The Stonewall Reader

by New York Public Library

“You know, the guys there were so beautiful—they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.” It was the first time I had heard that crowd described as beautiful.

In New York I would become part of a new breed of gay men who didn’t slide easily into the popular and unfortunate stereotypes of the times—and

It was 1969 and Mattachine had become old. They were men in suits. We were men in jeans and T-shirts.

We were on the ground floor of the struggle for equality, and though some might have seen it as a sexual revolution, we saw it as defining ourselves. Years later a friend would remark, “Mark was so involved with the sexual revolution that he didn’t have time to participate.”

We had no idea why they came in, whether or not they’d been paid, wanted more payoffs, or simply wanted to harass the fags that night.

There was an odd, celebratory feel to it, the notion that we were finally fighting back and that it felt good.

At his direction several of us wrote on walls and on the ground up and down Christopher Street: Meet at Stonewall tomorrow night. How did Marty know that this night could create something that would change our community forever?

Stonewall would become a four-night event and the most visible symbol of a movement. We united for the first time: lesbian separatists, gay men in fairy communes, people who had been part of other civil rights movements but never thought about one of their own, young gay radicals, hustlers, drag queens, and many like me who knew there was something out there for us, but didn’t know what it was. It found us. So, to the NYPD, thank you. Thank you for creating a unified LGBT community and thank you for becoming the focal point for years of oppression that many of us had to suffer growing up. You represented all those groups and individuals that wanted to keep us in our place.

Oppression within oppression was and is still of concern. Even recently, with the transgender issue finally being taken seriously, there is still a backlash from the community about including them in the general gay movement.

It was, in a sense, their home. The management’s job, according to their deal with the police, was to keep the queens in order. One night, like Stonewall, the queens decided they didn’t want to be controlled any longer.

Garland meant a little something to us, as she did for many groups—“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”—but that was it. And, honestly, that song was wishful thinking, an anthem for the older generation.

There are several theories as to what contributed to Garland’s status as a gay icon. According to Richard Dyer, author of Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, reverence of Garland among gay men took on a new form in 1950, when she broke off her contract with MGM and forged a rejuvenated career off the back of the success of 1954’s A Star Is Born and her on-stage endeavors. Not only did her image “speak to different elements within male gay subcultures,” writes Dyer, but she came to represent “gay men’s resilience in the face of oppression,” stemming from the perception of her as a star who had been knocked down only to triumphantly rise back up again. A comment from one fan, included in Heavenly Bodies, says “her audience, we, the gay people, could identify with her…could relate to her in the problems she had on and off stage.” Garland’s funeral in New York City has also been cited by many as a cause for the Stonewall Riots, which launched a new wave of LGBT activism. Thousands of fans turned out to pay their respects to Garland at her funeral on June 27, 1969. That night, the popular gay bar the Stonewall Inn was raided by police, as such establishments were commonly targeted during that era; but this time, the patrons fought back. The role that Garland’s funeral played in the Stonewall uprising has been debated for years: Several LGBTQ historians have said that there is a lack of evidence to connect the two events. However, others say that while her funeral may not have directly caused the uprising, the outpouring of grief at her passing heightened emotions among the community. “People who say that it trivializes [Stonewall], to say that it’s connected to Judy Garland, don’t understand how stars and other cultural objects can have tremendous meaning,” Petersen said on You Must Remember This.

The police represented every institution of America that night: religion, media, medical, legal, and even our families, most of whom had been keeping us in our place.

They had their riot gear on. In those days the New York City police had a guerrilla-prone cadre of their ranks known as the Tactical Police Force, the TPF. That’s who came. Who knows whether this thing would have escalated beyond that had they not come in? Because that’s what they always look for. They want a confrontation.

And this, I thought, you know, it was like Jesse Jackson used to say, rocks through windows don’t open doors. I felt this . . . I was horrified. I mean, the last thing to me that I thought at the time they were setting back the gay liberation movement twenty years, because I mean all these TV shows and all this work that we had done to try to establish legitimacy of the gay movement that we were nice middle-class people like everybody else and, you know, adjusted and all that. And suddenly there was all this, what I considered riffraff.

But it literally took Stonewall, and here I was considered the first militant and a visionary leader of the gay movement, to not even realize when the revolution, if you want to call it this, this thing that I thought would never happen, that a small nuclei of people would become a mass social movement was occurring—I was against it.

We went out and made that money off the streets to keep these kids off the streets. We already went through it. We wanted to protect them. To show them that there was a better life.

RIVERA: The community is always embarrassed by the drag queens.

Oh, people got hurt, because, you know, we weren’t baseball players. When the gays were throwing things, they were hitting the wrong people.

Because we’re fighters. Now we start to realize, and I think that is the beginning of gay liberation. You know, now we realize what we can do. Now we realize to put together the powers we did have.

White makes the unique point that the riot was ultimately fought for the right to pleasure.

Of course the Suffolk County police couldn’t control what went on in the dunes or along the shore at night, but in discos in both Cherry Grove and the Pines, every group of dancing men had to include at least one woman. A disco employee sat on top of a ladder and beamed a flashlight at a group of guys who weren’t observing the rule.

Angry lesbians, angrier drag queens, excessive mourning, staggering heat, racial tensions, the examples of civil disobedience set by the women’s movement, the antiwar protesters, the Black Panthers—all the elements were present and only a single flame was needed to ignite the bonfire.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms staged the raid, since they’d discovered the liquor bottles in the bar were bootlegged and that the local police precinct was in cahoots with the Mafia owners.

No one chooses the right symbolic occasion; one takes what’s available.

Also, there are different degrees of transvestism. There are some men who are very straight and only have sex with women, but get excited over wearing panties and a dress. Then there are those men such as myself, who want to live as women and go to the extreme of shooting hormones and undergoing electrolysis treatments so they can look real.

Eventually, he professed his love and said he’d do anything for her. Well, she of course pounced on the opportunity and told him she wanted a pussy. And not the kind with nine lives, if you get my drift. So Sonny robbed a bank to get her one. Boy, was he a fool for love. The story made the headlines and became the inspiration for the film Dog Day Afternoon.

The Stonewall was frequented by a lot of unique people going through major gender changes. We flocked there because it was a place where we were fawned over. We were treated like women, and as far as we knew, we were women. The black “girls” tried to look like the Supremes and the white “girls” tried to look like the Shangri-Las.

went to the Stonewall that night, but left early, wandering through the thick humidity, feeling it cling to me as I thought to myself, “Judy’s dead. Wow.” She died of a drug overdose and I felt bad for her, but it didn’t stop me from tampering with the same stuff. I felt it would never happen to me; overdoses were for “other people.”

The Stonewall riots became a milestone for the gay community not only because it was the biggest gay riot in history, but because it was the first time Miss Marsha got on TV! Darling, she made the six o’clock news, and she appeared so worldly for a girl of the gutter. Even her wig was on straight. I’m surprised they didn’t erect a statue of Miss Marsha on top of Sheridan’s shoulders, waving a pint of Cucamonga in honor of her carryings on.

The bars were getting raided regularly, and people just got fed up. There was something in the air anyway; riots were happening a lot in America at that time—anti-Vietnam, anti-police, anti-whatever. If you were out and you heard something was happening, you’d say, “Oh, let’s go and be in the demonstration!”

Nowadays, the Stonewall Riots are regarded as the birth of gay liberation, but for me and the other street queens, it wasn’t such an amazingly important thing; we were already out there.

But anyway, I started talking about that night, those seven or eight people that were arrested did not make that riot, did not make that rebellion, did not make that uproar. It was every fucking person that showed up in the thousands that made it.

And I try to tell people, especially young folks, you know, it’s like, I’d seen everybody there, you know—don’t let it be whitewashed that it was only these white people that did this, because I’d seen every shade, every color, every body image there that night.

And the few, the one or two black guys that they would tolerate were just, either super built or super fine. And into the leather scene.

And this division within the alphabet soup thing, has been there, from what I can tell, from time immemorial. Lesbians don’t wanna deal with fags, fags don’t wanna deal with the lesbians, bisexual guys don’t want to deal with d’s, butch lesbians don’t want to be bothered with trans men

But having been there and getting my ass knocked out, why wasn’t it better for my community afterwards? Why all of a sudden were we still like rugs to the rest of the community?

And I had learned from some friends in Chicago, if you’re ever in a situation with a cop, do something to piss him off enough to knock you out. ’Cause if they don’t knock you out, they will continue to beat your ass till they break bones in your body.

And so it behind that it became a matter of what do we do to keep this going. You know, to maintain it. I didn’t know a thing about that fucking parade till I saw it on TV. Someone should’ve told us, or made us aware of what was going on. You know and it was just, it was a hard pill to swallow. And one of the things, as a black person I learned that history is one big lie. It has to do with the person that’s writing it, not the facts that went on. And perception plays ninety percent part in what that asshole puts down on paper.

We’re sick of the Panthers lumping us together with the capitalists in their term of universal contempt—“faggot.”

Your friendly smile of acceptance—from the safe position of heterosexuality—isn’t enough.

But the internal violence of being made to carry—or choosing to carry—the load of your straight society’s unconscious guilt—this is what tears us apart, what makes us want to stand up in the offices, in the factories and schools and shout out our true identities.

The roles are beginning to wear thin. The makeup is cracking. The roles—breadwinner, little wife, screaming fag, bulldyke, James Bond—are the cardboard characters we are always trying to fit into, as if being human and spontaneous were so horrible that we each have to pick on a character out of a third-rate novel and try to cut ourselves down to its size. And you cut off your homosexuality—and we cut off our heterosexuality.

TAKE A LESBIAN TO LUNCH! SUPERDYKE LOVES YOU! WOMEN’S LIBERATION IS A LESBIAN PLOT. WE ARE YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE, YOUR BEST FANTASY.

“Wow, I really need to hear this tonight. I thought I could put off dealing with my feelings for a woman for at least two more years.” That statement struck a chord with many of the other nonlesbians in the audience.

Black women and members of a class workshop used the stage and then workshops to address how the conference reflected racism and classism in the Women’s Liberation Movement.

For lesbians, the best thing that emerged from the Lavender Menace action was the group of protesters itself—the first post-Stonewall group to focus on lesbian issues.

Radical Radishes because so many of our members were red (Marxist) on the outside but white (capitalist) within.

Heterosexual men are driven to abuse women because they can’t directly express the love they have for each other. They literally fuck their friends’ women because they are unable to fuck their friend.

Gay men are violently driven toward a false goal: the mutation of homosexuality into a male heterosexual personae. This results in the constant struggle of gay men to fit themselves into a heterosexual ideation of manhood. The gay man is asked to love, emulate, and worship his oppressor.

G.L.F. men have either avoided or attacked the most important movement in the world today: the struggle for the liberation of women. Any organization which does not recognize this struggle is objectively counter-revolutionary.