Lucian the K

In one of my recent A-V Club reviews, I said some rude things about the state of documentary filmmaking on PBS, so I thought I'd mention that I enjoyed and learned some things from the latest episode of American Experience, "Stonewall Rising", the title of which refers to the 1969 riot set off by an unscheduled police bust of a New York gay bar. (I wrote "unscheduled" because the bar, like most gay bars in the city at the time, was Mafia-owned, and the cops usually gave such places a heads-up in advance of any harassment so as to stay on good terms with whoever was giving them their payoffs.) The headline event doesn't start to happen until about two-thirds into the film, much of which is devoted to setting the scene by describing the repressive atmosphere in which gays were then expected to live, with the use of interviews and clips from old propaganda reels such as this:




Besides gays and cops (and movie critic and People's Court star Ed Koch, who at the time was getting his political career rolling as a representative of the forces of institutional gay-bashing in the name of family values), the interview subjects include two old Village Voice writers: Howard Smith, whose account of observing the action up close is vivid, stirring, and funny, and a fellow whose byline I remember from my earliest days as a compulsive over-consumer of print culture, a journalist and author of the popular bad novel Dress Grey. Here, he takes credit, sort of, for a breakthrough in gay rights coverage at the Voice. It seems that he wrote one of the first articles on Stonewall, and in that article he used the word "faggotry." (A close-up of the first few paragraphs of his article included in the film shows that he also referred to the events of that night as "a fairy tale.") The ensuing protests led to a change in policy at the paper, and henceforth homosexuals were referred to as "gays" in its pages.

The writer in question used to go by the unforgettable handle "Lucian K. Truscott IV", which always stuck me as the quietest and most efficient way of basically appearing in main street at lunch hour dressed only in a cardboard Burger King crown and a pair of underpants with the word "DOUCHE" sewn in gold thread on the crotch and ass, chanting, "I am Lord Douchey Von Douchington from the planet Douche, look on my douchiness all ye douches, and despair, douchily!" It's good to know that I hadn't judged him too harshly. According to American Experience, he's now content to be known as "Lucian Truscott IV"; he's dropped the "K." Baby steps! Coming up on American Experience, on May 16, a new look at the Freedom Writers who journeyed South to protest racial segregation in 1961. Here's hoping that Lucian Truscott IV will be invited on to reminisce about his coverage of those great days. "Today, Martin Luther King, Jr., as hungry for social justice as he has ever been for fried chicken and watermelon, raised his arm and chucked his spear into the heart of racial injustice..."