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Newspaper accounts, oral histories, and reports conflict with one another. There is little agreement about the events of that night-aside from the fact that patrons violently clashed with police.
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Although some claim Johnson “threw the first brick” at the police, she maintained she didn’t get to the bar until the melee was in full swing. Johnson, a Black transgender woman and activist who frequented the bar and is considered one of the leaders of the rebellion. One person fighting for her rights was Marsha P. I’m just looking at the door and saying to myself…‘African Americans can fight for their rights, Latinos can fight for their rights, women can fight for their rights, what about us?’” In an oral history, activist Mark Segal recalled a “circus of amazing colors and lights and people running. In a spontaneous outpouring of frustration, patrons and onlookers began yelling and throwing objects at the police. But this time, the patrons resisted, and violence broke out as the officers tried to calm the crowd. On the night of the raid, police arrived intending to follow their usual pattern of seizing the bar’s liquor and arresting its patrons. “It catered largely to a group of people who are not welcome in, or cannot afford, other places of homosexual social gathering.” “This club was more than a dance bar, more than just a gay gathering place,” wrote Dick Leitsch, the first gay journalist to document the events. ( Explore four other sites significant to the LGBTQ movement.) Located in Greenwich Village, the heart of gay life in New York at the time, its patrons were among the most marginalized members of New York’s LGBTQ community-including underaged and unhoused individuals, people of color, and drag performers. The Stonewall Inn was grubby and barely legal.
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Police officers regularly surveilled and entrapped gay men they raided gay bars on pretexts that ranged from “disorderly conduct” to a variety of minor liquor license infractions.
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Owners, many of whom were associated with organized crime, saw a business opportunity in catering to a gay clientele they had also learned to avoid raids by greasing police officers’ palms with bribes.īusiness was humming, but gay bars were still dangerous places to congregate. By 1969, activists had compelled the New York state liquor authority to overturn its policy against issuing liquor licenses to gay bars. Gay bars were rare places where people could be open about their sexual orientation. New York City, however, was home to a large LGBTQ population and a thriving gay nightlife. ( Listen to testimonies from Stonewall and beyond.) Altough some gay rights groups had begun to protest this treatment publicly, many LGBTQ people led their lives in secret. By the 1960s, homosexuality was clinically classified as a mental disorder, and most municipalities in the United States had discriminatory laws that forbade same-sex relationships and denied basic rights to anyone suspected of being gay. In the years since the uprising, LGBTQ activists pushed for-and largely achieved-a broad expansion of their the legal rights, and in June 2015, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling guaranteeing same-sex couples the right to marry.īefore these gains, however, LGBTQ people had long been subject to social sanction and legal harassment for their sexual orientation, which had been criminalized on the pretexts of religion and morality. Patrons and onlookers fought back-and the days-long melee that ensued, characterized then as a riot and now known as the Stonewall Rebellion, helped spark the modern LGBTQ civil rights movement.Įach June, Pride Month honors the history of Stonewall with parades and events. Patrons would pour out, lining up on the street so police could arrest them.īut when police raided the Stonewall Inn in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, things didn’t go as expected. Officers would pour in, threatening and beating bar staff and clientele. In 1969, police raids of gay bars in Manhattan followed a template.