Randy Wicker occupies a long, sturdy place in LGBTQ+ history.
Now 86, Randy was one of the most prominent activists in the U.S. during the pre-Stonewall era when relatively few people were willing or able to be out publicly. When a radio or television show would call the Mattachine Society asking to interview someone, it was often Randy who they’d send over.
In 1964 (five years before Stonewall!) Randy organized the first gay rights demonstration in the U.S.
And in 1966, along with Dick Leitsch, Craig Rodwell, and John Timmons, Randy took part in the now-infamous sip-in at Julius’ in New York City (pictured below; Randy is on the far right facing the bartender).
This sip-in is meaningful, not just because of my love of martinis (gin and slightly dirty, if you’re wondering), but because this action and the resulting lawsuit caused the N.Y. State Supreme Court to declare that it was unconstitutional to deny service to homosexuals. Julius’ is still open and is one my favorite places in the city.
Activism aside, Randy’s raison d’être is the legacy of Marsha P. Johnson who lived with Randy for over a decade until her death. We recorded our interview in the room where she used to sleep. The apartment is a shrine to Marsha—every wall, every door, every shelf holds her image as you can see below.
Jeffrey Masters: I want to start with the Mattachine Society, which you joined in 1958 while you were still a college student. What made you want to seek them out and join that group?
Randy Wicker: Well, I had read a book called The Homosexual in America, that’s how I came out. And then I heard about the Mattachine, and I found a magazine on the newsstand. And of course, the minute I knew there was a movement I wanted to join it, which not many people wanted to do. I went up and I had to lie and say that I was 21, and I was only 20, in 1958, to get in. And I think I was the 16th member. And at that time, whenever I would mention Mattachine to people in bars, it was amazing how it’s frightening when you start seeing how people can be brainwashed by society. I mean, there were all kinds of levels. They were against any kind of organization. “I don’t want to be associated with that dyke over there,” or, “That screaming queen,” or, “Isn’t it wonderful having this atmosphere, this undercover, underground atmosphere of these bars?” And they used to call me Miss Mattachine and make fun of me.
JM: They were against organizing because they liked the underground nature of gay life?
RW: They just didn’t want to be associated. It was all a matter of, blue-collar worker, it was on that level as well. They didn’t want to be associated with some screaming Black queen or some Spanish person, you know?
JM: You were the 16th member of Mattachine, your first meeting, was there like 16 people there?
RW: Oh, no, no. That was the number they had. If you had 16 people in the organization, you had four or five real activists, that’s always the case. But the whole movement, when I say, didn’t have over 100 real activists in it, and the thing that was so depressing about it, the kind of crunched-in, trapped feeling of gay people from the ’50s, very depressing. Because then when they get to discussing things in your meeting, they wanted to hear preachers or ministers telling them why they weren’t sinners, or were they sinners, or aren’t we sinners, are we sick or aren’t we sick.
JM: This is the 1950s. People are staying in the closet because of shame, fear, many societal factors…why did you not succumb to those things?
RW: Well, I didn’t want anyone to know I was gay, and also I found out people didn’t think I was gay. In other words, I’m one, I call myself, I shouldn’t use this term, because it’s, what do you call somebody that doesn’t exist, a normal homosexual. In other words, that I pass. My father told me, “You don’t hold books like this, that’s the way girls hold books, you hold them like that.” And so I had all the mannerisms.
JM: So when you realized you were gay, it didn’t bother you.
RW: Not at all, because I was raised Roman Catholic. I’m a confirmed Roman Catholic, only I didn’t dare tell the family I was an atheist. But I stood by a big tree at the age of seven and said, “They say I’m now at the age of reason, which means if I don’t go to Holy Communion or don’t go to church on Sunday or something, I’ll burn in hell forever.” And I thought, “Do I believe that?” And I said, “No, that doesn’t make any sense to me.”
But I had a boyfriend when I was in college, the last, right as I was graduating, and he said to me one morning something, it’s funny, it’s stuck in my mind, ’cause no one else had ever said that to me. He said, “I woke up this morning and I desired you.” And at the time I thought, “Well, it’s strange, but yeah, it’s kind of complimentary, right?” Well, six weeks after I left school he committed suicide, and I realized what it was, when he said, “I woke up this morning and I desired you,” he felt guilty. And because I was ebullient and happy and having a great ball, I guess people hide their guilt from you.
JM: And you were guilt-free.
RW: I was guilt-free, and he wasn’t. And I realized that when he said that to me, that that one thing he did stuck in my mind, and when he committed suicide, all of a sudden it hit me, he was making a confession. And that’s what it was like in the ’50s. I got tired of the gay movement, I left the movement after a few years.
I was literally the opposite of Franklin Kameny. I was the one that was pushing the envelope, and I can tell you there are letters that were written by organizations on the West Coast, when I was going on radio and TV, that were saying, “Why are you letting this person, Randy Wicker, go on radio and TV, he has no authority to speak.” Well, I’m sorry, I believe that we homosexuals are our own authorities on ourselves, not psychiatrists. They wanted to wait till they got the approval of psychiatrists and psychologists before they even showed their face on television. I broke into radio, I gave my people a voice. I was the first one on TV, first one to publicly demonstrate at the army induction center. I had a sit-in at Julius’ with other members of Mattachine, which actually made the groundwork for having the gay bars.
JM: I want to get into all that for sure, but the Mattachine Society was one of the early gay organizations in the US. What kind of work were they doing back then? What were their goals?
RW: Nobody was interested in Mattachine, but once they got arrested, who did they call? They’d call the Mattachine office looking for legal help, or trying to find a lawyer to defend them, and it’s like they were all users, takers. Nobody was working to build something.
JM: But internally, though, you were not there just to provide legal services.
RW: No, I was there to change society’s attitudes. And even if, officially, you were mentally ill according to all the psychiatrists, and you were a big sinner, all those things going against you. My father told me, when he told me, he wanted me to be the best-adjusted homosexual I could be, ’cause he wouldn’t always be here to protect me. And so the whole idea was that homosexuals were all screaming queens, effeminate. You would think that people would know better, but they didn’t.
JM: Your dad told you, “I’m fully supportive of you, do what you want.” But he also requested that you don’t use your family name.
RW: Apparently he went to an informed psychiatrist who told him, “Your son is always gonna be this way.” And he wanted me to be the first college-educated person in the family. So when I brought him Mattachine literature, when he read the literature he said two things to me. He said, “I don’t think you’re gonna get far with this.” That’s the first statement.
The second one is, “Just do me one favor, will you?” And I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Don’t involve my good name.” Now, he was Charles Girvin Hayden Sr., and I was Charles Girvin Hayden Jr., and that was the moment that Randolph Wicker, Randy Wicker, was born. I worked at a bank with a girl who liked the name Wicker, I thought it was sort of fun, because it was kinda like wicket, and then I saw a movie with Zachary Scott playing Randolph, and Randolph had a cloak and wore, I mean, I thought, there’s a quality name, if I ever heard one.
JM: So did that embolden you, taking on this new name to reinvent yourself? You were a very public person, did that give you permission to—
RW: I very much felt like Clark Kent ducking into the booth and coming out as, was it Superman or Batman he turned into?
I had to, I was like a split identity. Charles Girvin Hayden Jr. was my nine-to-five Social Security name, that I worked at these jobs, like in an advertising agency, which I hated. Finally, what happened is the gay movement started to get very boring, ’cause I was tired of trying to talk them into having a public demonstration. So a small group of activists in Mattachine, including people like Craig Rodwell and I, we wanted to go demonstrate at the army induction center, mainly against this whole thing of giving people dishonorable discharges.
JM: So this is known as the first gay protester picket in the U.S., that we know of.
RW: Yet they don’t know that I was really very against the draft, I still am, yeah. I don’t believe that any government has the right to draft you and make you go fight a war, like the war in Vietnam, that you disapprove of.
JM: But I think that for the first known protest picket in the US, it does stand out that it is about the military, out of all the other issues. Was there a reason?
RW: What was bad about it? We had our leaflets, we had two leaflets, and we had our little demonstration. Nobody got mad, nobody said, “Are you crazy?” Nobody cussed us out, no reaction at all. It was just like we almost weren’t even there. If you’d asked me that night I would’ve said it was a flop, and I thought it was a flop for 20 years. When I found out it wasn’t, it was one of Reggie Kagenhausen’s listings of public demonstrations for gay rights in the United States, only 20 years later, in 1988, did I realize I’d actually made history.
JM: Wow. So something that did get a ton of attention, though, was when you were on the radio in 1962.
RW: I broke into the radio because they tried to revoke WBAI’s license. They challenged it, a religious group, saying they were putting perverts on the air. And they actually, the Federal Communications Commission said homosexuality was a legitimate issue for discussion on the airwaves.
So everybody then wanted a homosexual, so they all came to the Mattachine, and I was the only one that, because I was young, I had nothing to lose. These other people had careers, if their voice was recognized they’d lose their job.
JM: And just for the audience to know, when you were on the radio it was a panel of gay men talking about gay life, you organized this, and it was the first time that anything like that had ever aired on radio. You convinced the station, WBAI to do this and the media response was tremendous. It was covered in The New York Times, Newsweek, Variety, and it was largely positive, right?
RW: Oh, yes. Newsweek was a full page called “Minority Listening,” and The New York Times said it was a provocative, interesting program, ’cause people had never heard anything like this discussed among people that were homosexual. One was bisexual, there was an interracial couple.
JM: And so you went to the radio station WBAI—
RW: Right, ’cause I’d heard these shrinks promising that in six sessions they could cure homosexuality.
JM: And thankfully the radio station agreed with you, that they should air what you said, of gay men talking about gay issues. But my, I guess my question is, this was you acting alone, right? This was not like the Mattachine hearing this radio program and targeting them.
RW: I had my little cards printed up. As a matter of fact, the funny thing, the way I really got the publicity, a week before the program, this guy named Jack O’Brian in a right-wing paper said that WBAI was having a six-man or something panel discussing homosexuality, and, “These card-carrying swish,” that’s me, changed the letters to WSICK. So I took that clipping a week ahead of time, and I went in person. I remember, it’s so funny, I went to The New York Times, and what they did, which I’ve never had this experience since, a reporter came out, and first the old man at the counter reads my card and says, “Does this card mean what it says?” And then of course, what else would my card, you know what I mean? So he calls the news desk, and the guy comes out, and he takes me into this closet. Now, the closet’s about, easily roomy for two people to be in, but like a larger closet. And I give him the whole spiel about what we’re doing, and that was all that happened there. And the other places, I went to Newsweek, I went to Variety, I went to every paper in the country.
JM: To make sure that they’d be listening and would cover this.
RW: I knew that this was a breakthrough. I didn’t realize how big a breakthrough, because that paved the way for everything else.
JM: To have the FCC change their rules to allow more of this, it’s huge.
RW: They didn’t change the rules, because they simply interpreted the rules. The general opinion was that this was too hot an issue to touch.
JM: Oh, sorry, so they clarified the rules to say, “Actually, you—”
RW: They sort of gave a ruling on the issue.
JM: You started doing a lot of media appearances after this. Did you feel comfortable doing all that press and being so visible a gay person in the ’60s?
RW: It was exciting. I went to City College and you had three or four hundred kids show up, because no one had ever seen a homosexual before. I could see some pretty little queens sitting in the first row. But this is why you won’t hear much about me in the old, proper books on gay history. I’m the bad boy of the gay movement. Politically, I moved from being a Democratic Socialist who supported Castro, literally up until the point that he started putting homosexuals in jail, that was the biggest wake-up in my life, that was not what I was. So I say I was a Democratic Socialist and rolled liberal, then I became a Democrat, a liberal Democrat.
And then I got in the business selling protest buttons, I made a lot of money. I very much believe in self-employment, that’s what made me free, to be self-employed. And it’s very important that I created, once I knew how to run a retail business, I switched from buttons to antiques, to ended up in art deco lighting. But still, I had the power to hire people, and that included AIDS activists that were perfectly healthy. They couldn’t work on the books, because if they did they’d lose their Medicaid, and they wouldn’t get the medical treatment and stuff that they needed. And I hired people like Sylvia Rivera.
JM: In 1966 you were part of the sip-in at Julius’, which was a famous sip-in protesting the laws that said the bars couldn’t serve homosexuals.
RW: The bar had already had one violation, because it was under new ownership, and it wasn’t the right to drink, it was freedom of assembly, because you could not have people that were homosexual, you couldn’t serve them alcohol, or you couldn’t allow them to gather on your premises.
JM: You know, in all the descriptions of that day, they mention the other three guys, Dick Leitsch, Craig Rodwell, John Timmons, and then it always says that Randy Wicker joined them later. Can I ask, why you were late?
RW: At one point they were saying that I was very late, but I joined them on 8th Street. They went to the Ukrainian, to the Ukrainian Center, knew they were gonna pull this on them, and it was closed.
JM: They shut down that day?
RW: Shut down. So they came over to the West Village. I met them on 8th Street, and finally, desperately looking, now we have three people that are demanding service, and I was one of the two legal witnesses. So we were a group of five people looking to be refused service. And we knew that Julius’ was one place where they would do this, because they’d already had one incident, and if they got another arrest it would mean they’d have to start paying off the cops like any other gay bar. Julius’ was never a gay bar. It was a, I don’t want, how can I knock the place that really is one of my claims to fame?
JM: You can say it.
RW: It was just a boring neighborhood bar filled with neighborhood people that stopped in on the way home from work. And yes, maybe half of them, it was more like 50/50. A lot of gays were involved because it was a very gay neighborhood.
JM: Gays liked going there, but it was not a gay bar explicitly.
RW: Right. It was a neighborhood bar.
JM: One of the reasons why the Julius’ sip-in is so famous is that the resulting lawsuit went to the state Supreme Court, and they said, “Actually, you cannot deny service to homosexuals in bars.”
The victory was such a big rule change for bars, what was the reaction at the time?
RW: I’ll tell you what really made the difference, is that after Stonewall, activists like GAA [Gay Activists Alliance] were taking politicians into places like Uncle Charlie’s, which was a privately owned, legitimate gay bar on the East Side. There were two or three around town. And the politicians found out, “Hey, there’s a place I can go in, there’s a specialized group of people that I might be able to get interested in voting for me.” And that’s what really the legalization of gay bars did, it gave us the possibility of becoming a political force.
JM: We’re sitting here in your apartment surrounded by pictures of Marsha P. Johnson, who lived here.
RW: Lived here with me for over a decade. There was a boy who I’d seen and I told him I had a shop in the Village, and he said, “Oh, I go to the Village all the time, I hang out with Marsha.” I said, “I don’t think Marsha’s the kind of person you should be hanging out with, Willie,” you know, my impression.
So I had an extra room, and she ended up moving in here. And he says to me one night, “It’s 10 degrees out and Marsha has nowhere to sleep, could she come here? Could she sleep on the floor in the living room?” And it was this living room. And I said, “Well, would she steal from me?” He said, “Oh, no, Marsha would never steal from you.” And then I’m thinking, “Willie, I know that you’re not a thief, why would you tell me this lie, that Marsha likes to sleep on the floor? It doesn’t make sense, right?”
And she came in that night. Turned out she did like to sleep on the floor, ’cause she’d been shot in the back and had a bullet lodged near her spine that acted up when it was damp. And also, she liked to sleep on a hard floor or a hard surface, because sleeping on a soft bed or something would cause her back to act up on her often. And she came in that night, and she was here for over a decade after that. She couldn’t come and go in drag.
JM: Why not?
RW: Because I am on the 10th floor of a 25-story building, and this is Hoboken, this is a small town, it was an even smaller town then. So she’d get on the PATH, and she’d be wearing this leather jacket, and the jacket would come off, and the dress would drop, and then she would get out some, throw on the wig.
And by the time she went from Hoboken to Christopher Street she would have transformed from male to female, except for the fact she had these huge shoes that were construction. She had big feet, so she didn’t have women’s shoes that fit her. And she would go out and panhandle. After she’d been here a while it got to where she’d go in my store and use my store to put the flowers in her hair. She’d have only 10 bucks, “Go buy a big bouquet of flowers.” I said, “Marsha, you bought those flowers, what a waste of money, you only have $10 for the weekend.” She said, “Oh, Mr. Wicker, these flowers are gonna make me a lot of money.” And she’d put a hairdo of flowers together, she’d go out, and she’d panhandle, she’d get enough for a meal, say six, eight, $10 or something, meet some queen on the street, say, “How are you doing?” “Not too good, Miss Marsha, I haven’t been turning any tricks, nothing happening today.” And Marsha’d give her all the money, she’d panhandle, go back to panhandle some more. “Have some spare change for a starving actress or a dying queen?” She’d have two lines, depended on what the day was, I guess.
JM: Wow. I mean, with Marsha and also Sylvia Rivera, who also lived here, the two of them, I can see their faces around us.
RW: Sylvia Rivera, I met at Marsha’s funeral. We were archenemies, I didn’t like her, she was loud and obnoxious, and down at GAA meetings and all, she was a pain in the neck in those days. And at Marsha’s funeral I said, “We have to bury the hatchet today, for Marsha.” And we commenced speaking, and she was living on a gay pier, which was separate from another pier that had a mixture of drug addicts and crackheads and all that, but the gay pier, they were all alcoholics.
JM: And with Marsha and Sylvia, who both lived here for many years, they were beginning to be forgotten to history. But now today their names mean something, they are the symbols of the trans community worldwide.
RW: I’m behind that.
JM: Really?
RW: Partially.
JM: Yeah, I was gonna wonder, when did that start happening?
RW: That happened in 2012. I got a phone call from Michael Kasino, he said, “I have this interview with Marsha, this tape is just dying on the shelf, I’m gonna finish it up in the next two or three days, I just wanna put it out there.” And I said, “Oh,” I said, “I have all sorts of leads and things I can tell you,” because, through the leads that I gave him, some of them are still there. And so he took the interview with Marsha and spliced in all this stuff, and at some point I said, “What are you gonna do with this?” And finally we had an opening at IFC, and I sat there hearing that audience begin to laugh, and I began to cry, and they called us up afterwards and said, “Was Marsha P. Johnson a saint?” And I said, “She was a saint.”
JM: And so that was the turning point when she started to be remembered?
RW: The movie, Pay It No Mind, on YouTube.
JM: With her becoming this worldwide symbol, Marsha, how do you think she would’ve reacted to that?
RW: She would have thought it was a real hoot. She would’ve laughed. It’s so funny, because she absolutely deserved all the praise that she gets. Everyone said she was the poorest person they knew and the happiest person they knew. I gave her a big brooch, it was like a $50 deco brooch, but it was missing a stone or two, so I got it for like five bucks or something, 10 bucks. I’d give it to Marsha, Marsha’d wear it out, and some little queen would say, “Oh, Marsha, that brooch is so beautiful.” “Oh, you like it?” And she’d just give it away.
I bought her a fur coat, a rabbit fur coat once, and she wore it out, some queen said, “Oh, that fur coat is so cute.” Rabbit, and really it was a coat that was worth 100, $150 or something, she gave it away. The only thing she liked was this one ratty, decayed fur coat, mink fur coat, and she endlessly sewed on it, and it was endlessly tearing. And finally the police tore it off her back one, some cold night out on the West Side Highway, that’s finally the way it met its end.
JM: Was she a good roommate?
RW: Oh, she was wonderful. I was once sitting here very depressed, because a friend told me his family was, was living with me, he was sort of my mistress while my lover was dying of AIDS, and he was my decorator, he worked in the store, very close to Marsha too. And he told me I was gonna be invited to Thanksgiving dinner, so I’d got all these crumb cakes and all, but they never called to invite me, and I was really feeling depressed. And I was sitting here, like literally right in this location, and Marsha walked over and she said, “Jesus loves me. How do I know? Because the Bible tells me so.” And I went from being in the pits to laughing my head off. I never had such an uplifting, it was like I was in a moonshot or something.
JM: So she did that to make you laugh.
RW: Yes. She had a way of reading people and knowing, she was so incisive, and she was the greatest blessing in my life.
JM: When you were fighting for gay civil rights and the movement, when did you see the movement start to expand to include trans people?
RW: Oh. Well, Sylvia, she was calling people from Delaware and Philadelphia and Boston, saying she was gonna have a march specifically for trans rights.
JM: What year was this?
RW: What year was this? That was around 1998 or ‘9. So she actually, and she pulled it off. It was about 150 people showed up. They marched down Broadway to Foley Square. I had to take a cab to catch up with them. So I went with her on that march. Yeah, she called herself a revolutionary.
JM: We often talk about how fast things have changed in the country for LGBTQ people. Has it felt fast to you?
RW: At one point, I tell you where it felt the fastest, was how quickly gay marriage, because back in the beginning…early activists said “We don’t wanna be discussing gay marriage,” because we don’t want to be cookie-cutter homosexual, heterosexuals. We’re gonna create our own institutions, we’re gonna create our own mores and whatever. But that changed very slowly, because the assimilationists, what it really boiled down to is are you willing to accept the rules, the general guidelines of our society, and behave like other civilized people? And if you do, we’ll cut you a fair deal and include you in our society. And that’s what happened.
Click here to listen to the full interview on the LGBTQ&A podcast.
LGBTQ&A features interviews with the most interesting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the world. Hosted and produced by Jeffrey Masters. @jeffmasters1
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