Stonewall Rebellion

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Stonewall Rebellion

In the early hours of June 28, 1969 patrons of a gay men's bar in Greenwich Village, and their allies in the street, vigorously resisted a routine police raid. The event, which has been described as "the hairpin drop heard around the world," and as one of those "specific sparks that ignites protest," was both timely and inevitable. It came about during an era of cultural and social ferment, and after years of efforts on the part of homosexuals to gain a public voice and legitimate place in U.S. society. The Stonewall Rebellion became a "metaphor for emergence, visibility and pride," one that publicly affirmed the identity of a people burdened with a tradition of invisibility and abuse.

A variety of factors including modernity, changes in cultural and sexual mores, and a politicized environment have been identified as supporting the development of urban homosexual subcultures and subsequently a homosexual movement. In New York City, the geographic and cultural setting for these radical changes was established in the bohemian, avant-garde atmosphere that began developing in Greenwich Village during the 1940s. Significant influences included the Beat Culture, pop art, psychedelics, the New American Cinema, off-Broadway theatre, and the activist folk music scene. In short, the area was an incubator for oppositional attitudes toward convention and traditional authority and these attitudes spread across the country.

Cultural critic Daniel Harris, has also proposed that "diva worship," among male homosexuals, was another factor that unwittingly contributed to gay militancy. Since homosexual males had no other gay positive images, many projected themselves either into the tragic and resilient Judy Garland ("the ultimate bellwether of the docile gay masses"), or the "invincible personas" portrayed by the likes of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. In short, homosexuals "recycled the refuse of popular culture and reconstituted it into an energizing force." Homosexual militancy was also nurtured by the politicized atmosphere of the time. Since the 1950s, Mattachine, ONE, and Daughters of Bilitis had publicly advocated for respect and civil rights for homosexuals. In the 1960s, the activities and gains of the Civil Rights Movement and other social movements also promoted a new sense of hope and assertiveness among politicized homosexuals.

For some gay men, the death of Judy Garland a few days before the Stonewall uprising, symbolically transformed the stereotype of the quiet, suffering homosexual. Activist Alkarim Jivani observed that "Garland had been the archetypal gay icon because she represented bravery through adversity, but that bravery was characterized by a passive stoicism. With the death of Judy Garland, that image of the gay man died."

Meanwhile, for those who identified with the battling, invincible divas, the moment of truth was fast approaching. According to one report, the day of Judy's funeral was "sweltering and humid, and that night there was a full moon." Vito Russo, who later wrote a book on homosexual themes in U.S. films (The Celluloid Closet), recalled that "I was in a foul mood that night because of the funeral." Ira Kushner, who was 15 at the time, remembers standing outside the Stonewall as part of a crowd that had gathered to honor Garland. Then the police arrived.

At first the police arrested some of the younger men standing outside and then they went into the bar. As the patrons were roughly hustled out of the bar, it was those most used to confrontations with the police (drag queens, street people, students, and a few butches), who were in the vanguard of the resistance. Drag queen Rey "Sylvia Lee" Rivera recalled that "that night, everything clicked." Rivera and some of the people he knew were already involved in other social movements. He told himself, "Great, now it's my time. I'm out there being a revolutionary for everybody else, now it's time to do my own thing for my own people," according to E. Marcus' book, Making History. In the midst of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, counterculture, student and women's movements, patrons of the Stonewall bar refused to go quietly into the police van.

There are also reports that, as the tension increased, a well-placed spark was contributed by a butch in drag. She had been visiting a male friend in the bar. When the police pulled her out of the bar and into a police car, she struggled. When she was hit, the audience exploded. Coins (symbolizing the bribes paid to the police by the bars), an uprooted parking meter, bottles, fists, and insults flew. Queens engaged in campy street theatre that included sexual repartee aimed at the police and a chorus line singing "We are the Stonewall girls… " The bar was set on fire, the police called for reinforcements, and the melee escalated into a riot. Although this was not the first time that homosexuals had resisted police abuse, this time, there were significant political consequences.

While moderate homosexuals condemned the violence, more radical activists used the event as an organizing opportunity. In New York, the event galvanized those sympathetic to confrontation politics. By July, these activists had coalesced into the co-gender Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a name that suggested solidarity with Third World resistance movements, such as the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. Across the United States, scores of groups with the same name sprang up. GLF was the first of many homosexual activist groups of that era, most of whom were politically at odds with one another. What these groups did have in common was a radical commitment to the civil rights of homosexuals. The groups were loosely connected into a network known as the Gay Liberation Movement. By 1973 there were over 800 gay and lesbian groups and organizations in the United States.

Main Street U.S.A. took little notice of the Stonewall event. News of the riot was buried in the back pages of the New York Times. Other mass market publications such as Life, Newsweek, Time, and Harper's, which had previously published sympathetic articles about homosexuals, also failed to recognize the importance of the event. While the mainstream press missed the significance of Stonewall, the homosexual press which was politically moderate, treated the riot with ambivalence. The Advocate, a national gay male publication, published several reports, and one writer wondered if "the spark" set off by Stonewall, would endure. The Ladder, a national lesbian publication gave the event two pages of coverage, but the article did not appear until October of 1969.

After Stonewall, coverage of homosexual issues in the mainstream media increased significantly. In October of 1969, Time magazine featured the "Homosexual Movement" as a main story. The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, an index to popular magazines, listed nine entries on "sex perversion" in 1950, the year in which the first Homophile Organization (Mattachine) was founded. By 1970, The Reader's Guide listed thirty items under "homo-sexuality" and one under "lesbianism."

Gradually, the story of Stonewall came to occupy a central position in the folklore and chronology of U.S. gay and lesbian history. It remains so even in the face of claims that it was but one significant event in a long history of individual and collective resistance that spans 400 years of U.S. history. According to Martin Duberman, the event simply "gave meaning and coherence to a struggle that was already underway." However, to many, the special appeal of the Stonewall Rebellion is based on it being a defiant and defining moment that took place during an era filled with similar moments. As in the Boston Tea Party, the use of confrontation radicalized a movement that had, up to that time, relied on documents and discourse.

Since 1970, lesbians and gays in cities across the United States have held annual Gay Pride parades and rallies to commemorate the event. There have been significant turnouts in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. San Francisco's event attracts between 350,000 and 500,000 participants and onlookers. Unlike the celebrations of other marginalized groups, Gay Pride memorializes the public emergence of a people and a movement that are still outside the equal protection of the law and are widely unwelcome at the diverse cultural table of this nation.

Stonewall signifies a dividing line between the brave but understandably more conservative efforts of homophile groups founded during the McCarthy Era; those of liminal 1960s groups like the Society for Individual Rights in San Francisco and the Homosexual Action League in Philadelphia; and radical homosexual activists, many of whom had gained organizing skills and new political perspectives in other civil rights movements. The title of a well-known documentary film on gay and lesbian history, Before Stone-wall (1979), suggests that the event was a radical departure from the homophile era. For those who subscribed to the new liberation ethos, assimilation and dissimulation were out. Instead, they were inspired by slogans like "gay is good" and "out of the closets and into the streets." For these lesbians, gay men, and other "sexual outlaws," Stonewall was a watershed event, one that galvanized them into radical activism on behalf of an historically despised group. For a specific generation of activists, the event "became the symbol of an oppressed and invisible minority at last demanding its place in the sun," according to Wayne Dynes in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality.

—Yolanda Retter