes a suicide, a clumsy attempt at extortion, a revenge plot, a job loss, electroshock conversion therapy, the end of a budding relationship, and more than a couple of disturbing revelations along the way.
Throughout, Cahill keeps us eager to know what’s coming next: what indignities and setbacks his characters are going to endure, what shards of their lives they will be able to hold onto. He does an excellent job of creating distinct, easily identifiable, lifelike dialog, and characters whose different responses to their plight are completely believable given the times. For readers who are unfamiliar with what it was like to be gay in this era, Julian Prince, the college professor, sums up the zeitgeist as he ruminates about his detention after the raid: “It occurred to him that gay people, even clever ones, were always closer to the criminal world than they realized. Who you slept with, how you socialized, even what you said and how you said it might suddenly bring the law into your life just as fast and as hard as if you were a thief or a murderer. You might forget about it most of the time, but the reality never changed. If you were gay, you were illegal.”
In one of the book’s most touching passages, as Danny shows his new, more experienced friend Roy Lee the damage that he suffered at the hands of the police, he admits to the shame he felt in the police station, as if it were his own fault he was there. “See,” Roy Lee tells him, “it’s their best weapon. Shame.” He advises Danny to turn the shame back on the cops, to make them face the shame of what they’ve done. Asked how he can do that, Roy Lee responds: “By making your enemies face their crimes. That’s justice. … Resist, little brother, if you’ve got the nerve. If you believe in your own humanity, you won’t ever feel ashamed again. … Get real justice once and you’ll never settle for anything less.” Thus, in Roy Lee’s advice to Danny, Cahill hints at the embers of resistance that would explode into a five-alarm fire at the Stonewall Inn.
