ST. PETERSBURG | 50 years after her funeral, the death of icon Judy Garland still brings tears to St. Petersburg resident Jay Chetney’s eyes. A true “Friend of Dorothy,” a decades-old euphemism utilized by gay men to safely share their sexual orientation, he attended her public funeral in June of 1969.
He wasn’t alone. The New York Times estimated that 20,000 fans gathered at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home to peer into Garland’s glass-enclosed coffin and say goodbye. “There were few tears and seats to spare,” they noted, something Garland’s film co-star James Mason shared.
“Judy’s great gift was that she could wring tears out of hearts of rock,” he said. “She gave so richly and so generously that there was no currency in which to repay her.”
Chetney concurred. Her funeral is what brought the New York native back to the city. He was living in a Connecticut commune at the time, which served as the resource center for The New England Committee for Non-Violent Action. He and his friends, “non-violent marshals,” orchestrated civil disobedience protests against the war in Vietnam.
“The first few nights I had slept on the sidewalk so I’d be in line when the funeral home opened,” Chetney says. “My persistence paid off and I was able to pay my respects.”
His love for Garland stemmed from “The Wizard of Oz” star’s public support for her gay fans, something nearly unheard of at the time. Members of the community also empathized with her troubled time in the spotlight. “She was set upon by industry moguls and so many men who took advantage of her,” Chetney says. “A lot of us could identify with all of the tragedy.”
Exhausted from the funeral and finally indoors with friends, Chetney was resting that evening until he received an early a.m. call from his commune. “They alerted me about Stonewall,” he says. “I remember my friend saying ‘the Village faggots have gone crazy and are rioting. They’re refusing to be arrested during a police raid on one of their bars.’ That had never happened.”
The commune knew Chetney was staying near Christopher Street. “I was asked to get down there right away,” he recalls. “I wasn’t really sure how my experience from peaceful anti-war rallies was going to translate, but I knew I had to help.”
Once he arrived in the Village, he says it was easy to figure out the riot had occurred at Stonewall. “I was stunned by the amount of rubble on the sidewalks,” he says.
It was also clear to him that people had been attacked. “I didn’t know at the time it was the police,” he says. “That was totally against the way that I wanted to live and I didn’t think it was an effective thing.”
Even so, Chetey says that his perception was that every member of the LGBTQ community who heard about Stonewall—even himself, a trained pacifist—thought “well, it’s about time.”
“I was talking with the guys who were milling around and immediately got swamped by tales of what they had done,” he says. “My non-violent resistance never meant that I didn’t have anger. I knew exactly what they were feeling at the time.”
As an act of civil disobedience, Chetney connected with other peace activists to “develop a more constructive plan for dealing with all the chaos.” They worked to reopen Stonewall, which Chetney remembers as “physically a disaster,” for the next evening.
“Stonewall wasn’t a bar like you see today,” Chetney says. “It was primitive. We spent all afternoon the next day working with staff to get things in order, gathering up bits and pieces of broken furniture, sweeping up debris and hauling out a trashed cigarette machine and jukebox.”
Chetney adds that the mafia, which controlled the money-making machines throughout New York, immediately showed up to replace them. “They came ‘off the back of a truck,’” he muses.
To reward their hard work, Stonewall’s staff gave Chetney and his friends free drinks that evening, which became the second night of the riots. “We knew the police were going to come back since Stonewall had been reopened against the law,” he says. “Everyone was on edge.”
His group had planned a “nonviolent resistance” in which they would “slump, so that to arrest us they had to lift us up and carry us out.” Undercover cops, stationed inside of Stonewall, soon did.
As he was being dragged out by the plain clothes policemen, Chetney says he was targeted by another officer, this one wearing full riot gear. “He turned and swung his Billy club against my knee, yelling at the top of his lungs that I was ‘nothing but a hippie faggot,’” he says with a pause. “He did it for no reason except to hurt me, because I was being arrested.
“In those days, men had a lot of anger towards us,” he continues. “A lot of cops beat us up because it was the thing to do, but I think even the guys that were arresting me were shocked because they dropped me and were pushing me away. I thought it was going to kill me—and that’s when all the people on the street just came in and took me away.”
Members of his community saved him, Chetney recalls with tears in his eyes. “I was rescued. So I never actually got arrested. I was glad to be alive, even if I couldn’t walk.”
While his injury prevented him from further participation that fateful weekend, Chetney knew change had come for the LGBTQ community. “It was obvious right away,” he says. “Stonewall finally became that galvanizing moment in history when we started having public discussions about our equality.”
He returned to New York frequently in the year after, marching in what would become the first Pride parade in 1970. It was there that he adopted his hero and friend Frank Kameny’s chant of the day—a mantra he carries with him still: “Say it clear, say it loud—gay is good, gay is proud!”
