Stonewall Was Not the Beginning of the Gay Rights Movement
By: Jeffry J. Iovannone
Tags: Equality, Talk Queerly, Culture, LGBTQ, History

The Stonewall Inn Riots of 1969, alternatively referred to as a rebellion or uprising, are often described as the beginning of the modern Gay (now LGBTQ) Rights Movement and the most significant event in LGBTQ history. Stonewall is not solely an historical event, but has taken on a mythological status within LGBTQ history. Stonewall, however, was not the beginning of the Gay Rights Movement as a whole, nor was it the sole genesis of the liberationist phase of the movement that emerged in the early 1970s. The uprising is but one example of the shift in the tone and tempo of the broader Gay Rights Movement that occurred during this period. Stonewall was one reaction, albeit an important one, in a longer chain reaction of events that resulted in the creation of a mass movement for gay rights, equality, and liberation.

In this column, I discuss culture and politics through a queer lens often absent in the mainstream to help amplify LGBTQ issues and perspectives.

Before Stonewall

The beginnings of a modern gay rights movement can be traced to the coining of the term “homosexuality” by medical professionals in the late-nineteenth century. This period marked a shift in Western society where sexuality was regarded not only as a set of moral or amoral acts, but as an identity. One’s sexual desires and activities marked them as a distinct type of person, and sexuality was seen an essential aspect of personhood. Though “homosexuals” were considered “deviant,” the creation of a distinct sexual identity simultaneously created the possibility of organizing around that identity for rights and change. The creation of gay identity was further impacted by the industrial revolution of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which allowed gays and lesbians to form communities, particularly in urban areas, with others like themselves outside the biological family and the space of the home.

Urban gay communities expanded during the World War II era as the social and cultural upheaval created by wartime mobilization allowed many gays and lesbians to leave their places of origin and explore their identities. Indeed, historian Allan Berubé refers to World War II as “a national coming out experience.” By the 1940s, bars catering to gay and lesbian clientele existed in most American cities and gay neighborhoods or districts were beginning to form in large urban centers. The social conservatism of the post-World War II era also impacted gays and lesbians. Gay identity and communities were beginning to take hold, but were far from mainstream acceptance. Dorr Legg, a member of the early gay rights organization ONE, Inc., described the position of American gays in the 1950s and early 1960s through the metaphor of “the four horsemen of the gay apocalypse.” Legg’s horsemen were: the medical, the social, the religious, and the legal. Gays and lesbians were widely regarded as mentally ill, social pariahs, sinners, and criminals, as gay sex was illegal in all fifty states.

The repressive environment of 1950s America and the McCarthy era resulted in the formation of the Homophile Movement. Gays and lesbians, due to the national coming out experience of World War II, began to have a sense of themselves as a distinct type of people with a unique culture that differed from that of mainstream America. Harry Hay, a labor activist and founding member of the early homophile organization the Mattachine Society, saw gays not as isolated individuals suffering from a condition in need of a “cure,” but as an oppressed minority group similar to that of blacks or Jews. Gays, in Hay’s view, were not the problem — society was. A growing understanding of gays and lesbians as a distinct minority group was a key tenant of the Homophile Movement. Comprised primarily of white middle-class gays and lesbians, homophile activists advocated for civil rights and argued that gays should have the full benefits of American citizenship, not second-class status.

Gays, in Hay’s view, were not the problem — society was.

Though homophile organizations such as the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis, an early lesbian organization, had chapters in large coastal cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C., the movement was not particularly widespread. Mid-sized cities, such as those in the industrialized Great Lakes region did, however, develop working-class gay bar cultures that operated as spaces of resistance. As Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis argue in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, their landmark oral history of Buffalo, New York’s working-class lesbian community, bar cultures functioned as pre-gay liberation spaces of community that allowed gay liberationist ideas to spread and coalesce into a mass social movement in the post-Stonewall era. Tough bar lesbians, who identified as butches, furthermore, fought to defend public spaces for lesbians and were socially “out” before Stonewall, though it is commonly thought the 1969 rebellion was the inspiration for gays across the nation to adopt a militant stance against oppression, to come out, and to take pride in their identities.

The Homophile Movement and working-class bar cultures are two examples that evidence a movement for gay rights did not begin with Stonewall and that successful movements for social change rarely have singular points of origin.

What Happened at the Stonewall Inn?

After Prohibition — a nationwide ban on the manufacturing, sale, and importation of alcohol — ended in 1933, the New York State Liquor Authority (SLA) was established to regulate liquor licenses. The SLA prohibited the sale of alcohol in establishments regarded as “disorderly” and the presence of gay people in a bar was considered disorderly by default. Bars known to serve homosexual clientele were routinely raided, and patrons were subjected to police harassment and physical and sexual violence. An 1845 state statute also specified that it was a crime to “masquerade,” or to appear in public as a gender that conflicted with the gender listed on one’s identity documents. During raids, police targeted drag queens, transsexuals, and other gender non-conforming people who were not wearing a minimum of three articles of gender “appropriate” clothing.

Amidst this broader context stood the Stonewall Inn, a mafia-run gay bar located at 53 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. Originally opened in 1967, the Stonewall, owned by Fat Tony Lauria of the Genovese crime family, operated as a private gay club, which allowed Lauria to circumvent SLA regulations. At the Stonewall, gays could be served alcohol and they were allowed to dance. Because the Stonewall was a private club, patrons paid an entrance fee and were asked to sign their names in a register, though many used pseudonyms. Bar owners paid bribes to the NYPD and the SLA and were often notified in advance of raids so they could flash the bar’s lights or cut the music as a way of warning patrons who were dancing to separate. During the summer of 1969, gay bars were particularly targeted by the NYPD because New York City Mayor John Lindsay was running for reelection on a promise of cleaning up crime within the city. Mayor Lindsay found an eager partner in Inspector Seymour Pine of the city’s Fifth Precinct, which covered Greenwich Village.

In the early morning hours of June 28th, the flashing lights, which indicated a police raid, shown through the unseasonably muggy air of the bar. The lights came on, the police , led by Pine, filed in, and the patrons lined up to have their IDs inspected. Those who were singled out for arrest for “masquerading” were taken out to the paddy wagons, while those who were not, instead of dispersing, waited on the street. The gays, according to eyewitness accounts, made a show of it by doing runway walks and camping it up as each person strutted out of the bar to join the growing crowd.

Frustrations over habitual police harassment reached a boiling point when the police attempted to drag a butch lesbian to one of the waiting cars. Several times the lesbian broke free and attempted to run back into the bar before being apprehended again by the police. “Why don’t you do something?” she allegedly asked, in a shout, to the assembled crowd. That did it. Several gays pried loose a parking meter — damaged from a previous car accident — and began using it as a battering ram against the door of the Stonewall where the police had now barricaded themselves inside. Some eyewitness accounts indicate that bricks were thrown, others not. Street queen Marsha P. Johnson is often credited with igniting the riot by throwing the first brick at the police, but Johnson’s own testimony about her involvement in the uprising contradicts this interpretation. In an oral history interview with journalist and historian Eric Marcus, she described her participation in Stonewall as follows:

“The way I winded up being at Stonewall that night, I was having a party uptown. And we were all out there and Miss Sylvia Rivera and them were over in the park having a cocktail, I was uptown and I didn’t get downtown until about two o’clock, because when I got downtown the place [the Stonewall Inn] was already on fire. And it was a raid already. The riots had already started… We were just saying, no more police brutality and, oh, we had enough of police harassment in the village and other places.”

Though the Stonewall Inn’s 50-foot facade was constructed of bricks (the exterior of the current Stonewall Inn looks remarkably similar to the Stonewall of 1969), it remains unclear whether bricks were thrown during the riot at all. We do know, however, that poor street queens of color and gender nonconforming youth, who had little left to lose and were, as a result, bold in their resistance, played a key role in the rebellion.

News of the growing confrontation spread throughout the Village and more gays, lesbians, and street queens, the majority of them working-class and of color, entered the fray. Someone else squirted lighter fluid, taken from a nearby cigar shop, inside and attempted to set the Stonewall on fire. Inspector Pine became increasingly nervous, but instructed his colleagues not to fire their weapons unless he gave the go-ahead. A policewoman, the slimmest of the bunch, crawled out through the boarded up windows at the back of the bar and went to call for backup. When help arrived, the police squared off against the crowd. No sooner did the police think they had beaten back the crowd then those participating in the uprising run around the block to taunt and confront the police from behind who were then forced to change direction.

Three nights of rioting ensued in Greenwich Village, during which the tactical police force were called in. Despite the elevated police presence, the press reported what gays already knew: when the final score was tallied, they had won. One, somewhat stereotypical, headline from the New York Daily News, published on July 6th of 1969, captured the anger and fighting spirit of the community: “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad.”

Martha Shelley, a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front and Radicalesbians, observed that:

“Stonewall was significant not because it was a riot — there had been other riots in California — but because of the organization that came out of it.”

The spirit of Stonewall and what it represented, in part, inspired the creation of new gay organizations that had a more direct and confrontational approach to gay rights and liberation. Younger activists involved in groups such as the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activists Alliance, Radicalesbians, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries didn’t ask for polite acceptance within American society or the mere attainment of civil rights; they expressed their identities with exuberance and pride, questioned sexual norms, and demanded radical social transformation.

Gay liberation did not emerge fully formed from Stonewall, but was both a continuation of, and a reaction to, the Homophile Movement and also built upon the gay and lesbian community networks created within working-class bar cultures. The Stonewall Uprising, therefore, was not a beginning, a point of departure, so much as it was a change in the tone and tempo of an existing movement — a turning point.

The Buffalo Tiki Raids

The Tiki was a Polynesian-themed bar located at 330 Franklin Street in downtown Buffalo, a mid-sized industrial city located on the edge of the midwest. Owned by Jim Garrow, a transplant to Western New York from Florida and a popular fixture in the gay community of the 1960s, the bar was known for its garish decor, which included carved Tiki-head figurines and plastic palm trees. Opened in 1968 and closed by the end of 1969, the Tiki existed during a decade when Buffalo gay bars rarely stayed open for long. Prior to the 1960s, Buffalo had a thriving gay bar scene. Corruption within the Buffalo Police Department allowed bar owners to pay off Bureau of Vice Investigation officers to avoid harassment, liquor license violations, and closure.

Things changed for Buffalo gays and lesbians when Nelson Rockefeller was elected Governor of New York in 1959. Rockefeller campaigned, and was voted into office, on a promise to clean up corruption within state police departments. He was assisted in his efforts by Kenneth P. Kennedy, who in 1961 became Captain of the Buffalo Bureau of Vice Enforcement. Kennedy, a devout Irish Catholic who regarded homosexuality as both a moral and public safety issue, systematically targeted Buffalo’s gay bars and used the power of his position to enforce his personal views. Don Michaels, a former president of the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier (MSNF), Buffalo’s first gay rights organization, described Kennedy as a throwback to the McCarthy Era. During the 1950s, similar to alleged communists, gay and lesbians were viewed as threats to national security and purged from the federal government.

By 1967, a dry spell existed, and few gay bars were operational in Buffalo. The crackdown was further intensified by the race riot that occurred on the East Side of the city from June 26th through July 1st of that year. Part of the race riots that swept the country during the “Long Hot Summer of 1967,” the East Side riot, which virtually shut down the city and resulted in multiple injuries and fatalities, resulted in increased scrutiny of minority residents by the Buffalo Police Department. Though predominantly white gay bars such as the Ki-Yo Club, which was torched during the riot, existed on Buffalo’s East Side, after 1967, gay bars primarily opened west of Main Street. The Tiki was one such bar established during the post-1967 relocation.

Five months after the Stonewall Inn Riots, the Buffalo Bureau of Vice Enforcement targeted the Tiki in a series of raids. Buffalo bar raids were not the dramatic affairs they often were in large cities such as New York where gay bars were equipped with bells or flashing lights to alert patrons of raids and police would theatrically load patrons into paddy wagons as a way to publicly shame those arrested. Nevertheless, Buffalo gays and lesbians were similarly angered by the Tiki raids. Their frustrations reached a boiling point when, in late 1969, the Tiki’s liquor license renewal was denied by the SLA, which cited Garrow’s homosexual arrest record as the primary reason for termination.

The Tiki raids, and the bar’s subsequent closure, prompted Buffalo’s gay community to organize for their liberation. By January of 1970, a fledgling gay liberation organization was formed: the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier. Greg Bodekor, a former member of MSNF, described the Tiki raids as “Buffalo’s Stonewall moment” — not because they resulted in a riot, but because they similarly resulted in new forms of organization within Buffalo’s gay community. Bobbi Prebis, a working-class butch lesbian who became MSNF’s first official member and Vice President, said she learned of the Stonewall rebellion because a friend brought her the papers from New York City. Other members of Buffalo’s gay community, Prebis observed, may not have immediately recognized the parallels between bar raids in Buffalo and New York City and were prompted to organize primarily due to oppressive conditions within Buffalo — not direct inspiration from Stonewall.

Though the Stonewall Inn Riots are often credited with sparking the modern American Gay Rights Movement, in reality, a liberationist mentality developed across the country parallel to the events of Stonewall as gays and lesbians responded to the oppressive conditions of their respective cities and towns. The Tiki raids, and the subsequent organization they inspired on the part of Buffalo’s gay community, are one such example that troubles the Stonewall narrative.

The Stonewall Origin Myth

There is no definitive account of the Stonewall Inn Riots, in part, because Stonewall is not only an historical event, but a cultural myth. To say that Stonewall is a “myth” is not to imply that the events that transpired in the early morning hours of June 28th of 1969 are mere falsehood or fiction. Myths are more complicated than that. A myth, in the classic sense, is a narrative or story that plays a fundamental role in society because it tells a people something about who and what they are, and in the case of an origin myth, where they come from. The Stonewall myth is useful in that it historically functioned, and continues to operate, as a narrative through which LGBTQ people can identify and come together to enact change.

The danger of the Stonewall myth, however, lies in the fact that it has become not only one story LGBTQ people tell about themselves, but the story we tell about ourselves. Stonewall is not just a narrative, but a metanarrative: a totalizing account regarded as a universal truth that excludes other narrative threads and possibilities. Indeed, Stonewall is often the focal point through which we regard the entirety of LGBTQ history and experience.

When we situate Stonewall as the genesis, the point of origin, of the modern Gay Rights Movement, we exclude the impact of labor movements, the Black Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, youth counterculture, and the broader sexual revolution on gay liberation. As the Buffalo Tiki raids show us, Stonewall as point of origin also ignores the contributions and experiences of working-class gays and lesbians, such as the tough bar lesbians written about by Kennedy and Davis, to gay liberation.

Centering Stonewall has typically resulted in an understanding of the Gay Rights Movement that is white-male centered and exclusionary to lesbians, queer people of color, trans and gender nonconforming people, and working-class queers. It presents a vision of LGBTQ American history that is centered on large coastal cities to the omission of the rest of the country and makes parallel organizing, like the work of gays and lesbians in Buffalo, New York, invisible. Finally, the Stonewall metanarrative limits models of LGBTQ activism both in the past and at present, as the activism that takes place in large cosmopolitan cities is not always applicable to rural communities and mid-sized cities.

While the Stonewall origin myth is not wholly devoid of purpose, Stonewall is not the full story, and presenting a more holistic history of gay liberation is essential to effective LGBTQ organizing in the present.