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Loading ...Stonewall: Forty years later
The police barricaded themselves inside the bar, the crowd almost overturned their vehicles, fires were set, the streets were blocked, and violence and vandalism continued off and on for several days afterward.
And through it all, a phrase that almost no one had ever heard or even uttered was shouted, chanted, and spray-painted all over Greenwich Village: Gay power!
In the weeks and months that followed, thousands of new gay rights organizations sprung up all over the country, many of them in New York City. Angry and energized gay activists, trained in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the mid-60s, began to organize, agitate, and demonstrate. And all that noise meant the newly-radicalized gay movement received unprecedented media attention across the country.
“I read about the Stonewall rebellion in Life magazine, which had a story on the gay rights movement,” said Cleve Jones, a Harvey Milk protégé who went on to found the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.
“I stole it from my high school library and hid it under the mattress like it was porn. And when I’d get home from school after getting beat up, I’d take it out from under the mattress and think, one day I’m going to San Francisco.”
Cleve Jones
That story, the mere idea that queers could fight back, drive the police into hiding, and stake a claim to the same liberation that other oppressed groups had been demanding throughout the 60s, was a sea-change the pre-Stonewall homophile movement had never envisioned.
Comprised of groups like the Mattachine Society, Society for Individual Rights, and the Daughters of Bilitis, the movement been working for legal rights for lesbians and gay men since the 1950s.
But if you think the 2008 battle against Prop 8 in California was overly tame and devoid of images and voices of “real” lesbians and gay men, consider what passed for a demonstration in pre-Stonewall gay America: Men in suits and ties, women in dresses and nylons, marching around quietly with neatly-lettered signs politely asking America to please not fire us from our jobs anymore.
With some exceptions, those early movement leaders were appalled at the radical style of the post-Stonewall gay activists. Hippies, hustlers, drag queens? How did that fit in with the suits, ties, and panty hose?
NEXT PAGE: “The courage to fight back.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>…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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.