BackStory; A History of Stonewall, the Riot That Started the LGBTQ Revolution

it somehow welcome the backstory to show that explains the history behind today's headlines i'm brian balogh and a nathan family if you're new to the podcast were all historians in each week along with our colleagues at ayers and joy and freeman we explore a different aspect of american history we're going to start today show in the wee hours of the twentieth of june nineteen sixty nine with a police raid on a gay bar a raid which would set off an earthquake that is still being registered today from all accounts it was a shabby place with water down drinks much too expensive but i think that gay men in particular and a few lesbians loved the place because of the dance floor which i have heard from a number of people who

perpetuated the place that it was the best dance floor in all of new york for gay people that's lgbt q scholar william finnegan the name of the bar she's describing has entered the iconography of gay life especially it wasn't even there or they did not have a liquor license it was supposed to be a private club and when you came you were supposed to sign in people signed in with names such as donald duck and mickey mouse and that was the way the mob supposedly got around getting a liquor license run by the mob the shabby stonewall inn was about to become a flashpoint in the battle over gay rights christopher mitchel was researching new york city's clear economic and cultural history from the nineteen forties to the nineteen seventies what was greenwich village like in the late nineteen sixties one of the things that's happening in the nineteen sixties and you see more and more businesses and

more and more economic activity that's geared towards queer consumers john was open a couple years before the riots and it's written about in gay guy that repulsion the late nineteen sixties as a place that is one to go to because you can dance and you can find two people a cup where but there's also this idea that you should be where the stonewall bar and beware of the people that work there there is a warning and one of the matching guides about black male and the fact that it had received a skull the infamous enforcer is taking people's personal information and blackmailing them with that was a gay man living in greenwich village fifty years ago was a novelist and white at the time of the saw ryanair uprising i was twenty nine i was working for heim lived not for time magazine before their book division and i was living in the village

and i was sort of office worker by day and a big thick by nine and going out to discos i would come home from or go right to better than wake up after my disco now up around midnight and then go out on the prowl stonewall was too big rooms people think of it as a disco but a religious have a jukebox it had a lot of gave favorites are on the jukebox when you entered into a long bar on the right in order gender and small dark you had to go cause it was the mafia barsotti had to go pass a kind of big fat mafia guard who had a dead cigar and the smile and they do it sort of if you would gain of letting them and then you go to the bar which was horribly on ig nick because they didn't have running water and they would wash other classes and dirty water was really pretty awful that and they charge more than it ordinarily would but you can

buy beer which was i guess they've been out in the first round people danced around the jukebox but never more than twenty people and then in the next room that there was it was dark they did just sit quietly on bang camps along the wall and talk and just maybe i don't know when i first started going it was mainly just white boys who lived in the village but by the time of the stonewall uprising it was mainly kids who'd who are coming down from harlem the black and puerto rican kids who were different population really and probably much fiercer then those silly white boys wouldn't i mean that is when there was a natural uprising they were kids who were used to confronting the cops and fighting early

hours of june twenty eight the police raided nothing unusual they often that they would come and ask to see people's ids if the idea didn't suggest that they were a minor that they were trying to quote pass by disguising themselves in the other as the other gender quote unquote people would then be released in those that there was any suspicion about would be arrested but this time when people were released what would actually happen if somebody was released in the raiders they would just run off they would just be so happy to have gotten away without being arrested and taken down to the police station but this time people got out of the stone wall and run off they stayed around waiting for their friends and eventually a proud accumulated the writer and historian of the lgbt q civil rights movement david carter

agreed to need backstory outside the stonewall inn in new york life balance between manny revealing that there's more than anger then it's a lot the fbi the police beat barges let's try to ensure state again and she fought ferociously and listening you know are treated roughly by the places that you've said about what you guys did

something to potential third time they put the heater volume control and then when the pleas from tree beside a barn that led rod even say that really simple very physical we'll be over half day retreat or of being a little middle class torrent of course didn't like the idea of people being are and protesting those sacred police so my first reaction was to try to say oh come on guys let's calm down just calm down a runaway but then the excitement of the protest unleash all these feelings even in many people began to chant gay is good it which was supposed to be a parody of black is beautiful so right away i think people began to see themselves as an oppressed minority and in a way you could say the most important

thing that happened at the stonewall uprising was a gaze went from feeling that they were the diagnosis to feeling that they were a minority but the cubs have a big paddy wagon and black mariah upfront and they hold all their like maybe twenty people worked in the bar and they were all holed our half of them were all andy and then the cops stayed barricaded inside the bar with the rest of them in the truck would come back and pick them up joe but we all started protesting i mean some customers were also arrested the more flamboyant ones but it was mainly the status so anyway while the cops were away and the other cops were barricaded inside the bar people began to use

battering rams people the parking meters and a gambler rambler drawers which are very heavy that would drawers with with these burner and they would take a bow and wastepaper outweighs desk is and throw it against the door and light it with a lighter and so's oh you know that was a period when you were pretty violent and they even in protests and then the cop sent reinforcements and pretty soon the whole area was there a war zone people are just grabbing anything they drove home construction going on in here now is because i was interested in history it was easier to get cold calls rounds of his time especially without us all the calls and other building blocks in the

surrounding trees here to pronounce them pawns basilica party you didn't get bybee had thought was loose band also created to attack the doors just on war and the wooden back any kind of two widows people into the cigar store and there's a lighter fluid tried to set the place on fire on the beach that address those bombs or the distressed seven percent is breaking glass board this it wasn't right and i was right now using fresh and everybody at the civil rights act the sexy voice of the body have every minority standing up for itself better and demanding change in getting in the news so i think that was sort of what was to if i was very very knotty us is standing up in the you know in many

ways was a teacher at the school who took part in the right reasons how he remembers that the site the most important thing for the people it's by there's stations there's been a major and they came to play we had people

saying that and you could see that you can't just always kept jaycee and we look at little bars we could wear them down because the directors do you have any political issue like the one that welcomes comradeship something we never felt no it felt like got out of some of the victims who were the perpetrators they're so dramatic it was the first time that gay people thought that in huge number is not the first time that that they protested there had been

significant protests of police raids in los angeles at a bar called the black cat another one at a bar called the patch there had been protests in san francisco of of police raids at compton's cafeteria but it was the first time i think that huge crowds gathered and over are angry enough to throw things and to fight back in a new grades went on for several nights but the violent clashes with the cops were motivated by more than just a botched police raid on a single gay bar it took place at a time when civil rights struggle of all kinds were daily the news and political activism was increasingly direct and confrontational lillian faded this was at the very end of the nineteen sixties this was june in nineteen sixty nine a an entire decade activism and angry responses to authority there was the black civil rights

movement there was the anti vietnam war movement there was the women's movement there was a puerto rican movement and in new york was so much the center of all of these things and so young people on the nightly news with would see that there was a lot of anger out there and the anger was often demonstrated by riots are angry protests and i think that the young people who were at the stone wall that night were very angry too that they cut the stonewall had recently been raided and this was another raid and other gay bars in greenwich village were raided and celebrity i think the mood of anger we had been brewing throughout the decade but it came to a head that night the media did not get it the new york times had a little article about the stonewall raids on page thirty three talking about held policeman had been hurt in a melee at a greenwich

village bar and that was it that was the emphasize about the policeman who were hurt the village voice had articles the two reporters wrote a very detailed articles but for the most part mocking about the gay people at the stonewall inn another new york paper had a headline that said that i'm a man stove homosexuals was raided and quote the queen bees are stinging mad and sort of mocking the anger of the gay kid city's stonewall other newspapers elsewhere around the country didn't pay much attention to it does it was even at that time a new gay newspaper in los angeles called a los angeles advocate which became and still is the leading lgbt q magazine now in the country but they thought that it was something significant that

kids at the stonewall inn fought back but for the most part not much attention was paid to it except in greenwich village and i think stonewall has become the icon that it's become because just a few days after the riots young people gathered and started a new organization called the gay liberation front the rat tell it about organization has indicated just by its name it was named after the communist vietnam national liberation front this was after all the the days of the protests against the war in vietnam and many of these young people have been involved in those protests the gay liberation front just the name caught the imagination of the people all over the country in various cities

everywhere in los angeles and san francisco and chicago and philadelphia groups popped up using that name or a name similar to the gay liberation front but i think the most important thing that the new york gay liberation front did is they decided that the riots needed to be commemorated and so one year after the riots they they decided they wanted to a big parade throughout new york two to celebrate the fact that he people finally fought back and it was a pride parade and they asked other cities to join in los angeles to los angeles had a parade commemorating the riots the same time in june of nineteen seventy was a big parade down hollywood boulevard with about a thousand people san francisco had a very small march in chicago had a small march but that was the beginning of the pride

parades there every year it commemorated the riots and of course now the pride parades are all over the world not only commemorate the stonewall riots but also to celebrate lgbt to people is we call the community now and to demand to lgbt rights which is just a little code names deception hi tech gadgets these might sound like something of the movie's but there are actually some of the essential components of being a spy ever wondered what it really takes to be a spy well every week a park asked original espionage tells the stories of the world's most incredible undercover missions and how these covert operation

succeeded or failed you get a chance to find out the real world's my tactics require to impersonate exploit and infiltrate the most confident are places in the world you'll be fascinated by the story of george truffle off a high ranking army official who was arrested after allegedly accepting money from a russian intelligence agent who was actually an undercover fbi agent episodes on british codebreaker alan turing as well as triple agent and reed dairy court are out right now search for and subscribe to espionage on spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts again searched espionage or visit park yes dot com slash espionage to listen now he made two thousand nineteen year city announced plans to build a new monument to two transgender women political activists marsha johnson so you're there were longtime campaigners for gay and transgender

rights the monument will sit just a few blocks from the stonewall inn in new york back stories friend eric marcus present of the podcast making gay history interviewed marcia p johnson he found her living in new jersey alongside an activist from the establishment wing of the gay rights movement randy weber has an extract from that interview marcia speaks first way i i lied about being dumb all that night party a band and we were all there and they've been very involved in the park have a cocktail i was that's an idyllic and sounds of that sold carpet like that dan savage places though are jambalaya with a radar ready the riots have already gotten a bed that the sleepy air and that the plague on fire they think that they have that i think that they they really want the town hall the crowd they had a raid and they are they got sick they end of the outage actually used to

work in a coat check room and then at all the bartenders and i don't want no more my daughter don't worry about the bar we were all there and we all had a lot of again walled medieval dungeon our lives where gary there's everything of it a day a year with the law but they won't be the ground they opened anyway i very gallantly game with a way to do it would take the money and the concept really take my and bar so they are the primary they would take all the money and hire a binder barney barker alan register layout and that i am pro our account and when the uninvited by ridley scott it all laid out of the bars at san lorenzo da and that that would just dig at npr and at our you know our when they came and they started out with a at atx jacquie then i was one of those you have

claimed that it really points out that the nba had the jack we have working air at have arrest anybody at them all a day when climate that we were nervous about the chorus lines and yells up at the police i like as they will fall a girls' rock at hal yeah i will achieve it beats out the monolith cause it's training surrogates who thought that have a crowd that's what i always remains were recently as we as methane leak it's now they end we had an out of our faith of absentee ballot inadequate food available love roseanne please don't know days laverne so near rights they want her at the town hall there were heard on the street outside the dialogue with people with rowing

borrow than a bleep rig out there with the club than an hour the time the riot helmets and now going back and i think what i like to hear the fourth down on the ground zero i was amazingly up while ortiz that history and every time we go in no going out to hire fulltime they we didn't get the top who wonder at the cia isi stonewall oh i should start on this note but it puts me in the worst light does to the time stonewall happened i was nine my button shop east village and for ali as a man issuing you see the pictures of me on tv and where innocent eye and i spent ten years of my life going on than people on the sexual look just like everybody else within all wear makeup and wear dresses and had falsetto voices mls good income there are communists and all this and all the saddest all broke out and there were reports in the press oh

chorus lines of queens checking out their heels of the cops like rock at sea and now we have the song all girls and no i thought you know as like jesse yes he says say iraq's the windows open doors i felt as i was horrified i mean the last thing rene then i thought of the time they were sending back again liberation movement twenty years later there may always tv shows and all this work that we have done or tried as that was legitimacy the game moment that they were we were nice middle class people like everybody else and you know it just didn't it suddenly there was all this what i considered riffraff and i gave a speech and was asked the city iowa i was asked the us to speak at the electric circus which was a major which was an age where you going what we got right

you know let me think that on reducing us so yeah i was now as rhyme ii shop in east village the biden shot they get a shot and when this happened i was horrified because it was still the source somewhere i saw a picture from stonewall and i had a big sign up the magazine society which was one of my base groups so the matches as i asked so this is so they believe though not big ways but the respect the law and order back in a lawful manner in other words the magazine itself was basically a conservative organization and they had a diaphanous electric circus and i got up and said that i did not think that the way went public acceptance was ago on end for chorus line the drag queens cook it kicking it be out with the police and i was just beginning to speak and one of the bouncers at the electric circuit found out that it was a gay thing they're their diet they're talking

with gay and somebody's standing next to me said to them are you one of them and i said yes and he began beating the hell out of him and this riot broke out an electric circus and i remember driving home because it was all about twenty one twenty two years old and he said all i know is that i've been in this moment for three days and beaten up three times and he had a black high and dr park that they so scary right but the thing was that you were dealing with a bang it shows that what my generation do we build the ideology you know are we sit calmly said where the scientific that's how we've been brainwashed by society we put together like you know learned i mean mark hallmarks wrote the book that what we did well it literally took style law and here i was considered the first note than the visionary near the gate moment not even realize when the revolution if you one i caught that this thing that i thought would never happen in a small neutralized people would

become a mass social movement was acquiring i was against it not very happy stonewall happened i'm very happy the way things worked out very serious issue was initially and that that action animation narrative that the root there are a lot of what was there was a war ii with the group picture and best i was about ten am when the transvestite vermonter like he and living in a hovel in a slum somewhere on themselves revolutionaries that's what it was the mine speech and that's that gets a very visionary started out of a very good for air was that as starlet they started they started today a bomb it could then today who used to beat marshall for a parade she was the one to talk they'll be angry berenson

even today cause that rivera would spread of darwin's remembered today and started real problem and stacey started arts teacher and that that cats never missionary can hear me right from the device rather than an orientation in nineteen ninety two johnson's body was found in the hudson river for death was initially dean suicide for falling late achieve authentic nation drowning of undetermined cost today james stonewall is attached to gay rights groups around the

world william fagan i think stonewall deserves to be remembered in that it was this very dramatic incident that that triggered important things that followed such as the gay liberation front that was formed just a week or so after stonewall at the parades all over the country formed initially to our stonewall but know hundreds of thousands of people show up to those parade seem empty in the beginning they did it in the name of stone all i think it needs to be remembered is as this icon that ignited the organization of these various groups that went on to do other important things is there's a direct line i think between stonewall and in the gay liberation front in the beginning and then out of the gay liberation front a group called the gay actor this

alliance that did nothing but fight for gay rights says it was called in the early nineteen seventies and then the establishment of all of these mainstreaming organizations that knew how to fight in the courts such as lambda legal and the national gay rights lobbying knew how to fight him in washington when those groups have been established had it not been for the trigger of stonewall very possibly but i think the stone wall rush them into being because it was this this huge explosion or in the words of this game with to nineteen sixty nine immediately after the riots this hair pin drop heard round the real stuff how did the riot of june nineteen sixty nine becomes such a turning point in the story of lgbt q politics christopher mitchel there

is this organizational cascade after stonewall i gay liberation front organizations are found across the country and through a combination of media and word of mouth there is this kind of immediate moment of national organizing it's not cordon it aired and it's kind of spontaneous but it's all it all seems to be inspired can either directly by or indirectly by the event's sam stovall in late june nineteen sixty nine and so you know that's that's significant than it was you know mustered immediately seen as this major turning point of that and that's why you have the christopher street liberation day committee organizing within a few months to try to commemorate the event in and i think that they knew that if they didn't keep that momentum rolling and if they didn't mark the event in some kind of way you would just end up being like you know the other uprisings that had occurred in new york city but also around the area i mean i never write at a doughnut shop in

la and maybe a donut shop in philadelphia i mean if it happens in places where gay people hang out usually diner is late night doughnut shops kind of places in anbar as gay bars you know what isn't to make stone wall stick out well it's the right combination of events and people and also the fact that it's really big at last a long time it was an event that really disrupted the village and it didn't stop hamas other than stop within a few hours the riot the first night went on for hours and hours and hours and people can back and do it the next night and then a third night so when something like that happens when it sustains you know you can you kind of think it's you know it's tapping into some kind of energy and it's tapping into a kind of a potential for political action based on the pre conditions that exist stonewall has become a story differently now seen as a turning point in american history in his second inaugural speech president obama even spoke of the

significance of seneca falls selma and stonewall and there's no doubt that in terms of gay self perception stonewall was transformative edmund white i mean our used to saying things like gay community in acting as a gay people constitute a minority of like puerto ricans are jews or whatever but in those at a living that way was days were considered a sickness and m is either crime or send your sickness but those only three possibilities and heaving gabriel and suvs subscribe to that many of us were in therapy trying to go straight and you know we weren't really attracted to members of the opposite sex before stonewall everybody at so much of their energy went into being gay into justifying birds this is do their friends or to themselves in disguising

the truth of their lives from their work mates and from their family i mean like dresses i would make up stories at work about my various girlfriends because i wanted to confide in my colleagues the way anybody else would but i couldn't tell him it was in and i was talking about i had to pretend it was when i saw all the kind of falsity and awe in double dealing what was abolished in a way by gay liberation and in my case i began to be able to write and publish books about gays and i've written twenty five books probably that mostly are about the game and the slides and so that made it a huge change for me because i had submitted boat rather tormented books before

stonewall and they'd always been rejected including rejected by other gay men who were editors and years later they would say to me oh i really like that book of yours but i didn't dare speak out more because my colleagues would have known i was there but after stonewall i'm a whole bunch of us began to publish books were gay content the stonewall is seen as the moment which ignited the gay community it also revealed tensions between reformers and revolutionaries men and women can serve the days and drag queens and between the generations christopher mitchel groups that emerged after stonewall army be unified for a minute or maybe they're unified enough to put on a i am a protest or a parade but they're not really unified enough to protect it kind of construct a singular agenda so to speak and if you look at some of the footage

from the end of the our march is an early nineteen seventies you'll see activists fighting on stage and most famous one is tom sawyer rivera being thrown out the stage trying to talk about trans rights prisoner's rights and it gets in the nineteen seventy three christopher street liberation day in on the protests there is still a lot of conflicts between system for people in the community in france people the community there's lots and lots of conflicts between lesbians and gay men over space and over representation and end those divisions were true and real in the nineteen seventies and they're just as true and real now and stonewall and fix any of that with chris

mason obviously the events around stonewall were incredibly important but there had been protests before there certainly had been a police abuse before why nineteen sixty nine well i think it's safe to say that there are a couple of different political streams are all meeting in greenwich village in the late nineteen sixties a lot of them it is absolutely this rising discontent with what had been really you know more than a decade long targeting of gay spaces in the context of the cold war at least a generation that experience stonewall would likely haven't experienced firsthand i mean new york's attacks on queer spaces go back to the turn of the twentieth century really but i think it's important to recognize that you have the mid nineteen sixties the political

awakening that we all recognize as being extraordinarily transformative you have the women's rights movement you have the civil rights movement and i don't think it's an accident that when you have these standoffs against police in june of nineteen sixty nine some of the most important elements of that moment are actually the re purposing of protest songs from the civil rights movement like we shall overcome or black power activists like the black panther party writing in to support the protests against the police or even the activists themselves using pretty charged language and borrow directly from the black power countries that are you know making a national narrative about police brutality and really compelling ways in that period and so i think it's it's really a moment where you see the bringing together of different social movements in a space like new york already has a tremendous amount of economic and ethnic diversity that also makes it for all terrain for the movement to really reach new heights record anything i would add two additional elements

from that period i would talk about the police behavior in a series of urban rebellious really starting in the mid sixties continuing until the late nineteen sixties almost all of which were started i'll buy some incidents with police let's just say treating a marginalized community in appropriately i will leave it at that but it was a well known fact documented am reports on these are riots and urban rebellions that many of them were started by the police prodding these communities and worse and the second image wage people have in their minds from the time or have read about is what was labeled a police riot at the chicago democratic convention where the police

simply waded into nonviolent protesters beating them with billy clubs or a saying that when you start reading the descriptions of what happened at stonewall sounds very familiar right right it's an important aspect of this story certainly that you have a form of policing that is seen as being modern seen as being really committed to long order some cases at whatever costs in terms of population that might be pushing back whether they are sunnis of color or anti war protestors or been clear spaces of you know communion and these are all going to be flashpoints or battle fronts in this debate over what modern policing is about and ironically enough even though the battle front of the press is at issue here because when the stonewall rebellion you jump off it was covered as police being assaulted at a bar on a very distant back page of the new york times read page thirty three you know the headline is cops assaulted at bar so it

becomes you know one way for the mainstream press to really minimize what happened at stonewall and really emphasize what happened sir to law enforcement that eventually write that you know there is way that many citizens are demanding changes to the way that long forces engage in these communities and that becomes you know one of the many variables and what makes stonewall such a transformative moment is that you know you actually raising the question of excessive policing along lines of sexuality in all of the polls are strictly along lines of race which a very big well established so how did this story move from page thirty three of the new york times to headlines if you will when we think about the movements in the resistance of the late sixties and early nineteen seventies what wasn't part of it is about the fact that it wasn't just a one off episode at a bar in greenwich village threat that this was a multi day protests edge of activists

who eventually you know came to this base and really it was consecrated stonewall as a sacred site in radical politics dominate the media couldn't simply ignore this as a happening in a more conventional sense that we now understand it i mean if you think about you know where it's many of the folks who might be in a part of the gay subculture in new york you know many of them are going to be forced with professional connections certainly people with certain kind such skills and then of course there's a broad swath of people who are coming at this from working class backgrounds of union membership or other kinds of political orientations with connections and existing vehicles around civil rights and black power struggles so this is a many faded struggle in the sense that you were just going to have one small population represented in silence but instead what happened was the lifting of a little ultimately on a community it has so many diverse members that when someone like stonewall help to politicize the gay

rights struggle or politicize troubles in middle class and working class corners white and black owners male and female corners and so absent some you know massive suppression campaign the part of mainstream media and let's say he didn't try out the new york times and tried it with it was there wasn't really a way to keep the movement of that brought meaning hidden from the country much longer hear nathan i think one of the things that the next both the history and remembering the history of these varied movements is a sense of pride among the participants and you found sense of pride in i would say public pride among marginal groups previously marginalized yeah i think i think that's right and i just recently got back from a trip to new york police were celebrating pride week there and you know this wasn't in greenwich village near stonewall was actually you know i drove near i saw a massive poster in penn station

celebrating pride week it was a drag queen in on a saturday in may the us seventeen by twenty foot you know a poster they're marking the history and marking the place of gay and transgender people in the city of new york but we have a stone wall among other you know moments had to fight for that radical politics distortion say to thank for that because he you know it's become now part of new york's of fabric in the most undeniable way that that that the history of and the presence that burger now of gay bisexual and queer people is going to be part of what we understand the modern city to be the modern country to be armed and you're really modern notions of americans today today we've been talking to lillian freeman author i think the revolution the story is the struggle to novelist edmund white author of the beautiful and many other topics christopher mitchel dr lutter

gender sexuality studies at hunter college and author of the forthcoming game get out the free market entrepreneurship and the transformation of life city and david koch that's scheduled for today for you can keep the conversation going on life that you thought of the episode as these are questions about history you'll find a back surgery at yelp dot org to backstory at virginia fat eating it raw sewage into whether they're factory whatever you do don't be a stranger special thanks to a friend has baking heat history and the johns hopkins didion's the support provided by an anonymous donor

joseph robert ford only a foundation and the national endowment for the humanities three views findings or recommendations they're not necessarily those of the national endowment for the humanities additional support provided by cultivating fresh ideas and the arts the communities are brian balogh is professor of history at the university of virginia and is as professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the university of richmond john freeman a professor of history and american studies at yale university nathan baxter athens associate professor of history at the johns hopkins university thanks to illustrate his landlord them of a genius you know