In honor of gay pride month, a little sex history lesson — The Stonewall Riots
The confrontations between demonstrators and police at The Stonewall
Inn, a mafia owned bar in Greenwich Village NYC over the weekend of
June 27-29, 1969 are usually cited as the beginning of the modern
Lesbian/Gay liberation Movement. What might have been just another
routine police raid on
a bar patronized by homosexuals became the pivotal event that sparked the entire modern gay rights movement.
The Stonewall riots are now the stuff of myth. Many of the most
commonly held beliefs are probably untrue. But here’s what we know for
sure.
- In 1969, it was illegal to operate any business catering to
homosexuals in New York City — as it still is today in many places in
the world. The standard procedure was for New York City’s finest to
raid these establishments on a regular basis. They’d arrest a few of
the most obvious ‘types’ harass the others and shake down the owners
for money, then they’d let the bar open as usual by the next day.
- Myth has it that the majority of the patrons at the Stonewall Inn
were black and Hispanic drag queens. Actually, most of the patrons were
probably young, college-age white guys lookin for a thrill and an
evening out of the closet, along with the usual cadre of drag queens
and hustlers. It was reasonably safe to socialize at the Stonewall Inn
for them, because when it was raided the drag queens and bull-dykes
were far more likely to be arrested then they were.
- After midnight June 27-28, 1969, the New York Tactical Police Force
called a raid on The Stonewall Inn at 55 Christopher Street in NYC.
Many of the patrons who escaped the raid stood around to witness the
police herding the “usual suspects” into the waiting paddywagons. There
had recently been several scuffles where similar groups of people
resisted arrest in both Los Angeles and New York.
- Stonewall was unique because it was the first time gay people, as a
group, realized that what threatened drag queens and bull-dykes
threatened them all.
- Many of the onlookers who took on the police that night weren’t
even homosexual. Greenwich Village was home to many left-leaning young
people who had cut their political teeth in the civil rights, anti-war
and women’s lib movements.
- As people tied to stop the arrests, the mêlée erupted. The police
barricaded themselves inside the bar. The crowd outside attempted to
burn it down. Eventually, police reinforcements arrived to disperse the
crowd. But this just shattered the protesters into smaller groups that
continued to mill around the streets of the village.
- A larger crowd assembled outside the Stonewall the following night.
This time young gay men and women came to protest the raids that were
commonplace in the city. They held hands, kissed and formed a mock
chorus line singing; “We are the Stonewall Girls/We wear our hair in
curls/We have no underwear/We show our pubic hair.” Don’t ‘cha just
love it?
- Police successfully dispersed this group without incident. But the
print media picked up the story. Articles appeared in the NY Post,
Daily News and The Village Voice. Theses helped galvanize the community
to rally and fight back.
- Within a few days, representatives of the Mattachine Society and
the Daughters of Bilitis (two of the country’s first homophile rights
groups) organized the city’s first ever “Gay Power” rally in Washington
Square. Some give hundred protesters showed up; many of them gay and
lesbians.
The
riots led to calls for homosexual liberation. Fliers appeared with the
message: “Do you think homosexuals are revolting? You bet your sweet
ass we are!” And the rest, boys and girls, is as they say is history.
During the first year after Stonewall, a whole new generation of
organizations emerged, many identifying themselves for the first time
as “Gay.” This not only denoted sexual orientation, but a radical way
to self-identify with a growing sense of open political activism.
Older, more staid homophile groups soon began to make way for the more
militant groups like the Gay Liberation Front.
The vast majority of these new activists were under thirty; dr
dick’s generation, don’t cha know. We were new to political organizing
and didn’t know that this was as ground-breaking as it was. Many groups
formed on colleges campuses and in big cities around the world.
By the following summer, 1970, groups in at least eight American
cities staged simultaneous events commemorating the Stonewall riots on
the last Sunday in June. The events varied from a highly political
march of three to five thousand in New York to a parade with floats for
1200 in Los Angeles. Seven thousand showed up in San Francisco.