On June 28, 1970, two thousand gay and lesbian activists in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago paraded down the streets of their cities in a new kind of social protest, one marked by celebration, fun, and unashamed declaration of a stigmatized identity. Was he present at the Stonewall Riots? Samual Murkofsky We could easily be hunted, that was a game. The Stonewall riots, as they came to be known, marked a major turning point in the modern gay civil rights movement in the United States and around the world. John O'Brien Seymour Pine, Deputy Inspector, Morals Division, NYPD:Our radio was cut off every time we got on the police radio. Links to additional online content are included when available. This set uses primary sources to explore the events preceding and surrounding the Stonewall Inn uprising as well as the aftermath of the riots in the gay liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. John O'Brien:And deep down I believed because I was gay and couldn't speak out for my rights, was probably one of the reasons that I was so active in the Civil Rights Movement. Since the Stonewall was without a license, the place was being closed. It provides references for primary documents related to the materials reprinted inThe Stonewall Riots; most of the sources come from newspapers, magazines, and newsletters. And they wore dark police uniforms and riot helmets and they had billy clubs and they had big plastic shields, like Roman army, and they actually formed a phalanx, and just marched down Christopher Street and kind of pushed us in front of them. Martin Boyce:And I remember moving into the open space and grabbing onto two of my friends and we started singing and doing a kick line. John O'Brien:It was definitely dark, it was definitely smelly and raunchy and dirty and that's the only places that we had to meet each other, was in the very dirty, despicable places. Nice to remember that fighting the police is sometimes a necessary part of the struggle for liberation. With riveting narrative skill, he recreates those revolutionary, sweltering nights in vivid detail through the lives of six people who were drawn into the struggle for LGBTQ rights. Geordie, Liam and Theo Gude The stomping occurred around 3 a.m. on June 28, 1969, at the start of what would later be known as the Stonewall uprising, The first police officer that came in with our group said, "The place is under arrest. I mean I'm only 19 and this'll ruin me. Stonewall Riots Document A: New York Daily News 1. Marc Steins The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History is a primary-source collection of the sort that a professor might assign in a class on social movements. an independent scholar and director of OutHistory.org, with help from David Carter, the author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution Cause we could feel a sense of love for each other that we couldn't show out on the street, because you couldn't show any affection out on the street. You throw into that, that the Stonewall was raided the previous Tuesday night. Stonewall Riots Cloth, $99.00. People started throwing pennies. Fred Sargeant:Things started off small, but there was an energy that began to flow through the crowd. But it was a refuge, it was a temporary refuge from the street. Producers What Happened at the Stonewall Riots? A Timeline of the 1969 Stonewall Riot But as visibility increased, the reactions of people increased. We take great pride in preserving the history of this groundbreaking event in Americas battle for LGBTQ+ equality. "The rebellion (it was never a 'riot') lasted five inconsecutive nights (they were not 'riots')" -STONEWALL Veterans' Association. Stream thousands of hours of acclaimed series, probing documentaries and captivating specials commercial-free in HISTORY Vault. Dick Leitsch:You read about Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal and all these actors and stuff, Liberace and all these people running around doing all these things and then you came to New York and you found out, well maybe they're doing them but, you know, us middle-class homosexuals, we're getting busted all the time, every time we have a place to go, it gets raided. John van Hoesen The overwhelming number of medical authorities said that homosexuality was a mental defect, maybe even a form of psychopathy. Danny Garvin:We were talking about the revolution happening and we were walking up 7th Avenue and I was thinking it was either Black Panthers or the Young Lords were going to start it and we turned the corner from 7th Avenue onto Christopher Street and we saw the paddy wagon pull up there. Danny Garvin:We had thought of women's rights, we had thought of black rights, all kinds of human rights, but we never thought of gay rights, and whenever we got kicked out of a bar before, we never came together. Mr. Katz urged anyone Very sleazy and colorful place I recall seeing boys walking around in silver jockstraps, etc. Fred Sargeant:In the '60s, I met Craig Rodwell who was running the Oscar Wilde Bookshop. And in a sense the Stonewall riots said, "Get off our backs, deliver on the promise." Alexandra Meryash Nikolchev, On-Line Editors You knew you could ruin them for life. Gay bars were places of refuge where gay men and lesbians and other individuals who were considered sexually suspect could socialize in relative safety from public harassment. America thought we were these homosexual monsters and we were so innocent, and oddly enough, we were so American. It must have been terrifying for them. Stonewall riots | Definition, Significance, & Facts | Britannica Historical Significance of the Stonewall Riots A few of us would get dressed up in skirts and blouses and the guys would all have to wear suits and ties. The mayor of New York City, the police commissioner, were under pressure to clean up the streets of any kind of quote unquote "weirdness." 1969 Stonewall Riots - Origins, Timeline & Leaders - History Giles Kotcher It is usually after the day at the beach that the real crime occurs. John O'Brien:Heterosexuals, legally, had lots of sexual outlets. In 1966, three years before Stonewall, members of The Mattachine Society, an organization dedicated to gay rights, staged a sip-in where they openly declared their sexuality at taverns, daring staff to turn them away and suing establishments who did. But you live with it, you know, you're used to this, after the third time it happened, or, the third time you heard about it, that's the way the world is. It was not the first time police raided a gay bar, and it was not the first time LGBTQ+ people fought back, but the events that would unfold over the next six days would fundamentally change the discourse surrounding LGBTQ+ activism in the United States. William Eskridge, Professor of Law:At the peak, as many as 500 people per year were arrested for the crime against nature, and between 3- and 5,000 people per year arrested for various solicitation or loitering crimes. Katrina Heilbroner Martin Boyce:We were like a Hydra. Barney Karpfinger In the sexual area, in psychology, psychiatry. Dick Leitsch:So it was mostly goofing really, basically goofing on them. Danny Garvin:We became a people. BBC Worldwide Americas It gives back a little of the terror they gave in my life. These homosexuals glorify unnatural sex acts. It was the law. They can be anywhere. It's like, this is not right. They would not always just arrest, they would many times use clubs and beat. Since then, the term 'Stonewall' itself has become almost synonymous with the struggle for gay rights. Even non-gay people. xGrS$GJ19f#Qld| C$ Rcyu5K+#<_7jntz~:tOuS=>@Vy?~j{P/TUc7VC^|j_](G.Ox.~vTGz6r+]* 6 :!>j6KcV'6FjSSTcNsWU zwOV$k5(;'NAo;;l'Skmu}n%86`naUfJ7WMvf Based on Alfredo del Rio, Archival Still and Motion Images Courtesy of You can also receive it via email. Drag queens and WebIn the early hours of Saturday, June 28, 1969, a riot broke out during a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, an LGBT bar. The Catholic Church, be damned to hell. Over a short period of time, he will be unable to get sexually aroused to the pictures, and hopefully, he will be unable to get sexually aroused inside, in other settings as well. My father said, "About time you fags rioted.". Most importantly, this anthology shines a light on forgotten figures who were pivotal in the movement, such as Lee Brewster, head of the Queens Liberation Front and Ernestine Eckstine, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s. These 1969 riots are largely credited with sparking the contemporary LGBTQ+ rights movement. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious. Lucian Truscott, IV, Reporter,The Village Voice:All of straight America, in terms of the middle class, was recoiling in horror from what was happening all around them at that time, in that summer and the summer before. Stonewall riots, also called Stonewall uprising, series of violent confrontations that began in the early hours of June 28, 1969, between police and gay rights activists outside the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. They began to jeer at and jostle the police and then threw bottles and debris. William Eskridge, Professor of Law:The Stonewall riots came at a central point in history. . other rioters, Wolfgang Podolski and Thomas Staton, whose involvement in the disturbances had not been documented before. But we had to follow up, we couldn't just let that be a blip that disappeared. I famously used the word "fag" in the lead sentence I said "the forces of faggotry." (The original inn closed soon after the riots, and the new bar, which occupies only part of the original space, has no other connection to the original establishment.) Dick Leitsch:New York State Liquor Authority had a rule that one known homosexual at a licensed premise made the place disorderly, so nobody would set up a place where we could meet because they were afraid that the cops would come in to close it, and that's how the Mafia got into the gay bar business. And so there was this drag queen standing on the corner, so they go up and make a sexual offer and they'd get busted. And Howard said, "Boy there's like a riot gonna happen here," and I said, "yeah." And that crowd between Howard Johnson's and Mama's Chik-n-Rib was like the basic crowd of the gay community at that time in the Village. Andy Frielingsdorf, Reenactment Actors Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt:So you're outside, and you see like two people walking toward these trucks and you think, "Oh I think I'll go in there," you go in there, there's like a lot of people in there and it's all dark. It's very American to say, "You promised equality, you promised freedom." Howard Smith, Reporter,The Village Voice:And by the time the police would come back towards Stonewall, that crowd had gone all the around Washington Place come all the way back around and were back pushing in on them from the other direction and the police would wonder, "These are the same people or different people?". Lucian Truscott, IV, Reporter,The Village Voice:TheNew York TimesI guess printed a story, but it wasn't a major story. That night, the https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/stonewall Because that's what they were looking for, any excuse to try to bust the place. We could lose our memory from the beating, we could be in wheelchairs like some were. You know, all of a sudden, I had brothers and sisters, you know, which I didn't have before. You know, it's just, everybody was there. WebLast Friday the privacy of the Stonewall was invaded by police from the First Division. Our lessons and assessments are available for free download once you've created an account. Martin Boyce:I had cousins, ten years older than me, and they had a car sometimes. If you are unable to visit the Library, you may be able to access these resources through your local public or academic library. Doing things like that. MacDonald & Associates and this is further reason to believe that.. Jerry Hoose:The bar itself was a toilet. For such reasons, LGBT individuals flocked to gay bars and clubs, places of refuge where they could express themselves openly and socialize without worry. If there had been a riot of that proportion in Harlem, my God, you know, there'd have been cameras everywhere. It meant nothing to us. WebDocument C: Mattachine Society of New York Newsletter 1. Richard Enman (Archival):Well, let me say, first of all, what type of laws we are not after, because there has been much to-do that the Society was in favor of the legalization of marriage between homosexuals, and the adoption of children, and such as that, and that is not at all factual at all. (U.K.-based), GLAAD (formerly Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), PFLAG (formerly Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and Queer Nation. I had never seen anything like that. And they started smashing their heads with clubs. Jorge Garcia-Spitz The police made several arrests and confiscated liquor. The 1960s and preceding decades were not welcoming times for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Americans. Absolutely, and many people who were not lucky, felt the cops. And we were singing: "We are the Village girls, we wear our hair in curls, we wear our dungarees, above our nellie knees." WebStonewall Riot praxis one paper pcs 215 03 praxis the stonewall riots in 1969, people responded to violence from officers at police raid at the stonewall inn in Skip to document Ask an Expert Sign inRegister Sign inRegister Home Ask an ExpertNew My Library Discovery Institutions Southern New Hampshire University Harvard University Lucian Truscott, IV, Reporter,The Village Voice:A rather tough lesbian was busted in the bar and when she came out of the bar she was fighting the cops and trying to get away. Philly took me to NYC for the 1st time and we went to a bar called The Sewer. You needed a license even to be a beautician and that could be either denied or taken away from you. The crime syndicate saw profit in catering to shunned gay clientele, and by the mid-1960s, the Genovese crime family controlled most Greenwich Village gay bars. Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window), Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window), Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window), Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window), Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window), Grey Villet/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images, https://www.history.com/topics/gay-rights/the-stonewall-riots. And all of a sudden, pandemonium broke loose. As the riots progressed, an international gay rights movement was born. It's the first time I'm fully inside the Stonewall. In 1966, they purchased Stonewall Inn (a straight bar and restaurant), cheaply renovated it, and reopened it the next year as a gay bar. WebLast Friday the privacy of the Stonewall was invaded by police from the First Division. We had been threatened bomb threats. And the police escalated their crackdown on bars because of the reelection campaign. Fed up with constant police harassment and social discrimination, angry patrons and neighborhood residents hung around outside of the bar rather than disperse, becoming increasingly agitated as the events unfolded and people were aggressively manhandled. Stonewall
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