Marsha P. Johnson hands out flyers for support of gay students at N.Y.U., 1970. Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections

A History of Stonewall, the Riot That Started the LGBTQ Revolution

06.28.19

In the early hours of June 28, 1969, a riot broke out at a rundown gay bar in New York City. Today the Stonewall uprising is famous around the world as a clash that helped spark a gay political revolution. Brian and Nathan talk to scholars and participants and discover how Stonewall led to a wave of activism, protest and political agitation.

This episode and related resources are funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this show, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

LGBTQ rights; Stonewall riots; commemoration; queer bars; queer history; rebellion

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A History of Stonewall Lesson Set

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In the early morning hours of June 28th, 1969, police officers raided The Stonewall Inn, a well-known gay bar in New York City. These types of raids occurred regularly and without incident at other gay bars and nightclubs in the city. However, on this night, patrons of the bar stayed outside and protested the police interference into their lives. Though this moment was not well-covered by the national media, it became a turning point in the fight for equal rights in the gay community. Many historians credit this demonstration as the spark that launched many different LGBTQ groups to form and start a more coordinated movement for equality. It also represents another challenge to the social and political status quo of the 1960s.

This lesson, and the corresponding BackStory episode, focus the legacy of the uprising at Stonewall Inn. Because of the personal nature of many of the accounts presented, encourage students to focus on the events from a historical lens.

Segments

The Revolution Started Here

The Stonewall Inn was a down-at-heel gay bar run by the mob, but when the cops raised it on June 28th 1969 it kicked off a revolution in LGBTQ politics. Brian and Nathan hear from scholars and participants in the Stonewall Uprising.

Music:

Motown Man by Eric Bolvin

LGBTQ rights; Stonewall riots; activism; gay rights movement

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Announcer: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Speaker 2: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Nathan: We’re going to start today’s show in the wee hours of the 28th of June 1969 with a police raid on a gay bar. A raid which would set off an earthquake that is still being registered today.

Lillian F.: From all accounts it was a shabby place with watered down drinks, much too expensive. But I think that gay men, in particular, and a few lesbians, loved the place because of the dance floor, which I have heard from a number of people who habituated the place that it was the best dance floor in all of New York for gay people.

Nathan: That’s the LGBTQ scholar, Lillian Faderman. The name of the bar she’s describing has entered the iconography of gay life.

Lillian F.: Officially, it wasn’t even a bar. They did not have a liquor license. It was supposed to be a private club and when you came you were supposed to sign in. People signed in with names such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. And that was the way the mob supposedly got around getting a liquor license.

Nathan: Run by the mob, the shabby Stonewall Inn was about to become a flash point in the battle over gay rights.

Speaker 2: Christopher Mitchell is researching New York City’s queer economic and cultural history from the 1940s to the 1970s. What was Greenwich Village like in the late 1960s?

Christopher M.: One of the things that’s happening in the 1960s is you see more and more businesses and more and more economic activity that’s geared towards queer consumers. Stonewall has opened a couple of years before the riots. And it’s written about in gay guides that are published in the late 1960s as a place that is fun to go to because you can dance and you can find cute people to hook up with.

Christopher M.: But there’s also this idea that you should beware of the Stonewall Bar and beware of the people that work there. There’s a warning in one of the Mattachine guides about blackmail and the fact that Ed Murphy the Skull, the infamous enforcer, is taking people’s personal information and then blackmailing them with it.

Speaker 2: One of the gay men living in Greenwich Village 50 years ago was the novelist, Edmund White.

Edmund White: At the time of the Stonewall rioter uprising, I was 29. I was working for Time Life. Not for Time Magazine but for their book division, and I was living in the village, and I was sort of a office worker by day and a beatnik by night, and going out to discos a lot. I would come home from work, go right to bed, then wake up after my disco nap around midnight and then go out on the prowl.

Edmund White: Stonewall was two big rooms, people think of it as a disco but it really just had a jukebox. It had a lot of gay favorites on the jukebox. When you entered. It had a long bar on the right. In order to enter, it had a small door. It was a mafia bar, so you had to go past a kind of big, fat, mafia guard who had a dead cigar in his mouth, and who would sort of, if you looked gay enough, would let you in. And then you’d go to the bar, which was horribly unhygienic, because they didn’t have running water. And they would wash out their glasses in dirty water. It was really pretty awful, and they charged more than people ordinarily would. But you could buy a beer, which was, I guess, safe enough.

Edmund White: In the first room, people danced around the jukebox, but never more than 20 people. And then in the next room, it was dark. They did just sit quietly on banquets along the wall and talk, and kiss maybe, I don’t know. When I first started going, it was mainly just white boys who lived in the village. But by the time of the Stonewall uprising, it was mainly kids who were coming down from Harlem. Black and Puerto Rican kids who were a different population, really. And probably much fiercer than the silly white boys would have been. I mean, when there was an actual uprising, they were kids who were used to confronting the cops and fighting back.

Lillian F.: In the wee hours of June 28th, the police raided nothing unusual. They often did that. They would come in, ask to see people’s IDs. If the ID didn’t suggest that they were a minor, or that they were trying to, quote, pass by disguising themselves as the other gender, quote, unquote. People would then be released and those that there was any suspicion about would be arrested.

Lillian F.: But this time, when people were released, what would usually happen if somebody was released in a raid is they would just run off. They would just be so happy to have gotten away without being arrested and taken down to the police station. But this time, people got out of the Stonewall and didn’t run off. They stayed around waiting for their friends and eventually a crowd accumulated.

Nathan: The writer and his story of the LGBTQ civil rights movement, David Carter, agreed to meet BackStory outside the Stonewall Inn in New York.

David Carter: Well essentially people collected in the street outside, and the crowd grew and grew mainly from passersby, and the feeling of the crowd went back and forth between humor and anger. And when the first patrol wagon came up to take prisoners away, the mood of the crowd darkened. And then they saw some people who were exiting being treated roughly by the cops, so that what made them angrier. And what really turned it was there was a lesbian, who was in handcuffs, apparently been hit on the head inside, was being brought out, and she was struggling with the police. They put her in a patrol car, she escaped.

David Carter: She tried to get back inside the Stonewall Inn. They put her back in. She escaped again, and she fought them ferociously and was being treated roughly by the police. And she said to the crowd, “Why don’t you guys do something?” And so the third time they heaved her body into the patrol car. And that’s when thing erupted. And then when the police retreated inside the bar, that made the crowd even … how can I say, that really unleashed the full fury because they thought we have the upper hand. They retreated.

Edmund White: Well being a little middle class twerp, I of course didn’t like the idea of people being violent and protesting the sacred police, so my first reaction was to try to say, “Oh, come on guys, let’s calm down, just calm down. Run away.” But then the excitement of the protest unleashed all these feelings even in me. People began to chant, “Gay is good,” which was supposed to be a parody of black is beautiful. So right away, I think people began to see themselves as an oppressed minority. In their way you could say the most important thing that happened at the Stonewall uprising was that gays went from feeling that they were a diagnosis to feeling that they were a minority.

Edmund White: The cops had a big paddy wagon, a black [inaudible 00:08:48] out front. And they hauled off. There were like maybe 20 people who worked in the bar and they were all hauled … or half of them were hauled off. And then the cops stayed barricaded inside the bar with the rest of them and the truck would come back and pick them up too.

Edmund White: But we all started protesting. I mean some customers were also arrested, the more flamboyant ones. But it was mainly the staffs. So anyway, while the cops were away and the other cops were barricaded inside the bar, people began to use battering rams. They pulled up parking meters and began to ram the doors, which were very heavy, thick, wood doors with these battering rams. They would take waste paper out of waste baskets and throw it against the door and light it with a lighter. That was a period when people were pretty violent and even in protests. And then the cops sent reinforcements and pretty soon the whole area was a war zone.

David Carter: People were just grabbing anything they could grab, that they could throw. There was some construction going on up here at the corner, they … a pile of bricks. So they were able to access to bricks there. Because there was a trench cut in the street, it was easier to get … called a cobblestones at this time, the street was not asphalt, but cobblestones.

David Carter: There were Belgian Blocks in the pits around the trees here, now as then. So there was a parking meter that had been hit by a vehicle that was loose, and that was uprooted to attack the doors to the Stonewall. And the wooden backing behind the two windows … people went to this cigar store right there and got lighter fluid, tried to set the place on fire. A trash can was set on fire and thrown through the window. Before that just a trash can had been thrown the window, it was one of the first things, is to break the glass, on this side with a trash can that was right next to … now you see the trash cans around containers. Back then they were just sitting out in the street.

David Carter: Everybody after the Civil Rights Act of ’64 and ’65, every minority was standing up for itself. Everybody that had a grievance was standing up and complaining, and demanding change and getting in the news, so I think that was part of what it was too, well if everybody else is standing up and demanding their rights, why shouldn’t we?

Nathan: Martin Boyce was a patron of the Stonewall who took part in the riot. This is how he remembers that night.

Martin Boyce: It was a huge riot and the loudest thing in a riot is silence. The whole street was silent. and the most important thing for us was to provoke the police to attack us because then we had time to run. Had they attacked us unprovoked, we didn’t have any time to get ready for what they were going to do. And there’s a thumping, and the crowd parted, and here comes the tactical police patrol. Like testeronic dread, shields, face shields, gas, clubs, guns, everything.

Martin Boyce: They’re made to put down a major riot in a major way. And they came … we just looked, and they looked, and I could not believe. They were called in to fight a bunch of yelly queers. But they didn’t attack right away, so we had to provoke them and it’s uncanny the way a herd can think. Sometimes so properly, so rationally. I would have never thought that. But this was right rational. We all grabbed each other and they a form a kick line, did a Rockette kick and sang one of our ditties, Throughout the Village Girls.

Martin Boyce: We were our era, and the police attacked. That was the first time they attacked, and you could see that if we kept this going and kept them chasing. And we knew the village like the Indians do the forest. We could wear them down because their drag was too heavy. Sure enough they were worn out very quickly. Well it was a feeling of valor, comradeship, something we never felt. We always felt like we got out of something. We were the victims that got out of something. Here we were the perpetrators that got into something. That was a good feeling because queens didn’t feel that way much.

Lillian F.: It was so dramatic, it was the first time that gay people fought back in huge numbers. Not the first time that they protested, there had been significant protests of police raids in Los Angeles in a bar called The Black Cat, another one at a bar called The Patch. There had been protests in San Francisco of police raids in the Compton’s Cafeteria. But it was the first time, I think, that huge crowds gathered, and were angry enough to throw things and to fight back. And the raids went on for several nights.

Nathan: But the violent clashes with the cops were motivated by more than just a botched police raid on a single gay bar. It took place at a time when civil rights struggle of all kinds were daily in the news, and political activism was increasingly direct and confrontational. Lillian Faderman.

Lillian F.: This was at the very end of the 1960s. This was June in 1969. An entire decade of activism and angry responses to authority. There was the black civil rights movement. There was the anti-Vietnam War movement. There was the women’s movement. There was a Puerto Rican movement. And New York was so much the center of all of these things and so young people on the nightly news would see that there was a lot of anger out there. And the anger was often demonstrated by riots or angry protests. And I think that the young people who were at the Stonewall that night were very angry too. The Stonewall had recently been raided and this was another raid. And other gay bars in Greenwich Village were raided. And so I think the mood of anger had been brewing throughout the decade.

Lillian F.: But it came to a head that night. The media did not get it. The New York Times had a little article about the Stonewall raids, on page 33, talking about how policeman had been hurt in a melee at a Greenwich Village bar. And that was it. That was the emphasize about the policeman who were hurt. The Village Voice had articles that two reporters wrote, very detailed articles. But for the most part mocking about the gay people at the Stonewall Inn. Another New York paper had a headline that said that a nest of homosexuals was raided and quote, “The queen bees are stinging mad,” sort of mocking the anger of the gay kids at the Stonewall.

Lillian F.: Other newspapers elsewhere around the country, didn’t pay much attention to it. There was even at that time a new gay newspaper in Los Angeles called the Los Angeles Advocate, which became and still is the leading LGBTQ magazine now in the country. But they thought that it was something significant that kids at the Stonewall Inn fought back. But for the most part, not much attention was paid to it except in Greenwich Village. And I think Stonewall has become the icon that it’s become because, just a few days after the riots, young people gathered and started a new organization called the Gay Liberation Front.

Lillian F.: The radicality of that organization is indicated just by its name. It was named after the communist Vietnam National Liberation Front. This was after all the days of the protest against the war in Vietnam, and many of these young people had been involved in those protests. The Gay Liberation Front, just the name caught the imagination of gay people all over the country in various cities everywhere in Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and Chicago, and Philadelphia. Groups propped up using that name or a name similar to the Gay Liberation Front.

Lillian F.: But I think the most important thing that the New York Gay Liberation Front did is they decided that the riots needed to be commemorated. And so one year after the riots they decided they wanted a big parade throughout New York to celebrate the fact that gay people finally fought back. And it was a pride parade and they asked other cities to join in. Los Angeles did, Los Angeles had a parade commemorating the riots at the same time.

Lillian F.: In June of 1970, there was a big parade down Hollywood Boulevard with about a 1000 people. San Francisco had a very small march, and Chicago had a small march, but that was the beginning of the pride parades that every year commemorated the riots. And of course now, the pride parades are all over the world to not only commemorate the Stonewall riots, but also to celebrate LGBTQ people as we call the community now and to demand LGBTQ rights.

United We Stand?

In May 2019, New York City announced plans to create a statue to transgender political activist Marsha P. Johnson who had taken part in the Stonewall Uprising and contributed to a range of LGBTQ political movements.

Eric Marcus, creator and host of the Making Gay History podcast, brings us an interview with Marsha P. Johnson and her room mate, the mainstream gay political activist Randy Wicker.

Music:

Lonely Jazz Trumpet by Colin Willsher

LGBTQ rights; Stonewall riots; activism; gay rights movement

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Nathan: So today on BackStory we’re chasing the long term impact of the Stonewall uprising.

Speaker 2: In May 2019, New York City announced plans to build a new monument to two transgender women political activists.

Nathan: Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were long time campaigners for gay and transgender rights. The monument will sit just a few blocks from the Stonewall Inn in New York. BackStory’s friend Eric Marcus, presenter of the podcast, Making Gay History, interviewed Marsha P. Johnson. He found her living in New Jersey alongside an activist from the establishment wing of the gay right’s movement, Randy Wicker. Here’s an extract from that interview. Marsha speaks first.

Marsha Johnson: Well guys, I winded up being at Stonewall that night. I was having a party uptown and we were all out there. And Ms. Sylvia and Rivera and them were over in the park having a cocktail. I was uptown and I didn’t get downtown until about 2:00. Because when I got downtown the place was already on fire and there was a raid already. The riots had already started and they said the police went in there and set the place on fire. They said the police set it on fire because they originally wanted the Stonewall to close so they had several raids. And there was just Tiffany and oh this other drag queen that used to work there in the coat check room, and then they had all these bartenders.

Marsha Johnson: And the night before the Stonewall riots started, before they closed the bar, we were all there and we all had lined up against the wall and they were all searching us.

Eric Marcus: The police were?

Marsha Johnson: Yeah they searched every single body that came here because the place was supposed to be closed, and they opened anyway. Because every time the police came, what they would do, they would take the money from the coat check room and take the money from the bar. So if they heard the police were coming, they would take all the money and hide it up under the bar in these boxes out of the register. And you know, and sometimes they would hide it like under the floor or something.

Eric Marcus: So what did-

Marsha Johnson: So when they got … by when the police got in all they got was the bartender’s tips.

Eric Marcus: Who went to the Stonewall?

Marsha Johnson: Well, at first it was just a gay men’s bar. And they didn’t allow no women in. And then they started allowing women in. And then they let drag queens in. I was one of the first drag queens to go to that place. Because we were sitting … when we first heard about this, and then they had these drag queens working there. They didn’t never arrest anybody at the Stonewall. All they did was line us up and tell us to get out.

Eric Marcus: Were you one of those that got in the chorus lines and kicked their heels up at the police? Like Ziegfeld Follies Girls or Rockettes?

Marsha Johnson: Oh no! No, we were too busy running over cars and screaming in the middle of the street because we were so upset because they closed that place.

Eric Marcus: What were you screaming in the street?

Marsha Johnson: Huh?

Eric Marcus: What did you say to the police?

Marsha Johnson: We just was saying no more police brutality and oh, we had enough of police arrests in the Village and other places. Oh, it was a lot of little chants we used to do in those days.

Eric Marcus: Were there lots of people hurt in Stonewall that night during the riots?

Marsha Johnson: They weren’t hurt at the Stonewall. They were hurt on the streets outside of the Stonewall because people were throwing bottles and the police were out there with those clubs and things and their helmets on, some riot helmets.

Eric Marcus: Were you afraid of being arrested?

Marsha Johnson: Oh no, because I’ve been going to jail for like 10 years before the Stonewall. I was going to jail because I was originally up on 42nd Street. And every time we go on out to hustle all the time, they would just get us and tell us we were under arrest.

Eric Marcus: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Randy Wicker: See I’ve … Stonewall, I shouldn’t start on this note, but it puts me in the worst night because for the time Stonewall happened, I was running my button shop in East Village, and for all the years in Mattachine, and you see the pictures of me on TV, I’m wearing a suit and tie and I had spent 10 years of my life going around telling people homosexuals look just like everybody else. We didn’t all wear makeup, and wear dresses, and have falsetto voices, and molest kids, and were communists and all this.

Randy Wicker: And all of the sudden Stonewall broke out and there were reports in the press of chorus lines of queens kicking up their heels at the cops like Rockettes, we are the Stonewall girls. I thought, it was like Jesse Jackson used to say, “Rocks and 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 20 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 adjusted and all that. And suddenly, there was all this, what I considered riffraff, and I gave a speech. I was asked a speech.

Eric Marcus: [inaudible 00:25:56].

Randy Wicker: I was asked to speak at the Electric Circus which was a major … [inaudible 00:26:06]. Marsha you just got me. Where are you going? What were you doing?

Marsha Johnson: It’s trying to gagging.

Randy Wicker: Oh she’s outside.

Marsha Johnson: Yeah, come on sweetie.

Eric Marcus: I’ve got the … here it is. It’s up here. The little a …

Marsha Johnson: Cookie.

Eric Marcus: I’ll find-

Marsha Johnson: Watch out. [inaudible 00:26:23].

Randy Wicker: God you’re so dumb.

Marsha Johnson: You think so?

Eric Marcus: Okay, you were saying about Stonewall.

Randy Wicker: Yeah I was saying I was running my shop in East Village, the button shop, the big hippie shop and when this happened I was horrified because it was civil disorder. Somewhere I saw a picture from the Stonewall, and it had a big sign up from the Mattachine Society, which was one of my base groups. It said the Mattachine Society asked citizens to obey the poli- … Not obey the police but to respect law and order. To act in a lawful manner. In other words, the Mattachine itself was basically a conservative organization, and they asked me to speak at the Electric Circus.

Randy Wicker: And I got up and said that I did not think that the way to win public acceptance was to go out and form chorus lines and drag queens kicking your feet up at the police. And I was just beginning to speak, and one of the bouncers of the Electric Circus found out that it was a gay thing that the guy up there talking was gay and somebody standing next to him, he said to them, “Are you one of them?” And the guy said, “Yes,” and he began beating the hell out of him. And this riot broke out in the Electric Circus. And I remember driving him home because the kid was only about 21 or 22 years old and he said, “All I know is that I’ve been in this movement for three days, and I’ve been beaten up three times.” I mean he had a black eye, and a puffed up face, and serious damage.

Marsha Johnson: Uh-huh (affirmative). It was terrible.

Randy Wicker: But the thing was that you would go with the new thing and it shows that what my generation did, we built the ideology. Are we sick? Aren’t we sick? What are the signs to think back? How we’ve been brainwashed by society. We’ve put together when Lenin, I mean Karl Marx wrote the book. That’s what we did. But it literally took Stonewall, and here I was considered the first militant and a visionary near the gay movement, to not even realize when the revolution, if you want to call it, 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. Now I’m very happy Stonewall happened. I’m very happy the way things worked out.

Eric Marcus: So you mentioned an organization that Marsha and you are involved with. What was the name of-

Randy Wicker: Street Trans-

Marsha Johnson: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with Ms. Sylvia Rivera.

Randy Wicker: Star.

Eric Marcus: What was that group about? What was it for?

Marsha Johnson: It was a group for transvestites.

Randy Wicker: It was a bunch of-

Marsha Johnson: Men and women transvestites.

Randy Wicker: It was a bunch of flaky transvestites living in a hovel and a slum somewhere calling themselves revolutionaries. That’s what it was in my opinion, now Marsha has a different idea.

Eric Marcus: What’s your opinion?

Marsha Johnson: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries started out as a very good group. It was after Stonewall, they started a GAA. Mama Jean DeVente, who used to be the marshal for all the parades, she was the one that talked Sylvia Rivera into leaving GAA because Sylvia Rivera who was the president of STAR was a member of GAA, and start a group of her own. And so she started Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and she asked me would I come and be the vice president of that organization.

Nathan: Johnson continued her activism and became a member of Aids activist group, ACT UP. In 1992, Marsha P. Johnson’s body was found in the Hudson River. Her death was initially deemed suicide. But authorities later changed this designation to drowning from undetermined causes. The case remains open.

How Stonewall Became Stonewall

Why are we remembering the Stonewall Uprising 50 years on? Brian explores the long term impact of the riots with our guests Edmund White, Lillian Faderman, Christopher Mitchell and David Carter.

Music:

Just Outside Full by Juan Mares

LGBTQ rights; Stonewall riots; activism; commemoration; gay rights movement

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 2: Today the name Stonewall is attached to gay rights groups around the world. Lillian Faderman.

Lillian F.: I think Stonewall deserves to be remembered in that it was this very dramatic incident that triggered important things that followed such as the Gay Liberation Front that was formed just a week or so after Stonewall. The parades all over the country formed initially to honor Stonewall, but now hundreds of thousands of people show up to those parades and in the beginning they did it in the name of Stonewall. I think it needs to be remembered as this icon that ignited the organization of these various groups that went on to do other important things. There’s a direct line, I think, between Stonewall and the Gay Liberation Front in the beginning and then out of the gay liberation front, a group called the Gay Activists Alliance that did nothing but fight for gay rights as it was called in the early 1970s.

Lillian F.: And then the establishment of all these mainstreaming organizations that knew how to fight in the courts, such as Lambda Legal and the National Gay Rights Lobby knew how to fight in Washington. Would those groups have been established had it not been for the trigger of Stonewall? Very possibly, but I think that Stonewall rushed them into being because it was this huge explosion or in the words of this gay wit in 1969, immediately after the riots, this hairpin drop heard around the world.

Speaker 2: So how did the riot of June 1969 become such a turning point in the story of LGBTQ politics? Christopher Mitchell.

Christopher M.: There is this organizational cascade after Stonewall. Gay Liberation Front organizations are founded across the country and through a combination of media and word of mouth, there is this kind of immediate moment of national organizing. And it’s not coordinated. And it kind of spontaneous but it all seems to be inspired either directly by or indirectly by the events at Stonewall in late June 1969. And so that’s significant. It was almost immediately seen as this major turning point event and that’s why you have the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee organizing within a few months to try to commemorate the event.

Christopher M.: And I think that they knew that if they didn’t keep that momentum rolling, and if they didn’t mark the event in some kind of way, it would just end up being like the other uprisings that had occurred in New York City but also around the area. I mean kind of a riot at a donut shop in LA and maybe a donut shop in Philadelphia. I mean but it happens in places where gay people hang out. Usually, diners, late night donut shops kind of places. And then bars, gay bars.

Christopher M.: What is it that makes Stonewall stick out? Well it’s kind of the right combination of events and people. And also the fact that it’s really big, and it lasts a long time. It was an event that really disrupted the Village and it didn’t stop. Most other events stop within a few hours. The riot, the first night, went on for hours, and hours, and hours. Then people came back and did it the next night, and then a third night.

Christopher M.: So when something like that happens, when it’s sustained, you kind of think it’s tapping into some kind of energy. It’s tapping into a kind of potential for political action based on the preconditions that exist.

Speaker 2: Stonewall has become a storied event. Now seen as a turning point in American History. In his second inaugural speech, President Obama even spoke of the significance Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall. And there’s no doubt that in terms of gay self perception, Stonewall was transformative. Edmund White.

Edmund White: I mean now we’re used to saying things like gay community and acting as though gay people constitute a minority like Puerto Ricans or Jews or whatever. But in those days people didn’t think that way, it was gays were considered a sickness, and it was either a crime, or a sin, or a sickness, but those are the only three possibilities. And even gay people themselves subscribed to that. Many of us were in therapy trying to go straight, though we weren’t really attracted to members of the opposite sex.

Edmund White: Before Stonewall, so much of their energy went into being gay, into justifying their existence to their friends, or to themselves in disguising the truth of their life from their workmates and from their family. I mean, like, for instance, I would make up stories at work about my various girlfriends because I wanted to confide in my colleagues the way anybody else would, but I couldn’t tell them that it was men I was talking about, I had to pretend it was women.

Edmund White: So all that kind of falsity and double dealing, well it was abolished in a way by gay liberation, and in my case, I began to be able to write and publish books about gays, and I’ve written 25 books probably that mostly are about gay men’s lives. And so it made a huge change for me because I had submitted books, rather tormented books before Stonewall, and they’d always been rejected, including rejected by other gay men who were editors, and years later they would say to me, “Oh, I really like that book of yours, but I didn’t dare speak out for it because my colleagues would have known I was gay.” But after Stonewall, a bunch of us began to publish books with gay content.

Speaker 2: Though Stonewall is seen as the moment which united the gay community, it also revealed tensions between reformers and revolutionaries, men and women, conservative gays and drag queens, and between the generations. Christopher Mitchell.

Christopher M.: Groups that emerge after Stonewall are maybe unified for a minute or maybe they’re unified enough to put on a protest or a parade, but they’re not really unified enough to kind of construct a singular agenda so to speak. And if you look at some of the footage from the end of the marches in the early 1970s you’ll see activists fighting onstage. The most famous one is Sylvia Rivera being thrown off the stage trying to talk about trans rights and prisoners’ rights. And I think that’s in the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day protest.

Christopher M.: There is still a lot of conflicts between cis-gender people in the community and trans people in the community. There’s lots and lots of conflicts between lesbians and gay men over space and over representation, and those divisions were true and real in the 1970s and they’re just as true and real now. And Stonewall didn’t fix any of that.

End Riff

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Speaker 2: Nathan, obviously the events around Stonewall were incredibly important. But there had been protests before. There certainly had been police abuse before. Why 1969?

Nathan: Well I think it’s safe to say that there are a couple of different political streams that are all meeting in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s. One of them is absolutely this rising discontent with what had been really, more than a decade’s long targeting of gay spaces in the context of the Cold War, at least a generation that experienced Stonewall would likely have experienced firsthand.

Nathan: I mean, New York’s attacks on queer spaces go back to the turn of the 20th century, really. But I think it’s important too to recognize that you have the mid-1960s as a political awakening that we all recognize as being extraordinarily transformative. You have the women’s rights movement, you have the civil rights movement, and I don’t think it’s an accident that when you have these standoffs against the police in June of 1969, some of the most important elements of that moment are actually the repurposing of protest songs from the civil rights movement like We Shall Overcome or Black Power activists like the Black Panther Party riding in to support the protest against the police, or even the activists themselves using pretty charged language borrowed directly from the Black Power cadres that are making a national narrative about police brutality in really compelling ways in the period.

Nathan: And so I think it’s really a moment where you see the braiding together of different social movements in a space like New York that already has a tremendous amount of economic and ethnic diversity that also makes it fertile to reign, for the movement to really reach new heights in that period.

Speaker 2: And Nathan, I would add two additional elements from the period. I would talk about the police behavior in a series of urban rebellions, really starting in the mid-60s, continuing until the late 1960s. Almost all of which were started by some incident with the police. Lets just say treating a marginalized community inappropriately, we’ll leave it at that.

Speaker 2: But it was a well known fact documented in reports on these riots and urban rebellions, that many of them were started by the police prodding these communities and worse. And the second image which people have in their minds from the time or have read about is what was labeled a police riot at the Chicago Democratic Convention, where the police simply waded into non-violent protestors, beating them with billy clubs. A scene that when you start reading the descriptions of what happened at Stonewall sounds very familiar.

Nathan: Right, right. It’s an important aspect of this story, certainly, that you have a form of policing that is seen as being modern, seen as being really committed to law and order, in some cases at whatever costs in terms of populations that might be pushing back, whether they are communities of color, or anti-war protestors, or again, queer spaces of communion, these are all going to be flash-points or battle fronts in this debate over what modern policing is about.

Nathan: And ironically enough, even the battlefront of the press is at issue here, because when the Stonewall rebellion jumped off, it was covered as police being assaulted at a bar on a very distant back page of the New York Times, page 33. The headline is Cops Assaulted at Bar. So it becomes one way for the mainstream press to really minimize what happened at Stonewall, and really emphasize what happened to law enforcement.

Nathan: But I think you’re absolutely right that there is a way that many citizens are demanding changes to the way that law enforcement is engaging these communities, and that becomes one of the many variables in what makes Stonewall such a transformative moment, is that you’re actually raising the question of excessive policing, but along lines of sexuality as opposed to strictly along lines of race, which had already been well established.

Speaker 2: So how did this story move from page 33 of the New York Times to headlines if you will, when we think about the movements and the resistance of the late 60s and early 1970s.

Nathan: Well I think part of it is about the fact that it wasn’t just a one-off episode at a bar in Greenwich Village, that this was a multi-day protest that you had activists who eventually came to the space and really in some ways consecrated Stonewall as a sacred site in radical politics, and that the media couldn’t simply ignore this as a happening in the more conventional sense that we now understand it.

Nathan: I mean if you think about where many of the folks who might be either part of gay subculture in New York, many of them are going to be folks with professional connections, certainly people with certain kinds of skills, and of course there’s a broad swath of people who are coming at this from working class backgrounds with union membership or other kinds of political orientations with connections in the existing movement, culture around the civil rights and Black Power struggle.

Nathan: So this is a many headed struggle in the sense that you weren’t just going to have one small population represented in silence, but instead what happened was the lifting of a lid ultimately on a community that has so many diverse members that once a moment like Stonewall helped to politicize the gay rights struggle, it politicized struggles in middle class and working class corners, white and black corners, male and female corners.

Nathan: And so absent some massive suppression campaign on the part of the mainstream media, and not to say it didn’t try, or the New York Times didn’t try, there wasn’t really a way to keep a movement of that broad meaning hidden from the country much longer.

Speaker 2: You know, Nathan, I think one of the things that connects both the history and remembering the history of these varied movements is a sense of pride among the participants … a newfound sense of pride, I would say, public pride among groups previously marginalized.

Nathan: Yeah I think that’s right, I mean I just recently got back from a trip to New York, where they were celebrating Pride Week there, and this wasn’t in Greenwich Village near Stonewall, which actually I drove near. But I saw a massive poster in Penn Station celebrating Pride Week, and it was a drag queen, and this had to have been maybe a 17 by 20 foot poster there marking the history and marking the place of gay and transgender people in the city of New York.

Nathan: And we have Stonewall among other moments to think for that, the kind of politics of Stonewall, I should say, to think for that. Because it’s become now part of New York’s fabric in the most undeniable way, that the history of … and the presence, the now, of gay and bisexual and queer people is going to be part of what we understand the modern city to be, the modern country to be, and really modern notions of American is to be.

Speaker 2: Today we’ve been talking to Lillian Faderman, author of The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. Novelist Edmund White, author of The Beautiful Room Is Empty and many other novels of gay life.

Speaker 2: Christopher Mitchell, doctoral lecturer in Gender Sexuality Studies at Hunter College, and author of the forthcoming Gay Ghetto to Free Market: Entrepreneurship and the Transformation of Queer life in New York City.

Speaker 2: And David Carter, author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution.

Speaker 2: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org. Or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu.

Speaker 2: We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Speaker 2: Special thanks this week to our friends at the podcast MakingGayHistory.org, and the John Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

Speaker 2: Backstory’s produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the John Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Speaker 2: Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 2: Brian Balogh is professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond.

Speaker 2: Joanne Freeman is professor of History and American Studies at Yale University.

Speaker 2: Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

Speaker 2: Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.