BY TIM GAY | We could have died in a spray of Uzi bullets. I was running late, but Glen Martin was already there drinking a beer.
Glen called from a pay phone as I was leaving my apartment. He was yelling with sirens in the background.
“Thank God, you’re still home… . Don’t come down here… . They shot up the place with a machine gun… . Bullets came through the door and windows… . There’s blood everywhere… . I saw Jörg bleeding on the sidewalk… . I think they killed him… . I don’t know how many more… .”
Glen and I were 25. We were meeting at the Ramrod at midnight to begin his 26th birthday celebration.
Three men died and six more were injured when the son of a preacher went on a rampage with an Uzi and automatic handguns in front of the Ramrod on the West Side Highway. It was Wed., Nov. 19, 1980, a week before Thanksgiving.
I ran down anyway. The police had blocked off the area. A number of gay men gathered on Christopher St. Rumors were that more men were shot on West St. We had no idea how many gunmen there were. Maybe it was a mafia payoff revenge? Could one of the teenage thugs from Carmine St. had gotten a gun and was proving his manhood?
It turned out the killer was the son of a Christian preacher, a married father with two kids, a man with a history of drug and alcohol addiction. Ronald Crumpley also claimed his thoughts were being haunted by homosexual ghosts.
Reverend Crumpley had counseled his homophobic son a couple of days earlier that maybe he “had a homosexual problem himself.”
So the son stole his dad’s car, drove through the night to Virginia, robbed a gun store, returned to New York with the two semiautomatic pistols, a .357 magnum revolver and the Uzi.
If he had known how to fire semiautomatic assault weapons, Ronald Crumpley could have killed 100 or more men.
I’m 61 now, and 36 years later, the violence continues.
This time it’s 49 dead, plus dozens more victims seriously injured. This time, though, the nation and the world is in shock. In 1980, the Ramrod shooting was barely mentioned in the local news sections of the daily papers.
Orlando is a travesty that might have been avoided with serious gun restrictions.
But the root cause is not immigration, F.B.I. checks, ISIL cells or the Muslim faith.
It is more universal. This violence is fueled by faith-based homophobia.
As more is revealed, Omar Mateen was leading two lives. One was as a religious married father who took his son to prayer services. The other was as a single man — gay, bisexual, questioning? — who over the years traveled more than 100 miles to enjoy our hard-fought rights to dance and commune freely.
Ronald Crumpley and Omar Mateen were both closet cases whose internal homophobia caused them to kill those who lived freely.
What made my husband and me cry was the reading of the names — most were in their 20s and 30s, young women and men, Latinos, Latinas, African American, Asian, white, multiracial, gay, who may have been straight, bi, gay, transgender, fluid, whatever.
Yet we are moved and given hope. Up here in the Catskill Mountains, more than 100 people gathered Sunday night at the corner of Wall and Front Sts. in uptown Kingston, with flowers and candles for the Orlando victims and survivors.
And on Monday, the L.G.B.T.Q. Center here in Ulster County opened its doors and windows as more than 250 people gathered inside and on the sidewalk to remember those we had never met.
Among the tributes was a sing-along to a song by Holly Near, one of the first openly lesbian performers in the ’70s.
Beginning with one singer, we all joined in with, “We are a gentle, angry people, singing, singing for our lives… .”
My husband, Bob Gibbons, was at Stonewall the day after, June 29, 1969. We were both helping those with AIDS before it was named. And although we didn’t know it, we were both with hundreds of other gay men and lesbians for a memorial at the Ramrod on Thurs., Nov. 20, 1980.
I looked up the names of those who died on Nov. 19, 1980. They were young and barely legal — Vernon Kroening, age 24; Rene Malute, age 23; and Jörg Wenz, age 21.
Glen and I knew Jörg. He was a 6-foot-6-inch sinewy blond German, with size 13 boots. Jörg worked at the Ramrod as the door guard, admitting men wearing proper leather and jeans gear, and keeping watch for the fag bashers.
Jörg’s photo was on the boarded Ramrod door the night we left the flowers. Thirty-six years later, the roses we left for the Orlando victims and survivors were also placed for Jörg — and Vernon and Rene too.
Gay was the Democratic district leader in Chelsea from 1992 to 2005. Tim and his husband, Bob Gibbons, live in the Catskill Forest somewhere west of Woodstock and Mombaccus Mountain.
