Resistance and the Mystery of Stonewall

A famous photo by Weegee shows a drag queen striking a pose for the camera before the paddy wagon door is shut. Not all gays and lesbians in New York accepted their lot quietly. She poses for the camera while the others in the wagon anxiously hide their faces. Fear was a fact of life for gays and lesbians from the 1930s until Stonewall, but there were little moments like this of defiance and resistance.

There have been political movements for the emancipation of gays and lesbians for a long time, going back to late 19th century Germany at least. I did a number of posts about those movements before Stonewall here, here, here, here, here, and here. Stonewall was not the first time gays struck back at oppressors. There were the “Molly House” riots in 18th century London. What we would identify as gay men played a decisive role in the downfall of Savonarola in Florence at the beginning of the 16th century.

Those movements and acts of defiance were all isolated, however. None of them ever caught fire into anything large and transformative. A big reason for that is the fact that gays and lesbians can hide in plain sight. They can camouflage themselves in a way that racial minorities can’t. They can even hide from each other. One of the most common early experiences of people entering a gay community or “coming out,” is the discovery that there are so many people like them who have those same feelings, who are also gay. Most assumed that they were the only ones in the world who felt as they did. Concealment and secrecy are both self-protective, and isolating. It was gay invisibility and isolation more than anything else that frustrated early efforts to build a political movement.
The early pioneers of gay political emancipation, Magnus Hirschfeld, Adolph Brand, Henry Gerber, Dell Martin, Phyllis Lyon, Harry Hay, and others all seemed to be quixotic isolated cranks in their lifetimes. Today, we see that they were bold and courageous visionaries. What they could see right before their eyes was a huge population that was invisible to the world and to each other, but they were very much there like the dark matter that pervades the universe. They saw the tremendous potential for a mass movement of gays and lesbians to free themselves and to claim their dignity. They knew that all those isolated invisible people who all thought that they were alone added up to a lot of people. How to get them to find each other? How to get them to work together for their common interests?

The Stonewall riots in New York in June and July of 1969 transformed gay emancipation into a grass-roots mass movement. It was the spark that finally started the prairie fire. Gays and lesbians finally came out to the world and to themselves and emerged as a people.

But why did it happen there? Why that bar? Why New York in 1969?

New York in the 1960s was a comparatively backward place when it came to gay politics. New York’s reputation for progressivism is always over-stated. San Francisco and Los Angeles were way ahead of New York when it came to raised consciences, resistance, and organization. Even the gay community of Washington DC under the leadership of Frank Kameny was much bolder and more forward looking than the New York community in the 1960s. It remains a mystery as to why that spark happened here in New York and not in California or even DC.

Harvey Milk was not the first openly gay man to run for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.  That distinction belongs to Jose Sarria seen in a campaign poster from his 1961 bid.

The gay community in San Francisco was way ahead of the community in New York in the early 1960s..  While the New York Mattachine chapter was still arguing over whether or not they were sick, the San Francisco community was already organized and cultivating political influence in city government, pursuing a civil rights agenda.  They even successfully won the support of some religious leaders.  The leadership of the local Episcopal and Methodist churches endorsed a repeal on legal penalties on gays and lesbians in San Francisco.

If something like Stonewall was to happen anywhere, then by all logic it should have happened in San Francisco.

The cautious, painfully tentative quality of early 1960s gay activism comes through in this group photo of the 1965 Eastern Conference of Homophile Organizations (ECHO) in New York.

Since the mid 1950s, gay activists were anxious to appear "normal" and unthreatening.  Men always appeared in public in coat and tie, and the women always wore dresses.  Part of this was a desire for acceptance by conventional society.  Another part was the desire to shed the underworld status assigned to gays and lesbians.

Some of the people in this photo would welcome the new activism and assertiveness that came in with the Stonewall riots.  Among them were Jack Nichols, the very tall man in the back in the center, Barbara Gittings standing on the far right, and Frank Kameny to the left of her.  Jack Nichols would join the Gay Activists Alliance, one of the first new gay political groups formed in the wake of Stonewall.

The New York chapter of the Mattachine Society was notoriously conservative and accommodating. The emphasis was not on a positive embrace of homosexuality advocated by leaders such as Harry Hay and Frank Kameny. The New York chapter accepted the conventional diagnosis of homosexuality as sickness, even inviting psychologists who held that view to address them. What the New York chapter wanted was for homosexuality to be decriminalized and recognized as a medical illness or handicap. They preferred back channel negotiating and using influence (these very middle class people soon discovered that they had little) to confrontation. Things began to change with the police crackdown on Greenwich Village for the 1964 – 65 World’s Fair, and with the entry of younger members who did not share the anxieties or patience of the leadership.  

To the horror of the leadership, younger members began to demand a more aggressive response to police crackdowns, and to state and local laws that penalized gays and lesbians.  Psychologists invited to speak to the group about their "illness" found themselves heckled by younger members. "Anyone who went to you for help would have to be sick!" yelled one young member to a guest lecturer.


Above is one of the very few confrontations of local law staged by the New York Mattachine chapter.  It was the "sip in" at the Julius bar on April 21st, 1966.  Dick Leitsch, the chapter president (talking to the bartender in this photo), identified himself as a gay man and demanded that the bartender serve him a drink in defiance of state law that prohibits the sale of liquor to known "sexual deviants."  The sympathetic bartender was obliged by state law to refuse.  The bar could be shut down and its license revoked if it did.  With Leitsch are some of the leaders of the younger contingent.  To the left of Leitsch facing away is John Timmins, to the right of Leitsch is Craig Rodwell who would start the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore the following year. and to his right is Randy Wicker.

This small gesture of defiance came only after a great deal of effort by Rodwell and Wicker to get the organization to move into a more assertive direction.

Three years later, the shift in the political winds was written on the boarded up windows of the Stonewall bar in the days of the riots.  Note that one graffiti  uses the word "homosexual" while the other uses the word "gay," a very important and telling distinction.

It remains a mystery (to me anyway) why New York should be the place where the spark of revolution caught fire.  And when it did, no one here was ready for it.

Sources for this post are David Carter's history of the Stonewall Riots, Stonewall, and John Loughery's The Other Side of Silence.