I WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE NUMEROUS AMOUNT OF PEOPLE WHO
CONTRIBUTED TO THIS SERIES AND THE TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF TIME AND
RESEARCH INVOLVED--I HOPE THE YOUNGER GENERATION HAVE TAKEN THE TIME TO
READ ABOUT THEIR HISTORY JUST AS I HOPE THOSE WHO REALLY THINK THAT GAYS
WANT 'SPECIAL NOT EQUAL' RIGHTS LEARN WHAT WE ARE FIGHTIGN FOR AND WHY
INCLUDING THOSE WHO THINK THIS IS 'RIDICULOUS'.

"Intolerable

situation"

Activity in Greenwich Village was sporadic on Monday and Tuesday,
partly due
to rain. Police and Village residents had a few altercations, as both
groups
antagonized each other. Craig Rodwell and his partner Fred Sargeant took
the
opportunity the morning after the first riot to print and distribute
5,000
leaflets, one of them reading: "Get the Mafia and the Cops out of Gay
Bars". The
leaflets called for gays to own their own establishments, for a boycott
of the
Stonewall and other Mafia-owned bars, and for public pressure on the
mayor's
office to investigate the "intolerable situation"
Not everyone in the gay community considered the revolt a positive
development. To many older gays and many members of the Mattachine
Society that had worked throughout the 1960s to promote homosexuals
as no
different from heterosexuals, the display of violence and effeminate
behavior
was embarrassing. Randy Wicker, who had marched in the first gay picket
lines
before the White House in 1965, said the "screaming queens forming
chorus lines
and kicking went against everything that I wanted people to think about
homosexuals ... that we were a bunch of drag queens in the Village
acting
disorderly and tacky and cheap." Others found the
closing of the Stonewall Inn, termed a "sleaze joint", as advantageous
to the
Village.
On Wednesday, however, The Village Voice ran reports of the
riots, written by Howard Smith and Lucian Truscott, that included
unflattering
descriptions of the events and its participants: "forces of faggotry,"
"limp
wrists" and "Sunday fag follies". A mob descended upon Christopher
Street once again and
threatened to burn down the offices of The Village Voice. Also in
the mob
of between 500 and 1,000 were other groups that had had unsuccessful
confrontations with the police, and were curious how the police were
defeated in
this situation. Another explosive street battle took place, with
injuries to
demonstrators and police alike, looting in local shops, and arrests of
five
people. The incidents on
Wednesday night lasted about an hour, and were summarized by one
witness: "The
word is out. Christopher Street shall be liberated. The fags have had it
with
oppression."

Aftermath

The feeling of urgency spread throughout Greenwich Village, even to
people
who had not witnessed the riots. Many who were moved by the rebellion
attended
organizational meetings, sensing an opportunity to take action. On July
4, 1969,
the Mattachine Society performed its annual picketing in front of Independence
Hall in Philadelphia,
called the Annual Reminder.

Organizer Craig Rodwell,
Frank
Kameny, Randy Wicker, Barbara Gittings,
and
Kay
Lahusen, who had all
participated for several years, took a bus along with other picketers
from New
York City to Philadelphia. Since 1965, the pickets had been very
controlled:
women wore skirts and men wore suits and ties, and all marched quietly
in
organized lines. This year Rodwell
remembered feeling restricted by the rules Kameny had set. When two
women
spontaneously held hands, Kameny broke them apart, saying, "None of
that! None
of that!" Rodwell, however, convinced about ten couples to hold hands.
The
hand-holding couples made Kameny furious, but they earned more press
attention
than all of the previous marches.
Participant Lilli Vincenz remembered, "It was clear that things were
changing.
People who had felt oppressed now felt empowered." Rodwell returned to New York City determined to change the established
quiet,
meek ways of trying to get attention. One of his first priorities was
planning
Christopher

Street Liberation Day.

Gay Liberation
Front

Although the Mattachine Society had existed since the 1950s, many of
their
methods now seemed too mild for people who had witnessed or been
inspired by the
riots. Mattachine recognized the shift in attitudes in a story from
their
newsletter entitled, "The Hairpin Drop Heard Around the World". When a Mattachine officer suggested an "amicable and
sweet" candlelight vigil demonstration, a man in the audience fumed and
shouted,
"Sweet! Bullshit! That's the role society has been forcing these
queens
to play." With a
flyer announcing: "Do You Think Homosexuals Are Revolting? You Bet Your
Sweet
Ass We Are!", the Gay Liberation
Front (GLF) was soon formed, the first gay organization to use "gay"
in its
name. Previous organizations such as the Mattachine
Society, the Daughters of
Bilitis, and various homophile groups had masked their purpose by
deliberately choosing obscure names.
The rise of militancy became apparent to Frank Kameny and Barbara
Gittings—who had worked in homophile organizations for years and were
both very
public about their roles—when they attended a GLF meeting to see the new
group.
A young GLF member demanded to know who they were and what their
credentials
were. Gittings, nonplussed, stammered, "I'm gay. That's why I'm here."
The GLF borrowed
tactics from and aligned themselves with black and antiwar demonstrators with the
ideal that they "could work to restructure American society". They took
on
causes of the Black Panthers, marching to the Women's
House of
Detention in support of Afeni Shakur, and
other radical New Left causes. Four
months after
they formed, however, the group disbanded when members were unable to
agree on
operating procedure.

Gay Activists

Alliance

Within six months of the Stonewall riots, activists started a
city-wide
newspaper called Gay;

they considered it necessary because the most liberal publication in the

city—The Village Voice—refused to print the word "gay" in GLF
advertisements seeking new members and volunteers. Two other
newspapers were initiated within a six-week period: Come Out!Gay
Power; the readership of these three periodicals quickly climbed to
between
20,000 and 25,000. and
GLF members organized several same-sex dances, but GLF meetings were
chaotic.
When Bob Kohler asked for clothes and money to help the homeless youth
who had
participated in the riots, many of whom slept in Christopher Park or
Sheridan
Square, the response was a discussion on the downfall of capitalism.
In late December
1969, several people who had visited GLF meetings and left out of
frustration
formed the Gay Activists
Alliance (GAA). The GAA
was to be entirely focused on gay issues, and more orderly. Their
constitution
started, "We as liberated homosexual activists demand the freedom for
expression
of our dignity and value as human beings". The GAA
developed and perfected a confrontational tactic called a zap,
where they would catch a
politician off guard during a public relations opportunity, and force
him or her
to acknowledge gay and lesbian rights. City councilmen were zapped, and
Mayor John Lindsay was
zapped
several times—once on television when GAA members made up the majority
of the
audience.
Raids on gay bars had not stopped after the Stonewall riots. In March
1970,
Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine raided the Zodiac and 17 Barrow Street. An

after-hours gay club with no liquor or occupancy licenses called The
Snake Pit
was soon raided, and 167 people were arrested. One of them was an
Argentinian
national so frightened that he might be deported as a homosexual that he tried to escape the
police precinct by jumping out a two-story window, impaling himself on a
14-inch
(36 cm) spike fence. The New York
Daily News printed a graphic photo of the young man's impalement on
the
front page. GAA members organized a march from Christopher Park to the
Sixth
Precinct in which hundreds of gays, lesbians, and liberal sympathizers
peacefully confronted the TPF.Democratic
Party and
Congressman Ed Koch sent pleas to
end raids on gay bars in the city They
also sponsored a letter-writing campaign to Mayor Lindsay in which the
Greenwich
Village
The Stonewall Inn lasted only a few weeks after the riot. By October
1969 it
was up for rent. Village residents surmised it was too notorious a
location, and
Rodwell's boycott discouraged business.

Gay Pride

Christopher Street Liberation Day on June 28, 1970 marked the first
anniversary of the Stonewall riots with an assembly on Christopher
Street and
the first Gay Pride march in U.S. history, covering the 51 blocks to Central Park. The
march took less than half the
scheduled time due to excitement, but also due to wariness about walking
through
the city with gay banners and signs. Although the parade permit was
delivered
only two hours before the start of the march, the marchers encountered
little
resistance from onlookers. The New York
Times Reporting by The Village Voice was positive, describing "the
out-front
resistance that grew out of the police raid on the Stonewall Inn one
year
ago" reported (on the front page) that the marchers took up the
entire
street for about 15 city blocks.

Gay Pride marches took place simultaneously in Los Angeles and Chicago. The next year,
Gay Pride marches took place in Boston,
Dallas,
Milwaukee,
London,
Paris, West
Berlin, and Stockholm. By
1972 the participating cities included Atlanta, Buffalo, Detroit,
Washington D.C.,
Miami,
and Philadelphia.
Frank Kameny soon realized the pivotal change brought by the
Stonewall riots.
An organizer of gay activism in the 1950s, he was used to persuasion,
trying to
convince heterosexuals that gay people were no different than they were.
When he
and other people marched in front of the White House, the State
Department and
Independence Hall only five years earlier, their objective was to look
as if
they could work for the U.S. government. Ten people
marched with Kameny then, and they alerted no press to their intentions.

Although he was stunned by the upheaval by participants in the Annual
Reminder
in 1969, he later observed, "By the time of Stonewall, we had fifty to
sixty gay
groups in the country. A year later there was at least fifteen hundred.
By two
years later, to the extent that a count could be made, it was
twenty-five
hundred."
Similar to Kameny's regret at his own reaction to the shift in
attitudes
after the riots, Randy Wicker came to describe his embarrassment as "one
of the
greatest mistakes of his life"The
image of gays retaliating against police, after so many years of
allowing such
treatment to go unchallenged, "stirred an unexpected spirit among many
homosexuals". Kay
Lahusen, who photographed the marches in 1965, stated, "Up to 1969, this

movement was generally called the homosexual or homophile movement....
Many new
activists consider the Stonewall uprising the birth of the gay
liberation
movement. Certainly it was the birth of gay pride on a massive scale."

Legacy

Unlikely community

Within two years of the Stonewall riots there were gay rights groups
in every
major American city, as well as Canada, Australia, and Western Europe.^[124] People who
joined activist organizations after the riots had very little in common
other
than their same-sex
attraction. Many who arrived at
GLF or GAA meetings were taken aback by the number of gay people in one
place. Race, class,
ideology, and gender became frequent obstacles in the years after the
riots.
This was illustrated during the 1973 Stonewall rally when, moments after
Barbara Gittings exuberantly praised the diversity of the crowd, feminist activist Jean
O'Learytransvestitesdrag queens in
attendance. During
a speech by O'Leary, in which she claimed that drag queens made fun of
women for
entertainment value and profit, Sylvia Rivera and
Lee Brewster jumped on the
stage and shouted "You go to bars because of what drag queens did for
you, and
these bitches tell us to quit being ourselves!"^[ Both the drag
queens and lesbian feminists in attendance left in disgust. protested what
she perceived as the mocking of women by
and
O'Leary also worked in the early 1970s to exclude transvestites from
gay
rights issues because she felt that rights for transvestites would be
too
difficult to attain. Sylvia Rivera left gay activism in the 1970s to
work on
issues for transgender people and transvestites. The initial
disagreements
between participants in the movements, however, often evolved after
further
reflection. O'Leary later regretted her stance against the drag queens
attending
in 1973: "Looking back, I find this so embarrassing because my views
have
changed so much since then. I would never pick on a transvestite now.""It

was horrible. How could I work to exclude transvestites and at the same
time
criticize the feminists who were doing their best back in those days to
exclude
lesbians?"
O'Leary was referring to the Lavender Menace,
a description by second wave
feminist Betty Friedan for
attempts
by members of the National
Organization for Women (NOW) to distance themselves from the perception of NOW as a haven for
lesbians.
As part of this process, Rita Mae Brown and other lesbians who had been
active in NOW were forced out. They staged a protest in 1970 at the
Second
Congress to Unite Women, and earned the support of many NOW members,
finally
gaining full acceptance in 1971.
The growth of lesbian feminism in the 1970s at times so
conflicted with the gay liberation movement that some lesbians refused
to work
with gay men. Many lesbians found men's attitudes patriarchal and
chauvinistic,
and saw in gay men the same misguided notions about women as they saw in

heterosexual men. The issues most important to gay men—entrapment and public
solicitation—were not shared
by lesbians. In 1977 a Lesbian Pride Rally was organized as an
alternative to
sharing gay men's issues, especially what Adrienne Rich termed "the violent,
self-destructive world of the gay bars" Veteran gay activist Barbara Gittings chose to work in the gay rights
movement,
rationalizing "It's a matter of where does it hurt the most? For me it
hurts the
most not in the female arena, but the gay arena."
Throughout the 1970s gay activism had significant successes. One of
the first
and most important was the "zap" in May 1970 by the Los Angeles GLF at a

convention of the American
Psychiatric
Association (APA). At a conference on behavior
modification, during a film
demonstrating the use of electroshock
therapy to decrease same-sex
attraction, Morris Kight When
the APA invited gay activists to speak to the group in 1972, activists
brought
John E. Fryer, a
gay
psychiatrist who wore a mask, because he felt his practice was in
danger. In
December 1973—in large part due to the efforts of gay activists—the APA
voted
unanimously to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic
and Statistical
Manual. and GLF members in the audience interrupted the film with shouts of
"Torture!"
and "Barbarism!" They
took over the microphone to announce that medical professionals who
prescribed
such therapy for their homosexual patients were complicit in torturing
them.
Although 20 psychiatrists in attendance left, the GLF spent the hour
following
the zap with those remaining, trying to convince them that homosexuals
were not
mentally ill.
Gay men and lesbians came together to work in grassroots political
organizations responding to
organized resistance in 1977. A coalition of conservatives named Save Our Children staged a campaign to repeal a civil rights ordinance in Dade County,
Florida.
Save Our Children was successful enough to influence similar repeals in
several
American cities in 1978. However, the same year a campaign in California
called
the Briggs
Initiative, designed to force the dismissal of homosexual public
school
employees was defeated. Reaction to the
influence of Save Our Children and the Briggs Initiative in the gay
community
was so significant that it has been called the second Stonewall for many

activists, marking their initiation into political participation.

[ Rejection of
gay
subculture

The Stonewall riots marked such a significant turning point that many
aspects
of prior gay and lesbian
subculture, such as bar culture formed from decades of shame and
secrecy,
were forcefully ignored and denied. Historian Martin Duberman writes, "The decades preceding
Stonewall ... continue to be regarded by most gays and lesbians as some
vast
neolithic wasteland". Historian Barry
Adam notes, "Every social movement must choose at some point what to
retain and
what to reject out of its past. What traits are the results of
oppression and
what are healthy and authentic?" In
conjunction with the growing feminist movement of the early 1970s, roles
of butch and femme that
developed in lesbian bars in the 1950s and 1960s were rejected, because
as one
writer put it: "all role playing is sick". Lesbian
feminists considered the butch roles as archaic imitations of masculine
behavior. Some women,
according to Lillian
Faderman, were eager to shed the roles they felt forced into
playing. The
roles returned for some women in the 1980s, although they allowed for
more
flexibility than before Stonewall.
Author Michael Bronski highlights the "attack on pre-Stonewall
culture",
particularly gay pulp
fiction for men, where the
themes often reflected ambivalence about being gay or self-hatred. Many
books
ended unsatisfactorily and drastically, often with suicide, and writers
portrayed their gay characters as alcoholics and deeply unhappy. These
books,
which he describes as "an enormous and cohesive literature by and for
gay
men", have not been
reissued and are lost to later generations. Dismissing the reason simply
as
political correctness, Bronski writes, "gay liberation was a youth
movement
whose sense of history was defined to a large degree by rejection of the

past".

Lasting impact

The riots spawned from a bar raid became a literal example of gays
and
lesbians fighting back, and a symbolic call to arms for many people.
Historian
David Carter remarks in his book about the Stonewall riots that the bar
itself
was a complex business that represented a community center, an
opportunity for
the Mafia to blackmail its own customers, a home, and a place of
"exploitation
and degradation". The true legacy
of the Stonewall riots, Carter insists, is the "ongoing struggle for
lesbian,
gay, bisexual, and transgender equality".Historian

Nicholas Edsall writes,

Stonewall has been compared to any number of acts of radical protest
and
defiance in American history from the Boston Tea Party on. But the best
and
certainly a more nearly contemporary analogy is with Rosa Parks'
refusal to move to the back of the bus
in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955, which sparked the modern civil
rights
movement. Within months after Stonewall radical gay liberation groups
and
newsletters sprang up in cities and on college campuses across America
and then
across all of northern Europe as well.

Before the rebellion at the Stonewall Inn, homosexuals were, as
historians
Dudley Clendinen and Adam
Nagourney write,

a secret legion of people, known of but discounted, ignored, laughed
at or
despised. And like the holders of a secret, they had an advantage which
was a
disadvantage, too, and which was true of no other minority group in the
United
States. They were invisible. Unlike African Americans, women, Native
Americans,
Jews, the Irish, Italians, Asians, Hispanics, or any other cultural
group which
struggled for respect and equal rights, homosexuals had no physical or
cultural
markings, no language or dialect which could identify them to each
other, or to
anyone else ... But that night, for the first time, the usual
acquiescence
turned into violent resistance ... From that night the lives of millions
of gay
men and lesbians, and the attitude toward them of the larger culture in
which
they lived, began to change rapidly. People began to appear in public as

homosexuals, demanding respect.

Historian Lillian
Faderman calls the riots the "shot heard round the world",
explaining, "The
Stonewall Rebellion was crucial because it sounded the rally for that
movement.
It became an emblem of gay and lesbian power. By calling on the dramatic
tactic
of violent protest that was being used by other oppressed groups, the
events at
the Stonewall implied that homosexuals had as much reason to be
disaffected as
they."
Joan Nestle started
the
Lesbian

Herstory Archives in 1975, and credits "its creation to that night
and the
courage that found its voice in the streets".
Cautious, however, not to attribute the start of gay activism to the
Stonewall
riots, Nestle writes,

I certainly don't see gay and lesbian history starting with Stonewall
... and
I don't see resistance starting with Stonewall. What I do see is a
historical
coming together of forces, and the sixties changed how human beings
endured
things in this society and what they refused to endure.... Certainly
something
special happened on that night in 1969, and we've made it more special
in our
need to have what I call a point of origin ... it's more complex than
saying
that it all started with Stonewall.

The events of the early morning of June 28, 1969 were not the first
instances
of homosexuals fighting back against police in New York CityLos Angeles and Chicago,
but similarly marginalized people started the
riot at Compton's Cafeteria in 1966, and another riot responded to a
raid on Los
Angeles' Black Cat
Tavern in 1967.^[ However, several
circumstances were in place that made the Stonewall riots memorable. The

location of the raid was a factor: it was across the street from The
Village
Voice offices, and the narrow crooked streets gave the rioters
advantage
over the police. Many
of the participants and residents of Greenwich Village were involved in
political organizations that were effectively able to mobilize a large
and
cohesive gay community in the weeks and months after the rebellion. The
local
press and national gay press covered the event extensively. The most
significant
facet of the Stonewall riots, however, was the commemoration of them in Christopher

Street Liberation Day, which grew into the annual Gay Pride and
elsewhere. Not only had the
Mattachine Society been active in major cities such as events
around the
world.
The middle of the 1990s was marked by the inclusion of bisexuals as a
represented group within
the gay community when they successfully sought to be included on the
platform
of the 1993 March

on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation.
Despite
also requesting to be included, transgender people were instead afforded

trans-inclusive language on the march's list of demands.The
transgender
community continued to find itself simultaneously welcome and at odds
with the
gay community as attitudes about binary and fluid sexual orientation and
gender
developed and came increasingly into conflictIn
1994, New York City celebrated "Stonewall 25" with a march that went
past the United
Nations Headquarters and
into Central Park.
Estimates put the attendance at 1.1 million people. Sylvia Rivera
led an alternate march in New York City in 1994 to protest the exclusion
of
transgender people from the events. Attendance at
Gay Pride events has grown substantially over the decades. Most large
American
cities have some kind of Pride demonstration, as do most large cities
around the
world. Pride events in some cities mark the largest annual celebration
of any
kind. The growing
trend towards commercializing marches into parades—with events receiving

corporate sponsorship—has caused concern about taking away the autonomy
of the
original grassroots demonstrations that put inexpensive activism in the
hands of
individuals.
In June 1999 the U.S.
Department of the
Interior designated 51 and 53 Christopher Street, the street itself,
and the
surrounding streets as a National
Historic Landmark, the
first of significance to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
community.
In a dedication ceremony, Assistant Secretary of the Department of the
Interior
John
Berry stated, "Let it forever
be remembered that here—on this spot—men and women stood proud, they
stood fast,
so that we may be who we are, we may work where we will, live where we
choose
and love whom our hearts desire."
On June 1, 2009, President Barack Obama declared June 2009 Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month, citing the riots as a reason to
"commit
to achieving equal justice under law for LGBT Americans". The year marked
the 40th anniversary of the riots, giving journalists and activists
cause to
reflect on progress made since 1969. Frank Rich in The
New York Times noted that
no federal legislation exists to protect the rights of gay Americans. An

editorial in the Washington Blade compared the scruffy,
violent activism during and following the Stonewall riots to the
lackluster
response to failed promises given by President Obama; for being ignored,
wealthy
LGBT activists reacted by promising to give less money to Democratic
causes.

SEE YOU IN 2011 IN THE MERRY MONTH
OF JUNE WHEN WE CELEBRATE GAY PRIDE AND REMEMBER STONEWALL AGAIN!