The Stonewall Riots are largely acclaimed as the moment that the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender movement for civil right began. The night was marked by violence, unrest, police brutality, and a sense of such great anger that the LGBT community could no longer contain their anger at being a marginalized identity population, instead this event is marked as the beginning of a series of events that demanded recognition for LGBT people for the first known time I history. While the events of Stonewall were certainly inspiring and obviously carry much weight in the collective conscious of LGBT individuals, is it completely accurate to argue for the solidification of Stonewall as a singular event that marked the beginning of a massively influential movement that still continues to fight for human rights even today? Perhaps instead there is not a definitive monumental moment that sparked off a entire revolution, what if instead a series of events and micro aggressions, including multiple instances of unfair arrests, protests, and meetings of LGBT people had already occurred—and such events are the ones that allowed for the events on the night of June 27th, 1969 to definitively begin a movement that would continue into the beginning of the twenty first century. Examining the events that preceded Stonewall is as important as discussing the implications of the exclusion of specific events from popular history.
The Events of Stonewall
The night of June 27th, 1969 has been recounted by many individuals who were involved in the riots, both as active participants and as witnesses who wished to document the incident for posterity. One such individual is Martin Duberman, whose photographs of the span of the LGBT civil rights movement have acted as a comprehensive visual history (Martin Duberman 1993). His photographic collection includes a wide span of dates and events, one of these specifically which is located in my exhibition that depicts an event that preceded Stonewall by 5 years (Martin Duberman 1993).
The Stonewall Riots occurred in and outside of the Stonewall Inn which is located on 53 Christopher Street, New York, N.Y. 10014. The inn was a known gathering place for homosexual men, and this place allowed them to engage in same sex community making and organizing, as well as actually having a public location in which such individuals may receive service. As evidenced by later protests, certain establishments refuse to serve known or suspected homosexuals, going to great lengths to even close the establishment to avoid media attention and/or a public altercation (Tuesday and 2008 2014).
The event began with an old fashioned police raid, something that was far from uncommon in Greenwich Village bars and pubs, as they were known for all manner of less than desirable characters and communities. Greenwich village was commonly noted as the location for alternative communities, a community of mostly artists, musicians, mobsters, and LGBT individuals (Lady 1971). On that fateful night there were rather a large number of individuals in the Stonewall Inn, namely homosexuals and Trans women (Matheny 2009). As the night progressed the police raided the inn, intending to arrest individuals for the charge of “indecent exposure” among a variety of other crimes. As the police began removing individuals from the bar, chaos began to break lose outside of the Stonewall Inn (Martin Duberman 1993). The first individuals were loaded into the police van, known as the “paddy wagon,” Duberman recounts seeing a heel clad foot kicking a police officer away from the van with a swift kick to the chest, after this individual escaped from the police van a stream of other women, both Drag Queens and Trans Women who were intended for the police station, escaped from the back of the vehicle (Martin Duberman 1993).
The escape of this group of women is what incited the crowd to greater intensity, anger, and levels of rowdiness. In Duberman’s narrative he cites specific individuals of three various backgrounds shouting obscenities at the police, one being Sylvia Rivera, a well-known Trans activist who was instrumental in the resistance, yet is rarely discussed by modern LGBT political activists (Gorton 2004) (Talusan 2014). Gorton criticizes this lack of acknowledgement of the identities of Trans women and the erasure of the participation by labeling them as “Queens,” when in fact men who wear “drag” or women’s clothing are vastly differently identified from transgender individuals who are not merely wearing the clothing of the opposite sex (Talusan 2014). Instead trans individuals are those who were born biologically as one sex, but decide that their gender (which is a socially constructed mode of classification based upon a binary) does not match their prescribed biological sex. To insinuate that trans women are merely playing at their identity in opposite sex clothing is insulting to their personal histories, as well as a collective one– and the erasure of their involvement in the Stonewall riots has been achieved through the misgendering and further marginalization of trans women.
The crowd began to hurl all objects on hand at the police, and this created an increased sense of riot like behavior, in which no rules existed. One individual heaved a trashcan through the plate glass window of the Stonewall Inn and another called the major newspapers to witness the events (Martin Duberman 1993). The police recount their actual fear, as the response of the individuals to the seemingly habitual raid were much more violent and vehement that what the police expected. Deputy Inspector Pine recounted to Duberman his feelings about the night of the event: “I had been in combat situations, [but] there was never any time that I felt more scared than then.” (Martin Duberman 1993).
The conflict escalated to a point where individuals outnumbered the number of police, and the officers were hiding inside of the Stonewall Inn while the rioters howled and derided them as they shouted and chanted the now infamous words in order to antagonize the anti-riot police force:
“We are the Stonewall girls
We wear our hair in curls
We wear no underwear
We show our pubic hair…
We wear our dungarees
Above our nelly knees!”(Gorton 2004)
Eventually the fray died down considerably, and the police slowly cleared Christopher Street, the surrounding side alleys, and the nearby park—all areas to which the conflict had spread. In the end, only four policemen were recorded as being injured to the point at which they required medical attention, but there are an undetermined number of civilian individuals that sustained injuries at the hands of the police (Matheny 2009).
Rewind and Freeze
It is cited after the events of this fateful night, that the contemporary LGBT Civil Rights Movement sprang into being. There is such a manner of myth and mysteriousness about the event that individuals regard it with reverence instead of viewing it as something to be analyzed and questioned. There is also a point to be made that many do not know of the Stonewall riots, they are not something that exist in the American consciousness in the way that the protests against the Vietnam War are imprinted, or the unforgettable speech of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. which is memorized by every American born in the past fifty years. This lack of common knowledge is mostly due to the lack of acknowledgement of the riots as a historical event and this in turn is due to the identities of the individuals involved in the events. Trans women, Drag Queens, Gay men both white–and of color, these individuals fought a bloody battle against the police on that night June 27th, 1969 yet they are not to be commended or recognized by society because who they are is inherently offensive.
The Meaning of Stonewall
It begs to be answered, why June 27th, 1969? What was it about that specific night that sparked an entire revolution? To answer that, it must be said that it was not the first time, and it was certainly not the last. Stonewall did not spark an entire revolution singlehandedly, instead it was the culmination of years of tension, anger, and unjust treatment of members of the (covert) LGBT community at the hands of the police.
Through the research that I have engaged with, I have reconstructed an example of the aggressions faced by police as well as other individuals who were actively involved in furthering equality for member of the LGBT community before the events of Stonewall. While many of these are secretive and partially obscured, there were two staples to the LGBT community—the Village Voice was known for being run by and for member of the LGBT community and it began in 1955 (Hunt 1992). A second staple to the covert LGBT presence before Stonewall was the activist group known as the Mattachine society, which was formed in the early 1950’s as well (Hunt 1992). The society staged a number of protests and demonstrations, as well as formatting literature to inform the public of their intentions and purposes. In addition to the Mattachine society’s multiple activities and protests pre Stonewall, group of Lesbian organizers picketed for two consecutive years in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1996 and 1997. Lastly, it is important to highlight instances of unjust arrest and targeting by police before Stonewall, while there are many smaller instances that are mentioned in historical records, the most widely acknowledged was the arrest of Trans women and men in drag during a raid of the 1962 Artists’ Exotic Carnival that took place at the Manhattan Center, a location that later helped in the treatment of HIV/AIDS patients.
With all of these seemingly minor and insignificant events compiled and identified, it helps to paint a broader picture of the events preceding Stonewall, and thus discuss the primer to a LGBT movement. While the events and aggressions may not have been cohesive, they help to depict why the events at Stonewall were so inflammatory and justified, they were not “out of nowhere,” instead they were a culminative response to the years of abuse, harassment, and unjust treatment at the hands of law enforcement, government officials, and the general heteronormative public. Stonewall provided the momentum to continue the road to LGBT liberation far into the future, but without its precursors, the current success of the LGBT movement would appear to be vastly different.
Bibliography
Gorton, Don. 2004. “What Really Happened at the Stonewall Inn?” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide XI (6): 37.
Hunt, Ronald J. 1992. “Gay and Lesbian Politics.” PS: Political Science and Politics 25 (2): 220–24. doi:10.2307/419712.
Lady, Chicken. 1971. “Droppings…” Off Our Backs 1 (23): 16.
Martin Duberman. 1993. History Is a Weapon: Stonewall. http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/dubermanstonewall.html.
Matheny, Amy. 2009. “David Carter: Recounting Stonewall.” Windy City Times, June 24.
Talusan, Meredith. 2014. “45 Years After Stonewall, the LGBT Movement Has a Transphobia Problem.” The American Prospect, June 25. http://prospect.org/article/45-years-after- stonewall-lgbt-movement-has-transphobia-problem.
Tuesday, Sharyn Jackson, and Jun 17 2008. 2014. “Before Stonewall.” Accessed December 14. http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-06-17/news/before-stonewall/.
About this Project
What spurred me to research this specific riot in history was my own personal identification. The Stonewall Riots are a rich narrative in my own historical consciousness as feminist lesbian woman. I learned about the Stonewall riots as a college freshman in my “Queer Theory” class. I had never encountered any information about this seemingly landmark event before taking that course, and this always left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction and discontentment. To know that an integral part of my own personal history as a member of the community had been out of my purview of knowledge due to the lack of popular recognition of LGBT history both disturbed and intrigued me. It appeared to me that it is highly improbable that Stonewall was the exact moment that the “sexual revolution” had begun, individuals had to have been fighting for their rights before this moment, and my goal was to provide at least a few instances of proof of such activities to demonstrate that an active resistance was occurring before 1969.
I enjoyed being able to contribute and through my research, recognize and restore history to individuals that have long since been forgotten and/or ignored. History very rarely favors those who are not white heterosexuals and this is my primary goal in studying history and art history, to recognize all who have been lost from the historical record due to the marginalization they have experienced. I enjoyed finding such instances to help support the points I was making about the precursors to Stonewall, but it was not easy and the most difficult and unpleasant aspect of this work is that the ideas I wished to convey were often very difficult to attain primary sources for. Certain individuals have been erased from the historical record in all but name and memory in the personal narrative. Reconstructing the participation of Trans narratives in Stonewall was essentially impossible due to a lack of recognition at large of their involvement, and the issues of Transphobia that the LGBT community is attempting to remedy. I was happy that I was able to reconstruct as few of the events preceding Stonewall, I merely wish I was able to construct a more complete timeline, but perhaps that is a topic for a future or continued research project.
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