Editorial
Editorial:
Reclaiming Herstory
If
you were born before 1970, chances are the name Kitty Genovese rings a
bell, however faintly. Her name became an emblem of urban indifference
and prompted soul-searching on a national scale. Solemn sermons on the
"good Samaritan" were preached; sociological studies were done;
those who examined their consciences asked whether they would have done
differently.
In 1964, Kitty Genovese was a 28-year-old
bar manager in New York. On March 13, she was almost home - parked her
car, walked toward her apartment building - when she saw a man approaching
quickly. She walked faster, but he caught her from behind and stabbed
her twice. She cried out for help. One man raised his window and yelled
at her attacker. He moved away, but came back when the light went out
in that window. She dragged herself around the back of the building, looking
for an unlocked door. He stalked her like a wounded animal, stabbed her
several more times, then raped her as she lay dying in a doorway. He took
$49 from her wallet and drove away.
The police investigation revealed
that 38 people saw or heard the attack on Kitty Genovese. Not one called
the police or attempted to intervene. Finally one neighbor called the
police, but not until the attacker left.
Last month, a few mainstream national
media outlets - and at least one Vermont paper - filled in a piece of
the history missing for 40 years: Kitty Genovese was a lesbian.
Her lover in 1964, Mary Ann
Zielonko, broke a 40-year silence to come out. She and Rebecca Jones,
her current partner, live in Vermont.
Hearing that Genovese was a lesbian
has shaken up my psyche. Genovese's name was always a cautionary tale
- about being a woman alone in the city at night, about the need to care
and take action in the face of assault. But now it's also somehow more
about me as a lesbian, about our denied and undiscovered herstory, about
the dangers we faced then - and now.
In 1964, it was not okay to be queer.
The only place to go to hold your lover's hand in semi-public was a bar.
Mary Ann remembers the Swing Rendezvous on MacDougal St. and the Seven
Steps on Houston. Police raids and being beaten up for wearing butch or
femme drag were common events.
Until now we've never had the opportunity
to ask whether the neighbors' indifference might have had an element of
homophobia (not that the word existed then). Kitty and Mary Ann lived
together in the apartment Kitty was so desperately trying to reach that
March night. Mary Ann says some of the neighbors suspected they were lesbians,
because they were always together. "But we didn't look 'gay,' whatever
that means." Mary Ann got home from her own shift tending bar and
went to sleep - until the police knocked at her door at 4 a.m. and drove
her from the tree-lined streets of their Kew Gardens, Queens, neighborhood
where Kitty died, to the hospital morgue to identify Kitty's body.
It was a time of such fear that none
of Mary Ann's lesbian or gay friends would step forward to be with her
in the months following Kitty's murder. They might have thought Mary Ann
was too in the public eye, too big a target of police attention, especially
during the trial. They turned away, Mary Ann remembers.
Throughout the week after the news
report, a phrase kept insinuating itself in my mind: Kitty Genovese was
our lesbian Matthew Shepard. Her murder had that kind of impact at the
time, and reverberations for long afterward. "Yeah, she was,"
says Mary Ann Zielonko when I relate my reaction, "but it wasn't
a hate crime." Or at least not because of her sexual orientation.
Winston Moseley, the man who
murdered Genovese, apparently picked her at random, as a woman alone,
not because he knew she was a lesbian.
But the end result - of
Moseley's determination to murder and rape a woman, of the 38 witnessing
neighbors' indifference - is the same. A woman of potential - who, it
is reported, wanted to open a restaurant - a beloved daughter, sister,
and lover, died alone simply because she was a woman and her neighbors
were too tired or too frightened or too uninvolved to take action.
Winston Moseley was sentenced to death,
later commuted to life in prison. He is a 69-year-old veteran of the Attica
prison uprising, now an inmate at a maximum-security prison in upstate
New York.
And Mary Ann Zielonko, whose memories
include looking at the dead face of her lover Kitty and waking up screaming
for a year after the murder, has a life here in Vermont. "I was famous
for a moment in time. This is the first time I’ve talked about it
- in 40 years! I can't let her memory die. I've suffered through the last
few days [of publicity over the anniversary of the assault]... but I also
feel acknowledged."
For the first time in 40 years, a
member of the Genovese family has acknowledged Mary Ann's existence. She
spoke to Kitty's brother Bill, an ex-Marine who lost both legs in Vietnam
three years to the day after Kitty died. "He has pictures of Kitty
that I would love to see," she says. She dreams of a memorial to
the lover she knew too briefly. "I was 23 and we were happy."
Thank you, Mary Ann, for giving us
one more piece of our herstory, and for being brave enough to come out
about a painful part of the past.
We believe in our hearts that the
community born of the Stonewall Rebellion still exists. We're certain
Mary Ann and Rebecca have found a true community here, one that does not
turn away from friends' tragedies. And no amount of assimilation can take
that away.
Euan Bear
Editor