The Stonewall Reader Quotes

“No matter that we were defending a Mafia club. The Stonewall was a symbol, just as the leveling of the Bastille had been. No matter that only six prisoners had been in the Bastille and one of those was Sade, who clearly deserved being locked up. No one chooses the right symbolic occasion; one takes what’s available.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“No, this wasn’t a 1960s student riot. Out there were the streets. There were no nice dorms for sleeping. No school cafeteria for certain food. No affluent parents to send us checks. There was a ghetto riot on home turf. We already had our war wounds. So this was just another battle. Nobody thought of it as history, herstory, my-story, your-story, or our-story. We were being denied a place to dance together. That’s all. The total charisma of a revolution in our CONSCIOUSNESS rising from the gutter to the gut to the heart and the mind was here. Non-existence (or part existence) was coming into being, and being into becoming. Our Mother Stonewall was giving birth to a new era and we were the midwives.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“This place was the “ART” that gave form to the feelings of our heartbeats. Here the consciousness of knowing you “belonged” nestled into that warm feeling of finally being HOME. And Home engenders love and loyalty quite naturally. So, we loved the Stonewall.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“The queens took the lead in the Stonewall Riots. They walked around in semi-drag with teased hair and false eyelashes on and they didn’t give a shit what anybody thought about them. What did they have to lose? Absolutely fucking nothing.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“I was with a group of queens, and we started walking up Christopher Street going, “Gay power! Gay power! Gay power!” We walked all the way to Eighth Avenue, and then we all looked at each other and said, “What do we do now?” So we turned round and walked all the way back down Christopher Street, still yelling, “Gay power!”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“Then everything changed with the Stonewall uprising toward the end of June 1969. And it wasn’t all those crewnecked white boys in the Hamptons and the Pines who changed things, but the black kids and Puerto Rican transvestites who came down to the Village on the subway...”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“For some historians, drag queens are not the ideal representatives of the LGBT community. 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.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“It has been over forty years since the Gay Liberation Front first took trans seriously, but the gay men who wore those shirts with the polo players or alligator emblems didn't want trans people as the representation of their community.
Their revisionist history has been accepted into popular culture because they were the ones with connections to publishers, the influence, as well as the money and time to sit back and write about what "really" happened.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“LGBT history is written, like most history, by the victors, those with the means and those with connections to power.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“When people are feeling fabulous, they don’t want to take any crap from anybody, particularly the cops.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“GLBT leaders like to criticize young gays for not taking the movement seriously, but don’t listen to them. Just remember that at Stonewall we were defending our right to have fun, to meet each other, and to have sex.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“Then there was the raid, the whimper heard round the world, the fall of our gay Bastille.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“In that bar, we were going to smash that rainbow.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“Defend the fairies!”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“I just want you all to know,” quipped a platinum blond with obvious glee, “that sometimes being homosexual is a big pain in the ass.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“Some say that Stonewall was the first time LGBTQ people fought back, which is also not true. Stonewall was preceded by earlier queer revolts such as the Cooper Do-nuts Riot in Los Angeles in 1959, the Dewey’s restaurant sit-in in Philadelphia in 1965, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco in 1966, and the protests against the raid of the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles in 1967, among many others. Scholars, participants, and the interested public also debate how many days the uprising lasted and who threw the first brick, the first bottle, or the first punch. And more, beyond any of these questions we wonder what these events that transpired fifty years ago mean to us today.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“The Kinsey Reports had already reassured people, straight and gay, how many adults had at least experimented with non-procreative sex—even kinky sex!”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“Every expression of manhood is a reassertion of this cock privilege. All men are male supremacists. Gay men are no exception to the maxim.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“You can’t call us fags anymore, we’re gay.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“One of the things I think about is if you were to take a history book and pull the bullshit out of it, find the truth, snatch out all the bullshit that’s in there, then you’re going to wind up with two or three pages.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“For some people the march was and will be one of the highest points in their lives. The courage that it took for some people to make those first steps from Sheridan Square into Sixth Avenue and out of the Village was the summoning up of a whole lifetime’s desire to finally come clear, to say the truth as it is, to expose themselves nakeder than any pinup boy in any flesh book, to show their heads as well as their bodies and to put their heads and souls where their bodies have been for so many years.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader