Throw Bricks
Continuing the trend of doing some different things with my Substack, here is an abridged version of a paper I submitted in college about The Stonewall Rebellion.
Stonewall Rebellion’s Legacy of Pride
In the early morning of June 28th, 1969, New York’s Greenwich Village became the stage for a touchpoint in LGBTQ+ civil rights: the Stonewall Rebellion.
In Greenwich village in New York City, the Stonewall Inn was a neighborhood bar described as “seedy”[1] and was often the home of the young and lost members of the gay community, where more established members of the LGBTQ+ community provided a sense of security. Its patrons were “homeless teens, queens, and others not welcome elsewhere” who were used to being raided once a month[2] due to the Inn’s lack of liquor license and frequent underage drinking. On Friday June 27th, police once again raided the establishment with the hopes of seizing illegal liquor and to arrest employees. Usually people would slip away, but this time, a large crowd gathered outside and as the police loaded the arrestees into vans, the crowd started throwing “pennies, bottles, and bricks”[3] forcing the police to hole up inside the building and wait for backup.
For two hours, the crowd continued to fight back against police until enough police force amassed. Thirteen people were arrested.[4]
Stonewall immediately became a defining event in gay history, marking a “year zero” in public consciousness in the gay rights movement. It had both the commemorative success and collective memory needed to become a watershed event in history for gay activism.[5] It spawned worldwide parades celebrated to this day and is now marked as the beginning of the gay liberation movement.
At the time of the Stonewall Rebellion, there was an increasing major trend of police raids on gay bars and clubs in New York. Prior to the Stonewall Rebellion, several gay clubs had been closed, including the Checkerboard and the Tele-star, while others, like the Snake Pit and the Sewer, had been raided in what “looked to many like part of an effort to close all gay bars and clubs in the Village.”[6] In January of 1965, police “stalked the area around”[7] a New Year’s Day costume ball. In another New Year’s celebration in January 1967, the LAPD beat clientele and management at both the Black Cat bar and the New Faces bar.[8]
This pattern of behavior from law enforcement, often violent, was one of the underlying reasons why the patrons at the Stonewall Inn finally fought back.
Another was the increasing public eye on homosexuality, particularly thanks to the work of the Mattachine Society, the largest gay rights organization during the 1960s.[9] In the early 1960s, the Mattachine Society held picket lines[11] and then in 1965 won an injunction against employers for firing workers because of their sexual orientation.[12]
These kinds of public events and victories forced media coverage and likely were part of the reason why those at the Stonewall Rebellion chanted “gay pride” during the night of the Stonewall Rebellion and why there was such a trend toward being “out” in public after.
Also occurring during the time of the Stonewall Rebellion was the civil rights movement already. Long had Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated for a synergy between patriotism and protest.[13] King forever kept an eye on the nation’s founding ordeals and many of the political rights movements during the 1960s relied on drawing a line between the American ideal and the actual experience of oppressed or marginalized Americans.[14] The gay rights movement took King’s lesson to heart and used the same principals to build their own political protest. In the 1960s, gay rights activists, known as “homophile” activists, “adopted the language and ideology of minority rights.”[15]
One of the reasons the Stonewall Rebellion is an essential moment in Gay Rights history is because of the mythology-like story that has grown from the event. It gave the gay rights community a well publicized and successful event to point to, empowering them to be more open about their homosexual lifestyles. Before the Stonewall Rebellion “there was little public expression of the lives and experiences of gays and lesbians(Harlin, 1).” After the riot, there was a general air of being open and proud of homosexuality. Homophile activists “were increasingly unapologetic, even celebratory, about the homosexual lifestyle.”[16] The New York Times wrote “Graffiti on the boarded-up windows of the inn included: ‘Support gay power’ and ‘Legalize gay bars.’(The New York Times) as examples of public acts of defiance of the gay community, thanks to this riot. As said by Garance Franke-Ruta, “now we’ve walked in the open and know how pleasant it is to have self-respect and to be treated as citizens and human beings.”[17]
Another reason that the Stonewall Rebellion should be considered a landmark moment in Gay Rights Activism is its legacy with Gay Pride, a month long celebration of Gay Rights, which would not exist without the events at the Stonewall Inn. For five years in a row after the riot, a Gay Pride Parade was celebrated in New York. Since then, Stonewall is “commemorated in gay pride parades around the globe.”[18] While other events in the history of Gay Rights are confined to history books, the Stonewall Rebellion is “marked by an international commemorative ritual.”[19] No other Gay Rights event—not the New Year’s Ball Raid in 1965, nor Compton’s Cafeteria Disturbance in 1966, nor any other—has had it’s anniversary celebrating in anything close to the same way as the Stonewall Rebellion now celebrated.
Finally, without the public and celebrated events at the Stonewall Inn, many of the milestones achieved by the gay rights movement in the 1970s would simply not have been possible. Riding on the commemoration of the riot, activists built on the narrative that the Stonewall Rebellion was “the first act of lesbian and gay resistance ever,”[20] despite there being many other examples of such activities. No other act of resistance had garnered such public attention, though. This public narrative helped the homophile movement form a “large, grassroots movement for liberation.”[21] Kiyoshi Kuromiya was an activist who in 1970 formed the Gay Liberation Front. In an interview with Marc Stein, Barbara Gittings said, “When Gay Liberation Front first got launched in New York, in the wake of Stonewall, it got out the gay troops to picket at the Women’s House of Detention for the women who were in there for prostitution.”[22] There is a direct line that can be drawn from the events at Stonewall Inn to an increase in activism for the gay rights movement in the 1970s.
The Stonewall Rebellion has earned its place in history as an indispensable milestone within the broader tapestry of the gay rights movement. Its legendary status echoes the resilience and defiance of the gay community, while the institutionalization of the Gay Pride parade serves as an enduring tribute to those who fought back on that night. The milestones achieved in the 1970s in the gay rights movement are testaments to the courage and activism sparked by the events at Stonewall, affirming its place as a foundational chapter in the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ+ rights today.
Sources
Armstrong, Elizabeth A., and Suzanna M. Crage. “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth.” American Sociological Review 71, no. 5 (October 1, 2006): 724–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240607100502.
Franke-Ruta, Garance. “An Amazing 1969 Account of the Stonewall Uprising.” The Atlantic, January 24, 2013. https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.soomopublishing.com/courses/USHistory2/Dick_Leitsch_Account_of_Stonewall.docx.
Gittings, Barbara, and Kay Lahusen. Interview by Marc Stein. Philadelphia, February 2, 1993. http://www.outhistory.org/exhibits/show/50th-ann/interviews.
Hall, Simon. “The American Gay Rights Movement and Patriotic Protest.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, no. 3 (2010): 536–62. https://doi.org/10.1353/sex.2010.0011.
Trowbridge, David J. A History of the United States: 1865 to Present. 3rd ed. Asheville, NC: Soomo Learning, 2017. First published 2012 by Flat World Knowledge (Boston).
Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna M. Crage, “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth,” American Sociological Review 71, no. 5 (October 1, 2006): 736, https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240607100502.
Armstrong and Crage, “Movements and Memory,” 737.
Armstrong and Crage, “Movements and Memory,” 737.
Simon Hall, “The American Gay Rights Movement and Patriotic Protest,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, no. 3 (2010): 51, https://doi.org/10.1353/sex.2010.0011.
Armstrong and Crage, “Movements and Memory,” 739.
Franke-Ruta, “An Amazing 1969 Account.”
Armstrong and Crage, “Movements and Memory,” 7.
Armstrong and Crage, “Movements and Memory,” 7.
Trowbridge, A History of the United States, 12.19.
Franke-Ruta, “An Amazing 1969 Account.”
13.Trowbridge, A History of the United States, 12.19.
Hall, “The American Gay Rights Movement,” 538.
Hall, “The American Gay Rights Movement,” 538.
Hall, “The American Gay Rights Movement,” 540.
Hall, “The American Gay Rights Movement,” 540.
Franke-Ruta, “An Amazing 1969 Account.”
Armstrong and Crage, “Movements and Memory,” 744.
Armstrong and Crage, “Movements and Memory,” 745.
Hall, “The American Gay Rights Movement,” 546.
Hall, “The American Gay Rights Movement,” 546.
Barbara Gittings and Kay Lahusen, interview by Marc Stein, Philadelphia, February 2, 1993, http://www.outhistory.org/exhibits/show/50th-ann/interviews.