The History of Pride, Part II: Mars and Police Violence

For Pride month this year I’m breaking down the history and the astrology of Stonewall. If you’ve been following me for awhile you know that I’ve covered Stonewall before and recently in an episode with Chris Brennan on The Astrology Podcast, I made an argument for Stonewall’s connection to the cycle of Venus Retrograde in Aries. However, since that episode is six hours long and full of tons of information, I wanted to make sure that this important history doesn't get lost. Each week, I’ll release a new blog post on the months leading up to the Stonewall Uprising and the story that unfolded - so be sure to follow along! As the government continues to make life more dangerous for queer and trans people, including by trying to erase our histories from the internet, I hope this series will add to the chorus of voices who are demanding safety and autonomy for all queer and trans people and ensure that this critical history is not lost.

CW: This week's post talks about a number of instances of violence against queer people and in particular police violence.

Mars

Last week we talked about Leo Laurence, Gale Whittington, the Committee For Homosexual Freedom, and the Venus Retrograde that accompanied their pickets. This week we're talking about another planet's retrograde cycle: Mars. Mars is the other key player astrologically in the story of Stonewall.

Mars is the planet that severs and fights. Mars can certainly be violent but it also shows us the things we are either willing to or forced to fight for. During the spring and summer of 1969, Mars went retrograde in the sign of Sagittarius. Mars’s retrograde story is linked in to Venus’s retrograde story because Venus went retrograde in Aries, one of Mars’s home signs. Where the Venus retrograde told the story of newfound bravery around queerness, Mars gave the impetus to fight for it. Mars first entered Sagittarius on February 24, 1969 and because of its retrograde it wouldn’t leave the sign until September 20, 1969. Mars was retrograde from April 27 at 16° Sag until it turned direct at 1° Sag on July 7th, in a direct opposition to Venus at 1° Gemini. The stories of Venus and Mars retrograde were very interwoven in 1969 by way of Mars’s rulership of Venus in Aries and because of their whole sign trine, with two exact hits on April 13th and May 15th.

Last week, we talked about the Committee for Homosexual Freedom (CHF) and the pickets they held in protest of Gale Whittington losing his job but job security was not the only concern that CHF had. There was also the very real threat of entrapment, police violence, and other anti-queer bashing. There were a number of instances of fatal violence that occurred in the Spring of 1969. While this violence was not new, history professor Marc Stein suggested that the inauguration of Richard Nixon in January 1969 emboldened police to “crush the radicalizing political movements that threatened the existing social order” putting queer people and those perceived to be queer at much greater risk.^[1]

Police Entrapment

Just after midnight on March 9, 1969, Los Angeles police arrived at the Dover Hotel to perform an anti-gay vice raid. During this raid they severely beat and killed 37 year old nurse Howard Efland, also known as Jack McCann. Despite multiple eyewitness accounts of the police brutality, a jury ruled in April that this was an “excusable homicide” because the victim had “resisted” arrest.

While I am hesitant to look at charts here as I don’t want to “astrologize” violence, I do think its important to see the thread that Mars and Venus pull through this story in order to understand what was happening and be able to use astrology to protect our community better.

If we look to the chart of midnight on March 9, 1969, we can see that Mars was rising on the ascendant in early Sagittarius. Mars on the ascendant can be an indication of violence. Jupiter, the ascendant ruler, was retrograde in Libra. Jupiter can signify the lawmakers and Libra is the sign of the scales of justice. Jupiter being retrograde here indicates reversals in justice and certainly this was an unjust murder and the lack of legal accountability the police officers faced gave the green light for further violence. When Efland was murdered, Venus (the planet the rules Libra) was coming off its first conjunction to Saturn and preparing to station retrograde just 9 days later. By the time the jury met on April 4, 1969, Venus would be solidly retrograde. Venus conjunct Saturn and stationing retrograde further indicates these blocks to justice. Worth noting that on both dates, March 9 and April 4, the Moon was in Scorpio, fallen, and ruled by Mars.

Just a few weeks later on April 17, an undercover police officer killed 33 year old Frank Bartley in Berkeley, California at a well known cruising site. The officer had attempted to entrap Bartley and shot him when he fled. Again, no charges were brought against the police officer because Bartley was “resisting” arrest. While we don’t have a time for Bartley’s murder, we do know it was in the evening on April 17, when Scorpio or Sagittarius would have been rising,^[2] meaning Mars was either the Ascendant ruler or in the sign of the ascendant.

Bartley had been a member of SIR (the Society for Individual Rights), the homophile organization that ran Vector (the magazine that Leo Laurence briefly edited). Following his murder, both SIR and CHF turned their attention to protesting police violence.

On April 25, 1969, SIR, CHF, Council for Religion and the Homosexual, and their supporters held a news conference outside the Glide Methodist Church and a mock funeral ceremony. At noon, they held a funeral motorcade from the church to the Berkeley Police station. In an interview given to the Berkeley Barb, Leo Laurence said “Berkeley gays had better wake up before it's too late…Gays must respond with the same militancy that the black community showed when it fought back against the killings of Bobby Hutton, George Baskett and Joey Linthcome”^[3] At the same time as this funeral protest, the CHF’s daily picket continued outside the States Steamship Company and the energy there was growing more militant as well.

On the States Steamship picket line, Charles Thorpe, as member of CHF said "We will take our freedom…We will burn our faces with tears and cover our hands with blood, but we will get our freedom as homosexuals. We will fight until our bodies no longer give blood, 'til we no longer exist, or until we can freely grow to our capacities without intervention by this murderous society. WE WILL FIGHT TIL WE ARE FREE.”^[4] Gale Whittington called on the Black power movement and Anti-War movement to join them in protest, making connections to anti-Black racism at States Steamship and the Company’s role in supplying weapons to the War on Vietnam.^[5] We can here see the gathering of people from different groups who are pissed off about the shared oppression that they face. In the episode I did on the Astrology Podcast, I made the argument that Venus retrogrades in Aries are moments where the connections between different groups of oppressed people become very obvious and become a site for coalition building and resistance. Its clear that the CHF was drawing connections between their struggle and the struggles against racism and imperialism and the struggles between job security and state violence.

The energy of this day was so potent because this was the week where Venus would hand off being retrograde to Mars. Mars would station retrograde on April 27 and Venus would station direct on April 29. The very real violence and oppression that came to a head during the Venus retrograde in Mars’ sign was causing people to note the impunity that police officers had in their anti-queer raids, as well as the connections between anti-queer and anti-Black state violence. Mars slowing down to station was making it feel all the more urgent to fight back.

The chart for the political funeral shows the Moon on the Ascendant in Leo. The Moon is separating from a trine to Venus and applying to trine Mars. The Moon moving from Venus to Mars mimics this retrograde hand off. In a supportive trine to both, the Moon is able to take the harms done to queer people under the Venus retrograde and share that with Mars who is very ready to fight back. This being a Leo rising chart with the Sun in Taurus in the 10th shows a visible, performance protest and of course this Sun is ruled by Venus in Aries - bringing us right back to the reason they were protesting.

A few months later, on June 18, just over a week before Stonewall, there was a third police killing in California. Philip Caplan, was murdered by police while visiting family in Oakland, California. Police accused him of lewd behavior in a public toilet. Caplan’s story garnered attention because Caplan was presumed straight and was taking a medication that caused him to need to urinate frequently. Despite this, the police officers were not indicted on charges in this instance either. His story showed how anti-queer violence puts everyone at risk.

New York

While these moments of police violence occurred on the West Coast, the information made its way to New York by way of news coverage. The Berkeley Barb reported weekly on the CHF pickets and also covered Bartley’s death. The Mattachine Society of New York reported on the police bathhouse raids in their April Newsletter and their June newsletter included an article titled “Grim Reapings - Coast to Coast” which reported on these West Coast police murders as well the unsolved murder of a young man near the Christopher Street docks, a popular cruising spot in New York. The young man's body was found on April 3, 1969. Mattachine also reported that a New York police officer who killed two gay men in September 1968 was absolved of wrongdoing in April 1969. So the hundreds of readers of the Newsletter would have been informed about both local and national examples of police violence.

This time period of Spring 1969, in particular March/April, was clearly a very dangerous time to be queer. While it had not been safe to be queer before this Venus/Mars retrograde, people were paying attention and getting organized around it during this time.

Next week we’ll take a look at the chart for Stonewall and break down how these mounting tensions finally erupted on the night of June 28, 1969.

Footnotes:

1. https://www.oah.org/process/stein-stonewall/
2. Scorpio was rising from 6:53 PM and Sagittarius wouldn't complete its rise until 11:42 PM.
3. https://revolution.berkeley.edu/assets/Berkeley-Barb-Volume-8-issue-17193-April-25-May-1-1969-7.-.pdf ↩︎
4. ibid.
5. ibid.