Gay Perceptions – SO WHAT EXACTLY WAS STONEWALL? Nishit Saran August 1, 2000 1027 words Homo Nest Raided: the Queen Bees are Stinging Mad! Thus screamed the headlines of the homophobic New York Daily News on July 6, 1969. They were reporting an event from the previous weekend, an event that was soon to change the lives of gay men and women across America, and perhaps across the world. The event was known by one famous word: Stonewall. At midnight on June 27, 1969, the New York Tactical Police Force raided a rather seedy but popular Mafia-run gay bar in the Greenwich Village area. The bar was called Stonewall Inn. Such raids were not uncommon in New York’s gay bars: the police entered, made usual homophobic comments, and arrested those that were underage, had no identification cards, or were dressed in drag. The bar would then be shut down, only to resume business in a couple of days, thanks to an alleged Mafia-police nexus. This night, however, was different. People who were allowed to leave the bar did not go home. Instead, they stood outside on Christopher Street and waited for their friends. Soon, a crowd of about four hundred people had gathered. And as the police loaded the (thirteen) arrested people in a wagon, the mood suddenly changed. Out of nowhere, the crowd exploded and started hurtling pennies and beer bottles and bricks at the police. The police ran for cover into the bar, only to be locked in by the crowd. As someone uprooted parking meters to batter in the door, the police radioed for backup. A window was broken in; someone tried to set the building on fire; the police cocked their guns… and then the reinforcements arrived. In forty-five minutes the riot was over. Over the next few days, however, there were protests and marches. Saturday saw large contingents taking to Christopher Street and shouting anti-police and gay pride slogans. There was a strong feeling of gay community and a strong fighting spirit, an intoxicating sense of release. It was “us against them, and by God, we're winning.” Crowds were growing, as if from the pavement. There was kissing, hugging, fondling. Sunday was relatively quiet, but Monday and Tuesday got the crowds out again. Encounters with the police were rare, however, and largely comic. The next night, Wednesday, July 2, events took a brutal turn. The Tactical Police Force men used their nightsticks indiscriminately. “At one point,” wrote a witness, “7th Avenue from Christopher to West 10th looked like a battlefield in Vietnam. Young people, many of them queens, were lying on the sidewalk, bleeding from the head, face, mouth, and even the eyes. Others were nursing bruised and often bleeding arms, legs, backs and necks.” After Wednesday, things petered out. The Stonewall Riots were over. And that, many thought, was it. But then… But then, out of nowhere, and almost overnight, an entire radical political movement began, and spread like wildfire across the country. There was something in the air, something that the poet Allen Ginsberg described with the following words: “They’ve lost the wounded look fags all had ten years ago” Within a few days after Stonewall, representatives of older, quieter gay groups such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis organized the City's first ever "Gay Power" rally in Washington Square. On July 27, 1969, speeches by Martha Shelley and Marty Robinson were followed by a candlelight march to the site of the Stonewall Inn. Five hundred people showed up, thought to have included almost the entire 'out-of-the-closet' population of Lesbians and Gay men in New York, as well as their supporters from the political left. The quieter gay groups soon gave way to groups of radical and ‘revolutionary’ youngsters, and during the summer and autumn of 1969, five Gay Liberation Fronts sprang up – in New York, Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose. The end of 1970 had created three hundred more Gay Liberation Fronts! The first demonstration in commemoration of the Stonewall Rebellion was held in New York in August of 1969. Marches were held in 1970 in New York and Los Angeles on the anniversary of the Uprising - and thus, a tradition was born. The rest, of course, is history… Stonewall, today, has legendary status: it marks down to the hour, for many gay men and women, the exact beginning of the gay liberation movement. There are others however, who think that Stonewall is made of mythic stuff. It actually happened, of course, and it was tremendously powerful, but – as these people remind us – the groundwork for Stonewall had been laid by many earlier gay activists, some, like Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis, dating back to the nineteenth century. In New York, as well, the Mattachine Society had done a lot of quiet but powerful work for the invisible community: they had gotten the Mayor to legalize gay bars in 1965, and also pushed through legislation to prevent police arrest for solicitation. Which is why the police that raided Stonewall in 1969 could not arrest people for being in a gay bar – they could only arrest those who were underage and were cross-dressers. What was amazing about Stonewall, however, was the scale at which young gay men and women suddenly decided that enough was enough - that it was time for revolution. Certainly, the timing was right – it was the very peak of the anti-Vietnam demonstrations and the movement for civil liberties. But hundreds of people, thousands of people, pouring out of their closets all at once…? Three hundred Gay Liberation Fronts formed in one year alone…? On the afternoon of June 27, 1969 – a few hours before Stonewall – Judy Garland, the most beloved diva-icon of an older generation of American gay men, was buried. Judy Garland (with her failed marriages, her addictions, and her troubled life) had been the perfect symbol for this older gay generation of compromise, of passive tolerance, of invisible but dignified survival. With Judy Garland’s death, it seems, the older generation also passed away. Overnight, the symbols changed, the slogans changed. From “We shall endure” to “We shall fight”… If Stonewall should be remembered for anything, it should be for this.