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Loading ...Stonewall: Forty years later
It was 1969, on a hot New York City summer night – the hottest June night in history. The police had just raided one of the only places in New York City where same-sex couples could dance together, a crappy Mafia club with watered-down booze and a sideline in blackmail.
The cops didn’t expect any resistance at all. It’s not like this was the first time they’d raided a gay club or even this particular club; this was their second raid on the Stonewall Inn that week. Their normal procedure was to check IDs, make a few token arrests, and send people whose gender they weren’t certain of into the restroom for examination by a policewoman.No one ever objected or resisted, and the lucky ones who were allowed to leave got out of the area as quickly as they could, grateful not to have been arrested.
But not that night.
June 28, 1969 was the night the patrons of the Stonewall Inn didn’t just get quietly in the police trucks or slink in grateful silence into the shadows. They gathered on the Greenwich Village streets outside the bar, attracting dozens and then hundreds of onlookers from the neighborhood, along with a couple of reporters from the nearby offices of the Village Voice.
Who threw the first brick or bottle, and why, is something we’ll never know. There are, after all, about as many accounts of what happened at Stonewall as there are people who were there.
Over time, it’s all become a tangle of history, myth and apocrypha that’s hard to unravel, although David Carter’s book Stonewall: The riots that sparked the gay revolution (St. Martin’s Press, 2004) finally compiled dozens of oral and written descriptions, giving us the first well-documented and cohesive account of the chronology of that night.
The basic outline Carter gives is this: The New York City police frequently raided the city’s gay bars, with the cooperation of most city politicians, including Mayor John Lindsay.
The bars, which were almost all owned by members of the Mafia, usually had advance notice of the raids, mostly because they paid off local cops. The people who didn’t get any warning, of course, were the bars’ patrons, many of whom found their lives destroyed either by being arrested, by their homosexuality becoming public, or, if they were wealthy or prominent, by Mafia blackmail.
The Stonewall Inn’s clientele included just about everyone who frequented Greenwich’s Village’s Bohemian streets, shops, and restaurants. Dancing and drinking in its two rooms were gay men of color, white gay men, hippies, Wall Street businessmen, hustlers, under-aged guys with fake IDs, and a huge variety of gender transgressors including very butch dykes, cross-dressers (illegal in New York at the time unless you were wearing a minimum of three “gender-appropriate” garments), transsexuals, drag queens, and effeminate men.
Once the raid was under way, the police noticed that the people they were arresting were acting much feistier than usual. Quite a few actually got away from the cops. There’s one account, possibly apocryphal, of a butch dyke being wrestled into a police car in handcuffs, angrily asking the men in the crowd why they weren’t doing anything.
People who were there describe men doing a Rockettes kick line while taunting the police, and pretty soon, bottles and bricks were being lobbed at the cops.
NEXT PAGE: A new phrase appeared: Gay Power!
I remember Stonewall vividly! I was living in the New York suburbs at the time, and the TV coverage from the local channels was extensive. I recall one guy leaning out of the police paddy wagon and yelling “The only reason I’m being arrested is because I am gay.” It was the first time I had heard the term “gay” to mean homosexual. I also remember thinking, there but for the grace of God go I. We’ve come a long way since then, for sure.
Me too.
I was 12 years old in ‘69. I saw the news reports and it was the beginning of my life-long rant on equal protection under the law.
I took the train from Bay Shore to the city every chance I could get away to join demonstrations and meetings.
Just an ugly fat pizza-faced too-big-for-my-age kid that passed, sometimes, for over 18 easily.
I learned how to negotiate law library stacks and participated in three–count ‘em!!!—three of the demonstrations, one of which was just an umbrella civil rights demo.
I’ve been angry and fighting ever since.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but dis·sen·sion [ di sénshən ] noun
Definition:
disagreement: disagreement or difference of opinion, especially when leading to open conflict
is the Father.
Without that anger. Without that realization and conviction that something is WRONG and the drive to change or correct that wrongness, there is no feeling of necessity to change.
So, folks, don’t be afraid of feeling that righteous anger. Just use it.
Thank all of you wonderful folks that finally had enough that night. We owe you all so much.
I am always reminded at this time of year just how important the Drag Queens, Transvestites and X-dressers were to the birth of the Gay Movement.
These people have been marginalized within our own community…. they still are…. at this time of year, perhaps we should be doing some housekeeping.
Perhaps the Gay Community should rethink how we treat one another.
An excellent article on the Stonewall riots can be found at the Wikipedia site below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
This article should be mandatory reading for all gays and lesbians concerning our history and the role that transsexuals, transvestites, and lesbians played in the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.
I would like to add my thanks to those who were there that night for standing up and acting up. I hope we honor that moment by acting up again….soon.
Finely, an article about Stonewall that recognizes the struggle for equal rights was already in progress.
The first public gay rights organization in the U.S. was the Society for Human Rights (SHR) in 1924, organized by Henry Gerber, who was soon arrested. Organization attempts continued and the Mattachine Society emerged in 1950, followed by Daughters of Bilitis organized by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon (the first couple married in California) in San Francisco in 1955. In August of 1966, the Compton Cafeteria riot in San Francisco, helped set the precedent for Stonewall. By 1969 gay and lesbian organizations existed all over the country. Stonewall was an important milestone because it was the first time the national media paid attention, but it was not the birth of the gay equal rights movement in the U.S. Thanks to all who made it happen, but the hard work and sacrifice of those who preceded Stonewall should not be forgotten either.
My comment is along the lines of Debra’s. I’m 24, I wasn’t even a tickle in my Dad’s…well yeah. I think my Mom was like 6…anyway, I wasn’t alive to have witnessed the riot, but do thank and appreciate that it happened. I remember when I first heard about Stonewall and what it was was from my older boyfriend at the time and felt incluned to read up on the subject. How shocking and disgusting it was to read about the plight of our community prior to and during the Stonewall era.
I wish I’d be at home in CT for NYC pride, but I’ll be in VA then.
It is time for another riot, or demonstration, or whatever.
I’ll be in DC on 10/11, in which Cleve Jones has called for a March on Equality in DC on National Coming-out Day. I’ll be there, and so should you. Make our voices heard. We haven’t gone anywhere in 40+ years, and we’re not going anywhere now. Our masses of people only increase every day, as people have less and less fear of who they are and are encouraged and supported to come out, and be true to you and only you.
We’re Here, We’re Queer, and bet your sweet ass we’ll fight for our rights.
REMEMBER: OCTOBER 11, 2009; Washington D.C. – March on EQUALITY!
I really loved this article. I loved it so much that I made a link for it on my blog on Tumblr. I am 17 years old, and in my lgbt community, where I live in Queens, New York, not a lot of people know that this went on at all, and it’s a shame, really. I want to push learning about this in public schools, because the more education there is about it, the more there won’t be any prejudice, because they’ll see that it compares to the Black Civil Rights movement. It also ties into todays politics, with Prop 8, and legalization of gay marriage. So yeah, this should be taught in schools it is a part of our history.
If you were an adult, employed, and living outside NY and maybe one or two other places, likely as not you just wished at the time that the “riot” hadn’t happened. It drew attention toward gay or lesbian people in a tightly closeted world; the last thing many of us wanted was more attention. It had begun to change five years later and by the tenth anniversary, the door on the closet had opened wider, but real change didn’t come until the 1990s. Stonewall was a beginning, but it took the country quite a while to catch up.
>…but real change didn’t come until the 1990s.
Don’t sell the seventies and eighties (my era as a young adult) short. A whole body of literature was born in the late seventies with Holleran, White, Maupin, and more. You might think, “So, what? They’re just books.” But them meant the *world* to me coming out in 1982. Reading a small bookshelf of all those books was practically like “going to school” for understanding and participating in gay male culture.
One of the odd side effects of the AIDS epidemic was that straights got to see committed and loving gay people caring for their partners. The fighting for AIDS funding, against a Moral Majority backlash, and for state-wide anti-discrimination laws took place in the eighties (MA finally got its anti-discrimination law in 1989). I remember protesting for foster care rights in the eighties in MA. I was also part of an effort to bring LBGT issues into the diversity program of a Fortune 500 company at that time (the now defunct Digital Equipment Corporation).
Progress didn’t stall between the Stonewall riots and the nineties.
I turned 18 in late 1961. I had false ID to show I was 18 just to get into the bars prior. I remember the mayoral elections of 1964. Prior the election night in November, they city government went around on what was called a city wide clean up. They closed gay bar
after gay bar. We had no place to go except on the streets. The Village streets got real busy those nights. When the elections were finally over, I understand that many straight businesses pleaded to Mayor Lindsey to please allow the gay bars to open again and “get these queens off the street”.
I stayed in New York until 1966. I had a little apartment in an old brownstone on Hicks Street in Heights. I remember cruisin’ the Promenade, even on those cold winter nights. The week of the Stonewall riots, I was working as a male dancer with a drag show in Atlantic City, at the Fort Pitt on New York Ave. and the Boardwalk One night the bar
and show people were arrested for having men wearing women’s clothes. After they got us all out of jail, the show went right back on. The drags got real creative and wore mens clothes and the “Show Must Go On!” After that somebody in the AC government heard
about the Stonewall Riots and didn’t want that in their city, so we were never harassed again.
Wasn’t it the night following Judy Garland’s funeral? The death of our first big ‘diva’ coupled with the injustice and someone not in the mood to be hassled. One night. That one night. If the raids had been held off for that weekend, the ‘beginning’ of the gay rights movement would have been delayed, perhaps by decades. It is our Rosa Parks incident. It’s our bus boycott. It wasn’t the first incident of gays demanding rights, but it was the biggest in the media age up to that point.
Judy Garland was found dead in her London apartment June 22, 1969. A National Gay Day of Mourning. I remember hearing the news and thought was very saddening.
So much is owed to so many who sacrificed , fought , lobbied , and gave their all ( and sometimes their lives), to achieve what we have today. I am so very grateful. And yes , we have a long way to go , but I agree with the support for using one’s anger to push constructiveluy for change. I do not believe we have been given anything by the powers that be, They have simply and finally ; acknowledged what was ours to begin with.
I am old enough to remember when you were warned at the door of a gay bar in Hollywood not to touch anyone because “they are here.” Touch and you could be arrested for soliciting by an LAPD vice officer. The result would most often be arrest, trial, and forced to register as a sex offender. And one wonders why it is so hard for other who have not had that experience not to understand why it is so easy to be furious at the comments which come from the Christian Taliban and those who allow themselves to be influenced by their bigotry and hypocrisy.