Progress and Memory, 40 years after Stonewall

The first annual New York City Gay Pride march, June 28, 1970, then known as "Christopher Street Liberation Day." It was organized and lead by Craig Rodwell and Foster Gunnison. Photo by Fred MacDarrah.


The previous posts are a very brief and basic account of the events of the Stonewall riots in New York 40 years ago. I am strictly a dilettante in these matters. I hope my readers will go from here to the work of the professionals like David Carter, Jonathan Katz, and George Chauncey.

Walking down Christopher Street and past the old Stonewall bar these days, I can’t help but reflect on how much has changed in those 40 years since the riots. The gay movement of 2009 that came out of the riots has expanded beyond the wildest dreams of the rioters on those nights in 1969, or of the activists in the months and years that followed. The 6th Precinct, once infamous for mob corruption and beating up street kids down at the station house, is now a model for good relations with the gay community. The once seedy neighborhood around Christopher Street, crowded with gay men and lesbians living in tiny apartments, is now so expensive that you must have a gold card just to walk down the sidewalk. With the end of housing discrimination came the end of the gay ghetto in New York City. Young hetero families with strollers now walk down Christopher Street where the street kids once kick stepped in a chorus line against the riot police. Gays and lesbians, and especially gay couples, can now live anywhere, and they do. When gays and lesbians live together in a neighborhood, it is now by choice instead of by necessity.

Many of the veteran activists from the Stonewall generation feel forgotten, and that their accomplishments are taken for granted. Marty Robinson was particularly bitter in the last years of his life about being neglected. The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s wiped out a lot of the Stonewall generation. Jim Owles, Tom Doerr, and Robinson all perished in the epidemic. Many died before they had an opportunity to tell their stories.

Another reason why so many of them feel forgotten is because the gay movement, like all transformative revolutionary movements, is forward looking. Its work remains unfinished. Its promises remain unfulfilled. Each new generation necessarily looks forward, and is too busy with present struggles to acknowledge the past and the people who came before and blazed the trail. That the younger generations do take the Stonewall legacy for granted is in a round about way a tribute to that first generation’s success. For earlier generations of gays and lesbians, liberation was both an inward and an outward struggle; a struggle for self-acceptance as well as against outward oppression. For the new generations, it is more of an external struggle against violence, bigotry, and discrimination. Gay identity is now accepted and embraced by the young with hardly any of the qualms earlier generations like mine went through. That is the success of the Stonewall generation, and their legacy to subsequent generations.

It is on anniversaries like this that it is due justice to remember those people who made our own progress possible. Craig Rodwell, Randy Wicker, Marsha P. Johnson, Jim Owles, Sylvia Rivera, Marty Robinson, Martha Shelly, Tom Doerr, Jack Nichols, Morty Manford, Arthur Evans, Arthur Bell, Jim Fouratt, and many others were courageous pioneers up against the police, the mob, the political establishment, landlords, banks, and the broad hostile indifference of the general public. Add to them the hundreds of people who are only names on an attendance record, an old phone tree list, a police report, or anonymous faces in old photographs. The hundreds of mostly anonymous throwaway Greenwich Village street kids, tired of being pushed around on a hot summer night, made history and kicked the door open for all the rest of us. Everyone did their very important part no matter how large or small.

We can only say one thing to them all,

Thank you.

The 24th annual Gay Pride March in New York, June 26, 1994

UPDATE:

There was a very interesting show on Stonewall then and now on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC today.  As soon as WNYC posts the podcast, I will link it here.  He had historian David Carter, 2 Stonewall vets, and some younger activists on the show.  Joining by phone was a very elderly sounding retired Detective Seymour Pine who led the police raid on the Stonewall that night.  Pine confirmed something that Carter wrote about in his book, that the upstairs of the Stonewall was the center of a national extortion ring that had thousands of victims around the country including a lot of Wall Street executives, and most notably, J. Edgar Hoover and his partner Clyde Tolson.  Pine said, and Carter wrote about in his book, that the raid was requested by the Federal authorities (though apparently not the FBI since the these blackmailers had the drop on Hoover) in order to break up this ring operating upstairs.  

One of the most fascinating parts of the broadcast was the conversation between the old veterans and the younger activists.  What was striking was not generational conflict, but generational continuity, that so many of the same issues and problems that were there at the time of Stonewall are still here with us today.  What I found a striking change between then and now is that the current younger leadership is a lot more diverse than the mostly young white men with a few women who were the face of the leadership 40 years ago.

As David Carter pointed out, today's generation of LGBTs have exactly the same federal civil rights protections as did the Stonewall generation --- ZERO.  That lack of clear legal protections will continue to make life precarious for all LGBTs, gay marriage or not.

The show is well worth listening to if you can spare an hour.

A note on sources for these posts:

Most of the material for the Stonewall riots and after came from David Carter’s excellent book, Stonewall, The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, other material came from Fred MacDarrah’s very brief and general Gay Pride about gay politics and culture in New York from the 1960’s to the 1990s. The best part of MacDarrah’s book is the generous selection of his photographs, and we really like pictures on this blog. For earlier gay history in New York, nothing is better than George Chauncey’s pioneering book, Gay New York, Gender, Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890 – 1940. I don’t know if there is a similar book about lesbian New York. If there is not, then I hope it is being written, because that is a rich and important history with more ties to larger political movements like feminism and labor than is the case with gay male history in the city.
There are many more general histories of gay politics and social and cultural life. One of the best is John Loughery’s The Other Side of Silence, Men’s Lives and Gay Identities: A Twentieth Century History. Some sources that are closer in time to the described events are Don Teal’s The Gay Militants, How Gay Liberation Began in America, 1969 – 1971, first published in 1971. There is Kay Tobin and Randy Wicker’s The Gay Crusaders from 1975; it is a little on the hagiographic side, but it does give a lot of biographical information on the people involved by 2 people who knew them well. Other authors on gay history whose works are definitely worth reading are Jonathan Katz and Toby Marotta.