50 years after Stonewall

The Stonewall riots were not the first attempt to push for equal treatment of the LGBT community, but it became an important rallying cry that fueled the gay-rights movement and is now commemorated every year during LGBT Pride Month.

Historian David Carter detailed the events of the raid in his book Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution.

Around 1:20 a.m. on Saturday, June 28 1969, eight officers — four in plainclothes, two in uniform, a detective and a deputy inspector — arrived at the establishment and shouted, “Police! We’re taking the place!”

Typically, LGBT bars and other places were warned ahead of time of raids, but that didn’t happen this time.

Carter wrote that the Mafia owners of the Stonewall and the manager were blackmailing wealthier customers, particularly those who worked in the Financial District. They appeared to be making more money from extortion than they were from liquor sales in the bar. Carter deduces that when the police were unable to receive kickbacks from blackmail and the theft of negotiable bonds they decided to close the Stonewall Inn permanently. Two undercover policewomen and two undercover policemen entered the bar earlier that evening to gather visual evidence, as the Public Morals Squad waited outside for the signal. Once inside, they called for backup from the Sixth Precinct using the bar’s pay telephone. The music was turned off and the main lights were turned on. Approximately 205 people were in the bar that night. Patrons who had never experienced a police raid were confused. A few who realized what was happening began to run for doors and windows in the bathrooms, but police barred the doors.

The raid did not go as planned. Standard procedure was to line up the patrons, check their identification, and have female police officers take customers dressed as women to the bathroom to verify their sex, upon which any men dressed as women would be arrested. Those dressed as women that night refused to go with the officers. Men in line began to refuse to produce their identification.

The police decided to take everyone present to the police station, after separating those cross-dressing in a room in the back of the bar.

The crowd outside started to swell and police feared they were losing control. A scuffle broke out when a woman, described as a “butch lesbian” and possibly identified as Stormé DeLarverie, in handcuffs was escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon, but she repeatedly escaped and fought with four of the police, swearing and shouting, She had been hit on the head by an officer with a baton for complaining that her handcuffs were too tight. She sparked the crowd to fight, yelling, “Why don’t you guys do something?” After an officer picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon, the crowd became a mob and went “berserk,” Carter wrote. “It was at that moment that the scene became explosive.”

Some claim that it was self-proclaimed “drag queen hustler,” Marsha P. Johnson, who was homeless and living in the park across from the bar, who “threw the first brick.” She denied the claim in a 1987 interview, saying she arrived after the riot had started.

The crowd gathered outside began throwing coins at the police, saying they were “paying them off” to keep the bar open. Coins turned to trash from nearby garbage cans, and then loose cobblestones from the street.

Sylvia Rivera, a self-identified “street queen” remembered that it was the most outcast people in the LGBT community, including “flame queens,” hustlers, and gay “street kids” who were responsible for the first volley of projectiles, as well as the uprooting of a parking meter used as a battering ram on the doors of the Stonewall Inn.

“You’ve been treating us like shit all these years? Uh-uh. Now it’s our turn!” Rivera remembers yelling. “It was one of the greatest moments in my life.”

Police were trapped inside the Stonewall Inn, so a Tactical Patrol Force was sent to the scene. One inspector who was there said, “Fights erupted with the transvestites, who wouldn’t go into the patrol wagon.” The TPF formed a phalanx and attempted to clear the streets by marching slowly and pushing the crowd back. The crowd openly mocked the police, cheering and starting impromptu kick lines.

The crowd lighted garbage on fire and threw it into the large window of the bar that had been broken.

The “riot” died down and on the next day, a large number of people came to see the fire damage of the bar and evidence of what happened overnight.

Reportedly, thousands of people came to the bar that night, as it had reopened. So many people showed that they blocked the street. Cars trying to make their way through the crowd were hassled and Johnson was reported to have climbed a lamppost to drop a heavy bag on a police vehicle, breaking its windshield.

Beat poet and longtime Greenwich Village resident Allen Ginsberg went to Stonewall Inn for the first time, and said “Gay power! Isn’t that great!... It’s about time we did something to assert ourselves.” He reportedly said, “You know, the guys there were so beautiful — they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago,” as he walked home.

The following few nights had less activity, in part due to rain. Fliers were scattered around saying, “Get the Mafia and the Cops out of Gay Bars.”

After the Village Voice printed a disparaging story of the events on the following Wednesday, using such terms as “forces of faggotry,” “limp wrists,” and “Sunday fag follies,” another crowd descended on their Christopher Street offices, threatening to burn it down. This action lasted only an hour.

A new movement began to surface of people no longer afraid and unwilling to life by the “rules” imposed on the community. The conservative Mattachine Society, founded in 1950, was calling for the actions to stop. But a new group was formed, the Gay Liberation Front, which was not willing to take a back seat. A citywide newspaper titled, Gay formed within six months and on the first anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, the first “Christopher Street Liberation Day” assembled on Christopher Street and simultaneously in Los Angeles and Chicago. The next year, marches took place in Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee, London, Paris, West Berlin, and Stockholm. And Pride was born.