Fort Worth's Own Little Stonewall, 40 Years Late

Police raided the Rainbow Lounge on Saturday night, a Fort Worth gay bar for reasons that I cannot fathom.  The coincidence with the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall raid was noticed by everyone except the Fort Worth Police Dept.  Some people were arrested for "groping" police officers (I smell a big phoney police rat).  Here is the Dallas Morning News article which is not very informative.  There is more about it here in an article in the Dallas Voice.

Gay bar raids in 2009, how quaint!

That over 100 people picketed the Tarrant County Courthouse over this incident is remarkable.  Fort Worth is one of the most right leaning cities in the nation.  And the really sad part about it is, I really like Fort Worth.  It's a great town despite its little men with big guns.

Hat tip to Margaret for bringing this to my attention.

The Day After

My dogs are killing me.  I'm tired. I have shopping to do, and I really don't want to do it.  The first day of summer school class went fine.  But I'm tired now that I'm home.

I had a great time yesterday.  I met Allen there.  I saw The Reverend Boy in the distance.  I saw +Gene Robinson who was a last minute addition to the parade.  I saw Wilfried there.  I marched with Ueber G.

Fifth Avenue from 56th to the Village and down Christopher to the river turned into one huge party, as it does every year.  I look forward to it like I once looked forward to Christmas.  For the young, it was one big Roman holiday of sexuality, fun, and friendship (as it was for me when I was younger).  For us older queens, it was heartfelt Thanksgiving, both secular and sacred.

It's a great party, and we love guests and visitors.

Historian David Carter has a great reflection on the meaning of it all on the BBC.

Liberty and Justice for ALL! Happy Stonewall 40!

Then...



...Now

Stonewall means Fight Back!

The struggle continues until we have full and equal rights as citizens of the United States, and of the World.

Burn down the closet! Freedom and Dignity for LGBTs!

Happy Gay Day to all!

*Stephen Colbert suggests we use the cheer, We're Here, We're Queer, He'll get to us eventually!"

*Frank Rich has a great column for us today.

From the Office of Inexplicable Obsessions

At last I found it, the original David Rose version of Holiday for Strings, that legendary masterpiece of 1950s Happy Shopping Experience music! Attention shoppers...



Here's something to go with the music. I never knew International Harvester made refrigerators.

Some of you may still prefer the Spike Jones version.

"Muscular," But Not Healthy, Christianity

Holding out for segregating gays is not helping churches.

Look at what is happening to that model of right wing success, the Southern Baptists. They are expelling congregations left and right for making gays feel welcome.   The Fort Worth congregation expelled in the article was not quite my idea of welcoming.  They were expelled for making  small and grudging concessions to a handful of gay members.

While newly minted ACNA is crowing with triumph over its anticipated destruction of the Episcopal Church, the truth is that religious affiliation is declining across the board in this country.  I would argue that the hegemony of conservative evangelicals in politics and public life over the last 25 to 30 years only hastened that decline.  The Catholic hierarchy making a hard right turn while trying to "manage" a huge criminal scandal didn't help either.

It is to the point where substantial numbers of people have concluded that opposition to abortion and homosexuality are the core beliefs of the Christian faith.  Watching any right wing religious cable network from EWTN to TBN where the discussion seems to be about nothing but those 2 topics, it's not hard to see how people might come to that conclusion. 

One part of the Washington Post article that I have linked particularly struck me:

Two years ago, then-SBC president Frank Page said the declining numbers can be blamed, in part, on a perception that Baptists are "mean-spirited, hurtful and angry people" and that the denomination has been known too much in recent years for "what we're against" than "what we're for," Page said.

"Our culture is increasingly antagonistic and sometimes adverse to a conversation about a faith in Christ. Sometimes that's our fault because we have not always presented a winsome Christian life that would engender trust and a desire on the part of many people to engage in a conversation on the Gospel," he said.

This is not just a problem for Southern Baptists, but for churches across the board.  The popular image of all  Christians these days is bigoted, hypocritical, and thoroughly frightened by sexuality and modernity.  It is anything but friendly and loving.  It is starting to turn into something worse, the perception that Christians are anything but good and fair.  It is automatically assumed that Christians are all politically conservative and associated with the Republican party, when a substantial number (at least half) are not.  That default moral authority that the secular used to ascribe to churches and their members is rapidly eroding.  The stand on gays that so many churches cling to only makes them look them look even more mean-spirited, and behind the rest of society in what many perceive as humane and positive reform.  

Right-wing commentators speak of the public embrace of gay rights (the "gay agenda" whatever that is) as "permissiveness" which completely misses the point.  The decision to accept gay family members, friends, and colleagues is a moral decision, and a difficult one for a lot of people.  It comes at the end of a long hard period of soul-searching for most people.  This is anything but a matter of "libertinism."  The conservative religious stand for segregating gays is seen by its proponents as a principled position over and against the childish permissiveness at large in the world.  It is only a matter of maturity and self-discipline in their eyes.  To others, the arguments for segregating gays are deeply offensive.  Those arguments offend, not people's sense of permission, but their moral sense.  The argument for segregating gays, as they become more integrated into the family and social experience of most people, appears less a principled stand than an assault on fundamental human dignity based on an arbitrary prejudice.  The defenders of segregation look worse than mean-spirited to people as time goes by. 

This is very sad, because the churches, including the conservative ones, are still full of very good and very selfless people.  While federal, state, and local governments failed the people of New Orleans after Katrina, religious groups, conservative and liberal, were the first to respond.  When the attention of the public, and the government, moved on, it was the religious charities that remained to help people rebuild.  A belief in the transcendent sanctity of all humanity can be a powerful motivator to do a lot of good.

I really wonder if a position that is also held by folks walling themselves up in compounds in Idaho is really one that churches want to defend as core doctrine.  It is not helping them.

Hat tip to Toujoursdan at Culture Choc.

Thunderstorms

A thunderstorm is rolling through New York. We've had almost nothing but rain all month, about 10 inches of it.

Michael and the cats hate thunder and lightning. When I was a wee tot, thunder and lightning terrified me, especially at night. Now, I love it. In fact, I miss those apocalyptic looking thunderstorms that were a regular part of late Spring in Texas and the Midwest. I miss the sky going all dark in the afternoon. I miss the bolts of lightning and the loud claps of thunder. I miss the ominous rumble of distant thunder. I miss watching curtains of rain approaching in the distance, along with the sudden wind gusts kicking up the dry dust.

The most spectacular storms I've ever seen were in north east New Mexico. I remember driving through a hailstorm of pea-sized hail, and lots of it. The ground was covered about an inch deep with it. That storm was followed by the most brilliant rainbow I've ever seen.

We have thunderstorms in New York. In fact, watching the lightning strike the tall buildings can be quite spectacular. I sometimes see those same curtains of rain coming down the avenues in Manhattan. But, we've never had anything quite like what I remember seeing every spring in Texas and in the Midwest.

Of course, I most enjoy them from a dry and safe vantage point.

This Indian miniature showing the goddess Lakshmi dancing as the monsoon storms approach best expresses how I really feel about summer thunderstorms. For me, the bolts of lightning and the claps of thunder are the force of life.

Lakshmi Greets the Arrival of the Monsoon Rains, 18th century Indian miniature

Farrah Fawcett 1947 - 2009

It seemed like everyone's brother, including mine, had this poster in their room in 1976.

Michael Jackson 1958 - 2009

The Citizen Kane of pop music just said "rosebud."

Tomorrow Is Another Day; The Gay Movement Today and Tomorrow

"The hairpin drop heard round the world" goes global:

Israeli soldier at a Gay Pride rally, Jerusalem

Gay Pride march, Bucharest, Romania

Gay Pride march in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Gay Pride March, Johannesburg, South Africa

Gay Pride march, Tokyo, Japan

Gay Pride march, Galway, Ireland

I am astonished at the progress of LGBTs that I’ve seen in my lifetime. What began for me in early adolescence as something terrifyingly occult and painfully secret is now a major social, political, and cultural force around the world. The idea of gay marriage is no longer just standard fodder for locker room humor and stand-up comedy, it is legal reality in 6 states with more coming. Being gay or lesbian is now broadly recognized as part of the variety of nature, something all of us who are gay have always known instinctively. We all knew in our heart of hearts from an early age that there was something fundamentally arbitrary and unjust in the criminal defective status assigned to us by the enforcers of conventional society. We now have the social and political space in which to build healthy lives and relationships over the course of entire lifetimes.

One of the great successes of LGBT politics since Stonewall is to take the marginal status once assigned to us by law and psychology and to turn it around to our advantage. It is not entirely coincidental that gay political activism first began to stir in the late 19th century. It was then that psychologists in Germany first coined the term “homosexual” and identified it as an innate status rather than as a series of sexual acts. The German Imperial government criminalized homosexuals and homosexual acts in 1871 in Paragraph 175 of their criminal code. The first ideas of homosexuals as a people appeared in the protests against that law in Germany at the close of the 19th century, and quickly spread through the rest of Europe and to the Americas. It was with Stonewall that, as historian Joan Nestle remarked, gays and lesbians ceased to be a police report, a medical case study, a locker room joke, and became a people.

And yet, despite all of that tremendous progress over the last 40 years, today’s LGBTs have exactly the same civil rights guarantees on the Federal level as they did the first night of the Stonewall riots, -- zero. The legal status of LGBTs is a now a widely varying patchwork of state and local laws. Only 16 states include LGBTs in their civil rights codes. Gay marriage rights in some states, but not in others, will not change that status. Our legal standing is just as much at the sufferance of the majority as it was in 1969. As we have seen repeatedly from Anita Bryant’s successful campaign to force Dade County, Florida to repeal its gay rights protections in 1973 to the victory of Prop 8 in California last year, the majority can turn on us. We can be fashionable and popular one year and be yesterday’s fish the next. Popular today, despised tomorrow, we will always be LGBT no matter which way the fashionable winds blow. Minorities are the creations of majorities. By definition, the minority must lose if its rights are ever put up for a vote by the majority. Until our status as full and lawful citizens of the United States is guaranteed by Federal law, we will remain vulnerable.

The leadership of the gay movement today is more diverse than ever before. However, its public face is still mostly affluent white male. Gender, race, and class divisions plague the movement now as they did 40 years ago. Yes, they do reflect larger divisions in American society, but these petty bigotries are luxuries we cannot afford. Lesbians have been much better friends to gay men than we have been to them. Misogyny does gay men no favors, especially when we have common cause against patriarchy with both lesbians and the feminist movement. The persons on the front line of the LGBT struggle these days more often than not are people of color and blue-collar folk. They have enough to worry about without having to face segregation within the gay community. The battle line no longer runs through San Francisco or New York, but today runs through places like Oklahoma and Newark. Perhaps the song we should be singing at our rallies these days is not just “We Are Family,” but the old union song, “Solidarity Forever.”

Jesus Kicks Ass!

"... Some here will remember the dictums (dare I call them “battle-cries”?) of that muscular Christianity that once reigned in these lands – in Canada and in the US: “No cross, no crown!” “No pain, no gain.” 

-- Bishop Robert Duncan of the Anglican Church in North America.

A post by Fr. Mark Harris over at his blog, Preludium, that included this quote from Bishop Duncan on Muscular Christianity got me to playing with Google Image Search.

  

Here's what I found.

Honestly folks, I can't tell whether these pictures are satire or serious.

This last one of Super Jesus breaking his cross makes me think of a similar (and much finer) image by a true believing Marxist, Jose Clemente Orozco, the great Mexican muralist from the 20th century.

Christ takes an axe to the Cross and cuts down the sacrificial role assigned to him by obscurantist priests. He raises his left fist to declare His new role as embodiment of the awakened proletariat. Orozco has a point here.   Jesus was a carpenter.  He probably had a union card.  

Orozco certainly liked the idea of "muscular" Christianity just as much as Bishop Duncan. But, Orozco was an atheist who believed that priests like Duncan were nothing more than agents of the bank.

Rembrandt, that pansy Amsterdam liberal, didn't like the idea of "muscular" Christianity, or Warrior Jesus, at all. Hero Jesus was for Rubens and the Catholics down in Antwerp (and in verbal form for the extreme Gomarist Calvinists in Rembrandt's native Leyden).
Rembrandt imagined Christ as a very ordinary man with an ordinary build suffering as any ordinary person would dying in extreme pain. He doesn't look like He could put up much of a fight, or kick anyone's ass -- sorta like all the rest of us.   

Rembrandt would say that's the whole point.

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.

How to Spend That Winning Lottery Ticket; The Very Beginning of the Post Stonewall Gay Movement

Craig Rodwell in 1970, photographed by Fred MacDarrah

“Are homosexuals revolting? You bet your sweet ass we are!”
– from a political flyer in 1969 written by Charles Pitts.

A Gay Liberation Front demonstration in Times Square, September of 1969. The blond haired young man on the right is the same as in this picture from the riots, a young man who went by the street name of Jackie Hormona. Photo by Diana Davies


The Stonewall riots were a big golden goose egg of opportunity that dropped into the laps of people who were completely unprepared for it.
The post Stonewall gay movement began in great hope and raised expectations. It also began in chaos and acrimony. Many people were frantically arguing and trying to figure out how to make the best use of this opportunity, and over the shape of the changed landscape of gay life in New York. People who were completely new to any kind of political action were now flooding into a new movement. They had to have a place to go.
The new gay movement that emerged out of the riots was riven with all kinds of divisions and conflicts; ideological divisions, divisions between gay men and lesbians, racial divisions, divisions between transgenders and everyone else, class divisions, neighborhood divisions, personal divisions, etc. It was the whole modern gay movement with all of its abiding problems in its raucous infancy.
Like the movement that would follow over the next 40 years, this first generation accomplished much more than would have been expected. It accomplished much because of – and sometimes despite -- the new populist nature of gay politics.

As I mentioned in a previous post, New York was way behind other cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and even Washington DC when it came to gay movement politics. The New York gay community was largely unprepared for this sudden and massive transformation in its life.

As the New York Mattachine Society clung to its “be nice, go slow, cut deals” approach to gay activism, two new organizations were created by people who saw that the same old methods were not going to work anymore after the riots. The first was the Gay Liberation Front. The second was the Gay Activists Alliance, which split off from the Gay Liberation Front soon after the Front was founded, the first of many such splits over the decades in gay political organizations. In 1969, this was all very new, very painful, and very exciting. Both groups would pioneer new forms of confrontational activism that would be imitated by all kinds of other political movements down to the present day.

Gay Liberation Front meeting in 1970 at the Washington Square Methodist Church

The Gay Liberation Front saw itself as part of a larger left wing revolutionary movement in the United States. It thought of itself less as a formal organization than as a collective. It had no formal structure and no officers or bylaws. Its meetings could be raucous and chaotic. The problem was that much of the revolutionary left wing was not at all happy to see a mass of charged up homosexuals joining their ranks. Many groups, especially the Black Panthers, were openly hostile to them. They saw homosexuality as part of the decadent capitalist system that they wanted to replace. To a certain extent, some in the Front agreed with them. They saw the whole gay culture of bars, cruising, bath houses, and gender bending as so much capitalist decadence that had to go. Some people in the Front wanted subsume the struggle for gay rights into the larger revolutionary struggle.
Others wanted to keep the focus primarily on gay issues, and on issues very specific to the New York community, like liquor laws, police harassment, and discrimination in employment and housing. The split came when members of the Front voted to make a $500 donation to the Black Panthers after the Panthers made blistering homophobic attacks on gays and their new political movement in recent speeches. A number of people walked out and decided to start a new organization.

Gay Activists Alliance march, 1970. Its first president, Jim Owles, is on the right of the row of men linking arms. To the left is Phil Raia, Arthur Evans, Marty Robinson is behind the photographer in the foreground. To the left of the photographer is Tom Doerr who designed the lambda symbol that they are all wearing.

Those people formed the Gay Activists Alliance, a very different organization that decided to focus exclusively on gay issues. Unlike the Front which had no bylaws, and whose meetings could get very chaotic, the Alliance drew up a constitution, used Robert’s Rules of Order for meetings, and elected officers. Whereas some in the Front shunned the gay subculture, the GAA saw it as an existing network to be exploited. The Front mostly spread out of New York through college campus chapters. The Alliance spread beyond New York by way of bars, bathhouses, cabarets, and the gay grapevine.

What both groups did, together and separately, was create a new confrontational gay politics sharply different from the ever-so-polite accommodation and influence peddling of the old New York Mattachine society. It was a participatory politics in which everyone had a part in the decision-making process and everyone participated in political activity. This was no longer the leadership driven politics of the old New York Mattachine. It was political action that was frequently very loud, angry, vulgar, messy and conflict-ridden, but it was also surprisingly effective and quickly got the attention of city politicos who never before took seriously anything gay.

One of the first signs that a new day was here was an action by the Front in 1969 to confront directly the mob ownership of a bar. A Mafioso bar owner punched out a lesbian who had refused to let him cut in on her dance partner. A GLF group of women and men, lead by Martha Shelly, entered that bar en masse, began cranking up the juke box and dancing while conspicuously NOT buying any drinks. Martha Shelley confronted the bar owner. When he said, “Do you know who I am?” She replied, “I don’t know and I don’t care, but we’re the Gay Liberation Front!”

The first thing that both groups concentrated on was visibility. They were out to break down the terrified invisibility that kept gays and lesbians isolated and powerless. They both demonstrated and marched frequently. Instead of trying to conceal homosexual distinction underneath suits, dresses, and a veneer of conventional respectability, they proclaimed their sexuality and a distinct gay identity. The word “gay” was prominent in the titles of both organizations, instead of concealed behind names like “Mattachine” or “Bilitis” or “Homophile” (or “Human Rights Campaign”). Whereas the earlier organizations were very shy about going public, the Front and the Alliance loved the cameras. The more press attention (especially TV attention), the better. They were out to send 2 messages to the world through the media. First, they wanted to show that they were not afraid, not afraid of the cops, the mob, the bigots, the bashers, or the whole power structure that stood against them. Above all, they were not afraid to be publicly identified as gay. Second, they wanted to show the rest of the gay population out there in TV Land that there was a community and a movement waiting for them if they came out, that they would be safest not in the dark closet, but out in the open in the clear light of day in a community with others like them.



Marty Robinson (right) "zapping" Governor Nelson Rockefeller at a campaign event in 1970. Marty planted himself in the reception line, and when Rocky shook his hand, Marty refused to let go until the Guv heard his whole speech about the need for gay rights legislation. Security later pried Marty off the Governor and expelled him from the reception. Photo by Richard C. Wandel

One technique to achieve these ends was pioneered by Marty Robinson of the GAA. It was known as the “zap.” It was a sudden unannounced disruption of a public event, or an intrusion on the offices of a hostile business or politician. The president of Fidelifacts, a New York private investigative agency that specialized in snooping into the sex lives of prospective employees looking to smoke out homosexuals, was asked in a TV interview how he knew people were homosexual. He replied with “If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it’s a duck.” GAA activists led by Marty Robinson dressed in a duck costume descended on his offices the next day with cameras in tow, publicly embarrassing Fidelifacts executives and employees, and disrupting their business.



Marty Robinson in his duck suit at the Fidelifacts zap. Photo by Richard C. Wandel

They took on hostile businesses and politicians all the time, but they targeted liberals (especially Mayor John Lindsay) much more frequently. They put constant pressure on them to keep promises made and to remind them that this new constituency was here to stay and that it was not going away.

The GAA Firehouse in 1971

Dancing at the GAA Firehouse, 1971.
Photos by Fred MacDarrah

Another new service that both organizations provided was opportunities for gays and lesbians to come together and to socialize outside the context of bars and cruising grounds. Both organizations quickly discovered the political effectiveness of a good party. The GLF from the beginning held fund-raising dances. GAA continued that policy, and went further, opening the GAA Firehouse in 1971, one of the very first gay lesbian community centers anywhere, in an old abandoned firehouse in Tribeca. These dances and the Firehouse were opportunities for consciousness raising, organizing, providing services, and having a lot of fun together without having to pay off the mafia or the cops. Movie nights at the Firehouse were legendary. Vito Russo, the author of The Celluloid Closet organized and ran movie nights. Crowds of thoroughly baked young people in the wee hours of the morning watched, recited lines, and sang along to camp classics like Valley of the Dolls, or The Wizard of Oz. The Firehouse was short-lived. It was destroyed in an arson fire in 1974.
The dances and the Firehouse were ways of increasing visibility and building community in a population that was as isolated from each other as they were from conventional society. Some lesbian groups went even further creating communes where women would live and work together.

New York politicians, like all politicians, pay attention to numbers, especially numbers of voters. Some saw the numbers that these organizations were reaching and began to recognize that gays were a potentially very large and powerful voting bloc in city politics. Candidates began making contact with the Alliance and the Front seeking gay votes.

In 1970, Marty Robinson proposed lobbying City Council members to amend the City’s human rights laws to end employment and housing discrimination against gays and lesbians, and to end their criminalization. Jim Owles, Morty Manford, Robinson, and other gay activists met with liberal council members and lobbied them to draft a bill and introduce it. Such a bill was introduced in 1971. It did not reach the Council floor until 1974. It perished in the Council after Cardinal Terence Cooke and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese applied great pressure on Council members through their majority leader Thomas Cuite to reject it. For years afterward, the anti-discrimination bill would die in committee and never reach the Council. The bill finally passed into law with the active sponsorship and support of Mayor Ed Koch in 1986.

The police expel Jim Owles, Marty Robinson, and other GAA members from City Hall, 1970

Who Rioted at the Stonewall Bar That Night?

Stonewall rioters photographed by Fred MacDarrah outside the offices of the Village Voice on the second or third night of the riots.

Who started rioting at the Stonewall Bar that hot humid night 40 years ago?

The Stonewall bar was a dive. Even by the low standards of Mob owned New York gay bars, the Stonewall was the bottom of the pit. Most of its patrons were way under the legal age for drinking. Glasses were washed at best occasionally, and frequently weren’t even rinsed. The restrooms were primitive and filthy. Craig Rodwell led a campaign to close the Stonewall after an outbreak of hepatitis among its patrons in the spring of 1969.
The clientele of the Stonewall was not the Fire Island set grieving over the late Judy Garland that week. The regular patrons of the Stonewall probably never heard of her. They were street kids. They were very young runaways and castaways leaving their families, or thrown out, because they were gay. Many of them were homeless and lived precarious (and sometimes short) lives by hustling, petty thievery, drug dealing, and odd jobs. Others were weekend street kids, kids who led double lives; straight at home and at school, and gay on the weekends in Manhattan. They too sometimes hustled and dealt drugs. As one gay Village resident who knew them said, “They were rotten kids, but they were made rotten.”
There was always a large population of homeless runaways in the Village and around Times Square, most of them gay boys. Among them were a number of transgenders. That population is still there in the Village, though the Times Square population has mostly been driven out by real estate development. The only thing that has changed about it is its color. In 1969, that population was largely white. Today, it is largely black and Hispanic reflecting middle class white America’s decision to accept its gay children, and African and Hispanic America’s continuing struggles with this issue, and with all kinds of complicating factors. The artist and writer David Wojnarowicz would emerge out of this homeless runaway population in the 1980s. He ran away from a violent alcoholic father and began hustling at age 12. His story is not that unique.
These were the people who started the Stonewall riots, who launched that first shot across the bow of history for all gays and lesbians.

As can be seen from the photographs, a substantial number of them were black and Latino. A lot of transgenders were involved. Two of them, Sylvia Rivera and Marsh P. Johnson, would emerge as political leaders, founding their own organization, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in the 1970s. Lesbians don’t appear to be much of a presence in the records, which does not mean they weren’t there. It is possible that one lesbian, Marylin Fowler, started the whole thing by ferociously resisting arrest as the cops raided the bar, provoking the crowds into charging the police.

The activists and other gays and lesbians joined in on the second and third nights. Craig Rodwell was at first appalled by the rioting, but quickly recognized its importance.  He tried to do some political consciousness-raising among the rioters.  Marty Robinson was there on the second night of rioting and remembered it as an exhilarating experience.

Not all of the rioters were gay. A substantial number of heterosexuals joined the riots on the second and third nights. Many of them were career anarchists and brawlers from the East Village who relished a good street fight with the NYPD. Many others were genuinely sympathetic to their gay friends.

"The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World," The Stonewall Riots

"Dropping hairpins" is old gay slang for publicly announcing one's homosexuality, what we would call "coming out."

Gay politics came out and dropped hairpins all over the place on a series of hot humid nights in the summer of 1969.

Forty years later, just about everyone wants to claim the Stonewall riots. Their importance to history becomes apparent only as they recede in time and their legacy grows. Like some dimly understood episode in ancient history, legend fills in where gaps appear in the factual account.

And the factual account has holes in it. The local press reports, especially at the start of the riots are few. The NY Times hardly bothered to mention it. The Daily News ran a headline that said “Queen Bees Stinging Mad,” followed by a story speculating that the riots were in reaction to the one big story that all the local papers and networks were focused on at the time, the death and funeral of Judy Garland.

There are few images of the riots, and none that I’m aware of from the opening night. The only news film that I’ve seen of the riots is some very dark and grainy footage of police cars that don’t show very much.

The one paper that did cover the riots extensively was The Village Voice. They had to. Their offices at the time were two doors down from the Stonewall bar (where the Duplex cabaret now stands). Reporters and editors had to step through debris and police barricades to get to work. Voice photographer Fred MacDarrah took most of the photos that we have of the riots. He stepped out the front door of his office and began taking pictures on the second or third night of rioting. His picture of rioters posing on the front of the Stonewall Bar remains the most famous image from the riots.

The rusting Stonewall Inn sign in the background is a relic from the days when the Stonewall was a respectable family restaurant in the 1940s and 50s.

The riots began around midnight June 27th, 1969 with a routine police raid on an unusually hot and humid night. Cops from the 6th precinct showed up with a paddy wagon expecting little to no resistance, as was usually the case in gay bar raids. Most of the arrested went quietly, but some struck poses and attitudes for the large crowd gathered in Christopher Park across the street. Again, this was not unusual.
For reasons that remain unclear, the large crowd gathered outside suddenly turned on the cops. They began pelting them with coins, rocks, and bottles, and then charged them. The crowd forced the cops into the bar. They shut the door of the now almost empty bar and frantically radioed for backup. The crowd pounded on the doors and broke the windows (which were already boarded up from the inside). They tore up a parking meter and used it as a battering ram to open the door. When they broke the door down, one of the trapped cops pulled his gun and threatened to shoot the first person to come in. The crowd then tried unsuccessfully to set the bar on fire.
Police backup and the Fire Department had to make their way through angry crowds pounding on their vehicles and throwing rocks and bottles. They finally rescued the trapped cops and dispersed the rioters by morning.



The second night of rioting was even worse with huge crowds filling the streets around Christopher Park and Sheridan Square. According to one account, Marsha P. Johnson, a local tranny, climbed a light pole and began throwing rocks down on the cops. According to other accounts, gay boys formed a Rockettes style chorus line kick stepping up Christopher Street toward advancing riot police, retreating when the police charged and then forming up again.
Rioting lasted into a third night with professional anarchists from the East Village joining in the fight. They broke windows and set cars on fire. Amazingly, there were no deaths, but there were lots of injuries, some of them serious.

Rioting continued in the Village sporadically through the month of July.

It is frequently explained that the riots happened in period of expectations raised by the Civil Rights movement, by the Sexual Revolution, etc. But expectations in the wake of the events of 1968 (the assassinations, the riots, the election) were beginning to wane. The kids who started the riot were probably unaware of any current events (though the people who joined in the second and third nights would certainly have been aware).
The riots’ significance was recognized immediately. Gay activists, especially younger ones, were anxious to keep the momentum going.

Younger members of the New York Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis organized the first political rally after the Stonewall riots. It took place in Washington Square Park July 27, 1969 attended by barely 200 people. There were few takers of the lavender arm bands and ribbons passed out. Martha Shelly of the Daughters, and Marty Robinson of Mattachine spoke to the crowd. They next marched from Washington Square to Christopher Park across from the vacant Stonewall Bar.
Below are photos of the event by Fred MacDarrah. These are pictures from the conclusion of the event in Christopher Park.

Marchers on their way to Christopher Park

A cop urges Marty Robinson not to incite the crowd. There were still sporadic riots in the Village at that time.

Marty Robinson addressed the marchers at the conclusion in Christopher Park. The young man wearing a bandanna around his neck just behind the man wearing a shirt that says "69" is Jim Owles, a founder with Robinson of the Gay Activists Alliance and its first president. Legend says that Owles fell in love with Robinson at this rally. They were an item. but not for long.

We see in the new leaders that emerged in the weeks and months following the riots a real change, especially in their public image. Gone are the suits and dresses and the anxious politeness.

Marty Robinson with boyfriend Tom Doerr in 1970. Tom Doerr, a graphic artist, designed the lambda symbol that they are both wearing. Robinson, Doerr, Jim Owles, and other founders of the Gay Activists Alliance chose the symbol because it was a sign in chemistry for a catalyst, what they hoped their organization would be in politics. The lambda soon became a general symbol of gay activism.


Longtime gay activist Jack Nichols (right) with his companion, Liege Clarke, a military intelligence veteran, photographed in 1971.


Activist and a founder of Gay Liberation Jim Fouratt photographed by Fred MacDarrah on Saint Mark's Place in 1967

The new younger leaders were social dropouts and castaways. Marty Robinson was the son of a Brooklyn doctor who gave up a prosperous home and future to live openly as a gay man. He worked all his life as a union carpenter. Jim Fouratt, a founder of Gay Liberation, was one of the street kids who started the Stonewall riots. All of these men cultivated a public image that was very counter-cultural and aggressively sexual, wearing tight jeans and making PDA with lovers at their events.

The suits and the dresses were gone forever, along with the fear and the isolation.

UPDATE;

Jonathan Ned Katz, a veteran of the Gay Activists Alliance, posted newly released NYPD records of the bar raid in the comments section of this blog entry. They appear to confirm one of the many legends about how the riot started. One story said that a very butch lesbian was arrested and dragged out of the bar by the cops. She put up a terrific fight which provoked the crowd. Only one woman's name appears on that arrest record, Marylin Fowler. She is described as "kicking and shoving" officers along with 2 other men, Vincent DePaul and Raymond Castro.

Not all the people arrested that night were gay. David Van Ronk, a noted folk singer who is quite heterosexual, was arrested for striking a police officer.

The whole document is very illuminating reading bringing to life a chaotic and historic event.

Thanks Jonathan for posting this historical scoop on my blog!

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.

The End of the Yellow Brick Road, Greenwich Village

One of New York City's most famous gay residents, the poet WH Auden called New York "The Great Rome of all who lost or hated home." The destination for so many of the uprooted from around the USA and around the world was the neighborhood known as Greenwich Village. It was originally founded as a genteel refuge from the cholera and yellow fever epidemics that struck New York between 1791 and 1805 (the indigent plague dead, about 10,000 of them, were buried in the city's first potter's field which is now Washington Square park; they are still there under the playgrounds, the trees, and the Washington Square Arch pictured above). Greenwich Village was the only neighborhood north of Wall Street that successfully resisted the street grid imposed by the Commission Plan of 1817 on Manhattan. It has always had a reputation for independence.
In most of the USA, Greenwich Village was long an object of scorn; a ghetto of rootless woolly headed idealists, free thinkers, and sex perverts. Every Presidential candidate from New York, starting with Al Smith, had the Village hung around their necks. It was the embodiment of the Decadent City -- Sodom by the Hudson -- used as a foil to enhance the virtue of the rural Heart Land.
And yet, the Village played a central role in the creation of modern American culture. It was where the New World met and clashed with the Old World. Beginning with the First World War, Greenwich Village was the home of exiled European intellectuals as well as American artists and writers. Until the 1960s, those 2 groups met in bars, studio lofts, and bookstores to talk, argue, fight, and frequently to collaborate in the creation of a new American modern culture that would dominate the world in the last half of the 20th century.

The Village became a major destination for gays and lesbians at about the beginning of the 20th century, and possibly even earlier. This omni-tolerant place, home to so many unconventional types, would surely be a safe home for members of sexual minorities. The earliest recorded gay bar is The Slide which once stood on Bleecker street in the Village in the 1890s. The only reason we know about it is because the New York Herald led a campaign to pressure the District Attorney into shutting it down. There were surely other earlier gathering places.

Charles Demuth, Turkish Bath, watercolor, 1918

The pioneering American modernist Charles Demuth haunted the bars, cruising grounds, and bath houses of the early 20th century Village recording his experiences in a series of watercolors that have only come to light recently. These provided him with a certain measure of consolation in his later life when misfortunes affecting his family's business forced him to return to his native Pennsylvania and back into The Closet.

Drag Ball in Webster Hall, 1920s

There was a brief springtime of openness for gays and lesbians in the Village during the Jazz Age of the 1920s with the "Pansy Craze," a brief fashion for all things gay and gender-bending. The drag balls at Webster Hall were huge spectacular events drawing thousands of people to watch and to participate. The drag balls in Harlem were even bigger and more spectacular. The competition was ferocious.

Prohibition criminalized the city's nightlife. People who in another time simply wanted to go out for a drink and a dance found themselves in illegal speakeasies together with all sorts of underworld types, including crowds of gays and lesbians. It was probably during these years that the gay reputation for spectacular partying began.
There was a blossoming of gay culture in literature. Gay men played a large role in the Harlem Renaissance. Some of the first literature to treat homosexuality sympathetically (eg The Well of Loneliness by Radcliffe Hall) was written at this time. One of the first people to take on the authorities over the question of homosexuality in New York was, of all people, Mae West. She wrote a play called The Drag which treated homosexuality in a positive light. It played with some success in New Jersey and Connecticut, but morality activists successfully prevented it from opening in New York. For going up against the authorities so frequently and so boldly, Mae West was prosecuted for corrupting morals and spent time in the City's prison then on Roosevelt Island.

With the end of Prohibition came state regulation of the sale of liquor, and a series of crackdowns on gay life in the Village into the 1960s. New York state prohibited the sale of liquor to "sexual deviants." Connecticut went further banning "sexual deviants" from getting driver's licenses. To be a regular patron of gay bars, to be a sexually active gay man or lesbian meant having an arrest record. Gay bars (and private parties) were regularly raided and shut down by the police. Owners, employees, and patrons were all arrested and prosecuted. Names and addresses would always be published resulting in unemployment, eviction, divorce, and loss of credit. The Village became quite literally a gay ghetto since landlords around the city were free (even encouraged) to evict "deviants." The Village was the only neighborhood in New York where landlords would rent to known gays and lesbians. Because of their underground status, gays and lesbians were sitting ducks for crime; everythng from extortion to assault to murder.
That Jazz Age spring froze over and was largely forgotten. Perhaps its ghost was at work continuing to attract hundreds of gays and lesbians to the Village to try to create something like a real life under the conditions of constant threat and harassment. There was a huge wave of gays and lesbians into the Village at the end of World War II. Soldiers discharged for homosexuality (numbered in the thousands because of crackdowns toward the end of the war) who couldn't and wouldn't go home settled in port cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. They dramatically expanded the gay populations of those cities. Their experiences, their proximity, and the expectations raised by the war would play a decisive role in creating a new gay lesbian political movement. Their friendships and mutual support networks would lay the foundation for the movement that would emerge after the Stonewall riots.

There continued to be a lively underground gay culture in New York, that would appear in the press every once in awhile with news photographs of arrests in bar raids. Then as now, drag queens and trannies were the easiest targets and a press favorite. New York, like a lot of American cities, criminalized cross-dressing after the end of Prohibition.

Arrested After a Village Bar Raid, 1962

Sources for this post are David Carter's Stonewall, and George Chauncey's Gay New York.

The Stonewall Bar, a Brief History

The Stonewall Bar in September of 1969, vacant, boarded up, and burned out from the riots.

The Stonewall Bar today

In 1967, "Fat Tony" Laurio, deeply disappointed his very pious mob boss father when he decided to open a gay bar in Greenwich Village on Christopher Street. He bought a burned out small building that had stood vacant for about 5 years. In 1967, almost all gay bars in New York state were mob owned. Since the end of Prohibition, it was illegal to serve drinks to "known sexual perverts" in the state. Gay bars were the creations of the mob and police corruption. "Fat Tony" had the means to regularly pay off the cops at the 6th Precinct.

The vacant building he bought was originally 2 small buildings. They were built in the late 19th century as stables. One was the Jefferson Livery Stable, the other was a stable run by Saks Fifth Avenue for its delivery horses. The building stood just a block from the Northern Dispensary, one of the oldest public clinics in the USA. Edgar Allen Poe was a frequent patient there. In the next block beyond that on Christopher was the site of the Lion's Head Tavern, a favorite watering hole for writers like Eugene O'Neil. In that same block, Craig Rodwell opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Book Store in 1967, one of the very first to specialize in gay literature (as opposed to pornography which Rodwell refused to sell). The poet e. e. cummings lived in that block of Christopher. Christopher Park across the street from the building was once a huge crumbling tenement that burned down in the 1900s in fire that killed 40 people. The site was turned into a small park. Across the park within sight of the buildings is 59 Grove Street where the great revolutionary Thomas Paine died.

The two buildings were combined and turned into a tavern in the early 1920s. It was called "Bonnie's Stone Wall" and may have served a lesbian clientele. The name may have been code. There was a very popular lesbian novel at the time by an anonymous author titled The Stone Wall. During Prohibition, the Stone Wall was a "tea room," a bar that served no liquor, but usually kept a speakeasy in the basement or in back. In the 1940s the Stonewall Inn was a thriving respectable restaurant hosting wedding and retirement parties. By 1960, the restaurant burned down, and the building stood vacant as the surrounding neighborhood went into decline.
The Stonewall was too far west to cash in on the Beat culture that was centered on 8th street. But, it was perfectly situated for a gay male clientele. By the early 1960s, Greenwich Avenue, a block away, was major cruising area. The Stonewall was right next to an important subway stop where gay men arrived in the neighborhood.

By the time the Stonewall opened in 1967, gay night life had already endured 3 years of a police crackdown that began with the New York World's Fair of 1964 - 1965, and continued as a politically popular campaign to "clean up" Greenwich Village and make it more tourist and business friendly. The campaign only pushed the Village's gay night life deeper into mob control, and lined the pockets of police captains willing to look the other way for the right price.

The major source for this short history is David Carter's splendid history of the Stonewall riots, Stonewall, The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, with a little help from George Chauncey's Gay New York, Gender Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890 - 1940.