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!