Thanks to Joe for the reminder that tonight is the anniversary of the beginning of the Stonewall riots. Joe has reprinted a contemporary New York Post story about the riots.
As much as Stonewall was a watershed in the history of the American gay rights movement, it’s important to remember that gay activism didn’t begin with Stonewall. It had been going on for at least 20 years before then: Harry Hay and the Mattachine Society; ONE, Inc, which brough a case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court about obscenity and the postal service; and Frank Kameny, who is still alive and who organized the first public gay protest, a picket line in front of the White House in April 1965. John Loughery, in his terrific history of American gay life in the twentieth century, The Other Side of Silence, describes Stonewall as “a culmination rather than an isolated uprising.” Nevertheless, Stonewall marked a new assertiveness – not just in gay activism, but in gay culture and gay people’s sense of themselves.
Loughery also writes:
The mythology of the riot… in its crudest form, implies that gay life in America was immediately and dramatically transformed one summer night. In reality, most gay men and lesbians in the United States did not hear anything about Stonewall until years later, if only because the media outside New York City did not cover the riot.
He says that it did get almost immediate coverage in New York, though. While the mainstream New York Times gave it only scant mention in a short article in the back of the paper under the headline “Four Policement Hurt in Village Raid,” the Village Voice gave it in-depth front-page attention.
Out of curiosity, I looked for Stonewall coverage in the Complete New Yorker and found a Talk of the Town piece in the issue of July 11, 1970, describing the first gay pride march in the city, held in commemmoration of the first anniversary of the riots. It begins, “On June 29 [sic], 1969, city police raided the Stonewall Inn, a well-known gay bar on Christopher Street, in Greenwich Village. A gay bar is a bar frequented by homosexuals.” (Not sure if that’s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek or not.) One man at the beginning of the parade route is quoted as saying, “Homosexuals are very silly. They congregate in certain areas and then spend all their time walking up and down the street ignoring each other.” (Sounds like a gay bar to me.) Later on, one marcher says, “Would you believe it? It looks like an invading army. It’s a gay Woodstock. And after all those years I spent in psychotherapy!”
Gay men still go to psychotherapy, but at least they’re no longer in it to try to “cure” themselves.
Thank you, Stonewall rioters.