Dick Leitsch

Gay activist whose ‘sip-in’ laid the groundwork for Stonewall

Dick Leitsch, who in 1966 led a pioneering act of civil disobedience to secure the right of US gay patrons to be served in a licensed bar, helping to clear the way for gay pubs to operate openly in New York state, died from liver cancer last Friday at a hospice in New York City. He was 83.

Leitsch was one of the first leaders of the Mattachine Society, an early defender of gay rights when homosexuality was mostly underground and even a small protest took courage. He called his action a “sip-in,” and likened it to sitins by black protesters at segregated lunch counters in the South during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Three years before the Stonewall Inn uprising accelerated the gay rights movement in America, Leitsch challenged the common practice of bars’ serving gay customers under a no-questions-asked arrangement necessitated by an unwritten State Liquor Authority policy that regarded homosexuals as inherently “disorderly”. Bars that knowingly served them could have their liquor licenses revoked.

The policy, supported by no law and apparently unconstitutional because it precluded the right to free assembly, led to charades by gay men and lesbians. They would avoid affectionate touching or dancing with one another or any other conduct that might be interpreted as “queer”. Bartenders looked the other way and poured the gin.

On 21 April 1966, Leitsch and three friends, Craig Rodwell, John Timmons and Randy Wicker, accompanied by a New York Times reporter and a Village Voice photographer, staged the “sip-in” at Julius’, a bar in Greenwich Village. The bar had been serving a gay clientele since the 1950s. A clergyman had just been arrested there on charges of soliciting sex, and a sign said: “This is a raided premises.” As the four stood at the bar in suits and ties, a bartender set up glasses and asked, “What’ll you have?”

“We are homosexuals,” Leitsch announced. “We are orderly, we intend to remain orderly, and we are asking for service.” The barman clapped his hand over Leitsch’s glass – a signal moment captured by the photographer – and refused to serve them. “I think it’s the law,” the bartender said.

The NYT published an account the next day: “3 Deviates Invite Exclusion by Bars.” The Mattachine Society, citing the events at Julius’, said it would sue the State Liquor Authority to overturn the policy that prohibited bars from knowingly serving alcoholic beverages to gays on grounds that they were inherently “disorderly”.

The liquor authority promptly denied such a policy existed,