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It was 1969, on a hot New York City summer night – the hottest June night in history. The police had just raided one of the only places in New York City where same-sex couples could dance together, a crappy Mafia club with watered-down booze and a sideline in blackmail.

The cops didn’t expect any resistance at all. It’s not like this was the first time they’d raided a gay club or even this particular club; this was their second raid on the Stonewall Inn that week. Their normal procedure was to check IDs, make a few token arrests, and send people whose gender they weren’t certain of into the restroom for examination by a policewoman.

No one ever objected or resisted, and the lucky ones who were allowed to leave got out of the area as quickly as they could, grateful not to have been arrested.

But not that night.

June 28, 1969 was the night the patrons of the Stonewall Inn didn’t just get quietly in the police trucks or slink in grateful silence into the shadows. They gathered on the Greenwich Village streets outside the bar, attracting dozens and then hundreds of onlookers from the neighborhood, along with a couple of reporters from the nearby offices of the Village Voice.

Who threw the first brick or bottle, and why, is something we’ll never know. There are, after all, about as many accounts of what happened at Stonewall as there are people who were there.

Over time, it’s all become a tangle of history, myth and apocrypha that’s hard to unravel, although David Carter’s book Stonewall: The riots that sparked the gay revolution (St. Martin’s Press, 2004) finally compiled dozens of oral and written descriptions, giving us the first well-documented and cohesive account of the chronology of that night.

The basic outline Carter gives is this: The New York City police frequently raided the city’s gay bars, with the cooperation of most city politicians, including Mayor John Lindsay.

The bars, which were almost all owned by members of the Mafia, usually had advance notice of the raids, mostly because they paid off local cops. The people who didn’t get any warning, of course, were the bars’ patrons, many of whom found their lives destroyed either by being arrested, by their homosexuality becoming public, or, if they were wealthy or prominent, by Mafia blackmail.

The Stonewall Inn’s clientele included just about everyone who frequented Greenwich’s Village’s Bohemian streets, shops, and restaurants. Dancing and drinking in its two rooms were gay men of color, white gay men, hippies, Wall Street businessmen, hustlers, under-aged guys with fake IDs, and a huge variety of gender transgressors including very butch dykes, cross-dressers (illegal in New York at the time unless you were wearing a minimum of three “gender-appropriate” garments), transsexuals, drag queens, and effeminate men.

Once the raid was under way, the police noticed that the people they were arresting were acting much feistier than usual. Quite a few actually got away from the cops. There’s one account, possibly apocryphal, of a butch dyke being wrestled into a police car in handcuffs, angrily asking the men in the crowd why they weren’t doing anything.

People who were there describe men doing a Rockettes kick line while taunting the police, and pretty soon, bottles and bricks were being lobbed at the cops.

The police barricaded themselves inside the bar, the crowd almost overturned their vehicles, fires were set, the streets were blocked, and violence and vandalism continued off and on for several days afterward.

And through it all, a phrase that almost no one had ever heard or even uttered was shouted, chanted, and spray-painted all over Greenwich Village: Gay power!

In the weeks and months that followed, thousands of new gay rights organizations sprung up all over the country, many of them in New York City. Angry and energized gay activists, trained in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the mid-60s, began to organize, agitate, and demonstrate. And all that noise meant the newly-radicalized gay movement received unprecedented media attention across the country.

“I read about the Stonewall rebellion in Life magazine, which had a story on the gay rights movement,” said Cleve Jones, a Harvey Milk protégé who went on to found the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.

“I stole it from my high school library and hid it under the mattress like it was porn. And when I’d get home from school after getting beat up, I’d take it out from under the mattress and think, one day I’m going to San Francisco.”

That story, the mere idea that queers could fight back, drive the police into hiding, and stake a claim to the same liberation that other oppressed groups had been demanding throughout the 60s, was a sea-change the pre-Stonewall homophile movement had never envisioned.

Comprised of groups like the Mattachine Society, Society for Individual Rights, and the Daughters of Bilitis, the movement been working for legal rights for lesbians and gay men since the 1950s.

But if you think the 2008 battle against Prop 8 in California was overly tame and devoid of images and voices of “real” lesbians and gay men, consider what passed for a demonstration in pre-Stonewall gay America: Men in suits and ties, women in dresses and nylons, marching around quietly with neatly-lettered signs politely asking America to please not fire us from our jobs anymore.

With some exceptions, those early movement leaders were appalled at the radical style of the post-Stonewall gay activists. Hippies, hustlers, drag queens? How did that fit in with the suits, ties, and panty hose?

“That’s exactly the piece of the Stonewall story that’s been an inspiration to me,” said transgender activist and actress Calpernia Addams. “In a time when it was not safe to openly express who they were, these marginalized people – gay men, trans people in various stages of transitioning – all had the courage to fight back. They reached the point that night where they said, no more.”

Stonewall might have been the LGBT movement’s most famous riot, but it wasn’t the first. Nor was it the last. Ten years later, rioting broke out in San Francisco after former Supervisor Dan White received a near-slap on the wrist for killing the city’s first out gay supervisor, Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone.

“It’s a bizarre set of coincidences that on the thirtieth anniversary of the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, we’d have a film opening about Harvey’s life,” said Jones.

“Then on the thirtieth anniversary of the White Night Riots, law enforcement was apparently concerned the news about the Prop 8 decision would spark a repeat of those riots. And now with progress in multiple states and setbacks in California, it’s all coming to a head on the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion that launched the modern gay rights movement.”

Today, the legacy of Stonewall is everywhere. A march held in Greenwich Village to commemorate the riots became the annual Pride events celebrated in cities all over the world today, and “Stonewall” is part of the name of dozens of LGBT political groups.

What’s more, the thousands of gay and lesbian political organizations that emerged in the wake of Stonewall became the driving force behind Harvey Milk’s fight for public office and against anti-gay legislation in California in the 1970s. It inspired ACT-UP and all the angry, politically savvy organizing around HIV/AIDS in the 80s and 90s, and it continues to drive protests and demonstrations for marriage equality, where signs reminding us that “Stonewall was a riot” wave in the air next to those reading “Everyone deserves the right to marry.”

The legacy is even there in the fear being whipped up in the wake of the passage of Prop 8 by the religious right, the drumbeat that gay people would – or did – riot, destroy property, vandalize churches, and even commit violence against people who supported the measure.

“When I was coming out it was illegal for us to dance together. It was a felony to have sex,” Jones told me. “The idea of full equality wasn’t on anyone’s agenda. There was a long list of inequalities we could read from to underscore how screwed up it was, but the early organizing I was involved in was mostly around creating safe places where gay people could meet and socialize and dance without being in Mafia bars and hauled off to the police. We’ve come a long way since then.”

Source: By Christie Keith
http://www.365gay.com/living/stonewall-forty-years-later/