The blacked-out windows and heavy door of the Stonewall Inn at 53 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village recalled a speakeasy—even to the peephole covered with a slide bar and a bouncer’s eye that suddenly appeared to check whether a knock on the door was hooligans or the fuzz come to raid the place. The door opened easily for homosexuals with the three dollars to pay for tickets that could be exchanged for a couple of watered-down drinks. The cover charge was not trivial for the gay youngsters who were among the Stonewall Inn’s main habitués; but they found a way to pay it because no gay bar in the Village had such a good dance floor, or such a varied and lively clientele. There were blacks, whites, Puerto Ricans, a few Asians, leather-clad hustlers, queens with made-up faces and fluffed-out hair or sometimes in full drag; there were chicken hawks who came to pick up street kids1 and occasional “bougie” gays, as the kids called the Wall Street types in three-piece suits.2 There were occasional fag hags, too, and butch dykes with or without femmes. Except for the chicken hawks, practically everyone there was in their teens or twenties and having an uninhibited ball in a place they could almost think of as home, if they forgot that the Genovese family held the deed and made the house rules—and couldn’t keep the Stonewall safe.
About one in the morning on June 28, 1969, the bouncer was summoned to the peephole. He looked out and saw “Lily Law, Betty Badge, and Peggy Pig,” as policemen were called by campy Village queens, and when police shouted, “Police! Open up!” a bouncer had to open up.3 Six officers of Manhattan’s First Division Public Morals Squad invaded the place. Two undercover policewomen were already inside. For more than an hour they’d been sitting at the bar, pretending they were lesbians, and keeping their eyes open in the hopes of spotting homosexuals who were selling or using drugs.
The Stonewall’s dimly lit rooms, jammed with two hundred revelers, were suddenly flooded with harsh light. The jukebox whirred to mute. The patrons knew what that meant, and they froze. “Line up. Get your IDs out and in hand,” one of Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine’s men ordered. Those whose IDs showed they weren’t minors or “masquerading” as the other sex were shooed out the door. Several “drag queens”4 said they were “ladies” and were taken by the two policewomen to the toilet, where it was determined they’d violated New York Penal Code 240.35 section 4, against “unnatural attire or facial alteration.” “You’re under arrest,” they were told. A small knot of lesbian patrons were also singled out for special attention when a couple of them got feisty, back-talking to the officers, yelling, “We have a right to be here!”5
Police actions like this one were not uncommon in the gay bars of Greenwich Village. The New York Court of Appeals had ruled after Dick Leitsch’s sip-in three years earlier that even homosexuals must be served in drinking establishments, but in the two weeks before the Stonewall raid the Public Morals Squad had found reasons to raid the Snake Pit,6 the Tele-Star, the Checkerboard, and the Sewer.7 The excuse for the June 28 raid was that though the Stonewall claimed to be a private club requiring membership (people signed the “member book” with names such as Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, and Daffy Duck), liquor was being sold there and the bar did not have a liquor license.8 Regardless of the reasons for a raid, the history of police harassment of gay bars was old enough so that gay people knew what to do. If they were so lucky as to be shooed outside instead of carted off to the police station and booked, they quickly skedaddled.
But on this night, they didn’t. As patrons were released by the police, they stood on the sidewalk in front of the bar waiting to see if friends still inside would be set free; and as each new person came through Stonewall’s door, those who waited applauded and cheered. The unexpected limelight proved irresistible to many of the liberated who made devil-may-care assertions of dignity by prancing out diva-style, striking a pose, curtsying and bowing, blowing kisses to the throng. “The whole proceedings took on the aura of a homosexual Academy Awards Night,” an unfriendly and thoroughly baffled eyewitness reporter for the New York Daily News observed.9 The festive crowd was soon swelled by Greenwich Village weekend tourists who came to see what the excitement was about.
A few doors down from the Stonewall, Village Voice reporter Howard Smith, who specialized in writing about sex, drugs, and rock and roll in the Greenwich Village counterculture, was working late in his office because he had a deadline to meet. Smith saw the commotion from his window and wondered whether there was some sort of story to be had. He wandered over to the scene. A rookie Village Voice reporter, Lucian Truscott, was already there. Truscott, a recent West Point graduate, son of a long line of military officers, had taken a summer job writing for the Voice that was to last until he had to report for duty at Fort Benning, Georgia, at the end of July. He’d had a late dinner in Chinatown and had gone for a nightcap to the Lion’s Head, a writers’ hangout two doors down from the Stonewall.10 Seeing the commotion in front of the bar, Truscott changed his plans. Borrowing a pencil and pad of paper from someone in the Lion’s Head, he hurried to the scene, where he hopped atop a lidded trash can from which he could get a good view of what was happening. He and Howard Smith would be the Richard Harding Davis and Ernie Pyle of the Stonewall riots.11
Howard Smith observed that when he first arrived the mood of the crowd had been a sort of “skittish hilarity.” Then several violators of the masquerading law, as well as the Stonewall’s bartender, the hatcheck girl, the doorman, and the men’s room attendant, who was an elderly straight black man, were led outside in handcuffs and herded into a waiting paddy wagon. A few onlookers booed the policemen. But the real turning point, Smith and Truscott agreed, came after several policemen dragged a butch lesbian out of the bar.12 They’d handcuffed her because she’d struggled with them. The paddy wagon was full, so the officers pushed the hefty, dark-haired woman who was wearing a man’s dress suit13 into one of the squad cars that were lined up on the street. But she wouldn’t stay put. Three times she slid out the driver’s-side back door and tried to run back into the Stonewall, perhaps to a lover still being questioned. The last time, as a beefy policeman wrestled her back toward the squad car, she yelled to the crowd, “Why don’t you guys do something?”14
It was as though her question broke the spell that had, for generations, held gays and lesbians in thrall. “The crowd became explosive,” Truscott jotted in his notepad.15 “Police brutality!” “Pigs!” they shrieked.16 They pelted the police with a rain of pennies (dirty coppers). Someone threw a loosened cobblestone. Beer cans and glass bottles followed. Bricks from a nearby construction site were hurled at the squad cars with baseball-player skill. A black drag queen, Marsha P. (for “Pay It No Mind”) Johnson stuffed a bag with the bricks, then shinnied up a lamppost despite her high heels and tight dress. Taking aim at the windshield of a squad car parked below, she let fly and heard the satisfying shatter of glass.17 Gays surrounded the paddy wagon and shook it as though they would rescue the prisoners trapped inside by pulling it apart. If some among the crowd suggested it was time to cut out, others answered—as purportedly did drag queen Sylvia Rivera—“Are you nuts? I’m not missing a minute of this. It’s the revolution!”18
A white policeman grabbed a Puerto Rican man who was striking campy poses; the man struggled and the policeman raised his billy club to subdue him. “How’d you like a big Spanish dick up your little Irish ass?” the man screamed, and the policeman hesitated just long enough for his prisoner to slip away in the mass of rioters.19 Two officers handcuffed twenty-eight-year-old Raymond Castro and pushed him into the paddy wagon. Hyped by the crowd’s shouting, “Let him go! Let him go!” Castro sprang back and knocked both policemen down, superhero style.20 A butch fellow set a fire in a nearby trash can, and when it blazed red and gold, he threw it through one of the Stonewall’s plate-glass-and-plywood-backed windows. People rushed to phone booths to call other gays to join the fight; or they ran through the streets like Paul Revere, drawing gays and straights alike—and especially the Village radicals who had long been hoping and waiting for this night.
John O’Brien—a muscular twenty-year-old with an open Irish face, son of an immigrant woman who worked as a maid and a man who was a union janitor—had been a social activist since 1962. He’d been thirteen years old at that time and had seen a flyer put out by college students about helping black people fight for their rights. The students were going to march in Greene County, Alabama, and O’Brien ran off to join them. That was the start of his long career. He dropped out of high school as soon as he could and became a full-time radical in the civil rights movement, then in the antiwar movement, then in the abortion rights movement. He joined the Young Socialist Alliance, too, though he was kicked out of it in January 1969, when he refused to deny rumors that he was gay. Two or three months later, O’Brien began meeting with other radical young gays at Alternate U, on the second floor of a rundown old building that had once been a sweatshop, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. Though the plaster was falling off the walls and the furniture was nothing but beat-up old couches, Alternate U was a favorite spot for counterculture types because it offered space and free classes to people interested in leftist politics, community organizing, or avant-garde art.
O’Brien’s group—a half dozen gay kids in jeans and T-shirts, all in their early twenties—were repelled by New York Mattachine, “where everyone wore a suit and tie and you paid your dues and a couple of people politely represented you to the politicians.” They were also furious about recent bar raids in the Village, about harassment by unfriendly business owners, and especially about a rumored police shooting of two gay kids near the docks where unguarded trucks that were used to haul meat during the day were taken over at night for a gay trysting area. In response to these recent incidents, O’Brien’s little group of militants had written up circulars, gotten the War Resisters League to print them gratis, and posted them in cruising areas: “Gays Must Resist!” “It’s Our Streets!” “Gays Must Fight Back Against The NYPD!”21 That was earlier in June.
And now it was happening. That night, O’Brien had been talking radical politics at his usual hangout, on Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, a block or so from the Stonewall. When he got the word that the revolution had started he came running, picking up bricks where he could and hurling them at police vehicles. (The second night of the riots, O’Brien led the charge, hurling bricks at the windows of nearby banks that had “shown their hatred of us,” and especially at McDougall’s, a record shop next to a Latino gay bar on Eighth Street. The owner liked to chase homosexuals with a baseball bat when they passed his shop.)22
Twenty-six-year-old Martha Shelley was in the Village that night, too. She was entertaining two Boston lesbians who’d come to New York to find out more about Daughters of Bilitis because they’d hoped to start a lesbian group in their city. Daughters of Bilitis was annoyingly conservative for Martha Shelley (who’d had to change her name from Martha Altman when DOB insisted that using a pseudonym helped keep members safe). But she’d belonged to the organization for two years and had even served briefly as its president. In Shelley’s spare time, when she wasn’t working as a secretary at Barnard, she was participating with the Columbia Student Homophile League in militant antiwar demonstrations; she was also representing the Daughters on panels and in classrooms, where her restrained and unspectacular message was “Homosexuals are not sick. Homosexuals just need equal rights.” In the early hours of June 28, Shelley and the two Boston women left Gianni’s, a lesbian bar a few blocks from the Stonewall. They first heard and then saw a brick-and-bottle-throwing crowd. “What’s going on?” one of the Boston women asked Shelley. “Oh, it’s probably an antiwar riot. We have them in the Village all the time,” she answered, and they walked on. Because the fact was inconceivable, even to a committed activist: this time it was gay people who were rioting—not for other causes but for their own.23
Dick Leitsch, now executive director of New York Mattachine, was home doing some last-minute packing when the riot began. His partner was taking him on his first European vacation and they were to leave in a few hours. Leitsch had barely been listening to the all-news station WNEW that was playing in the background, but when he heard the newscaster announce a disturbance at the Stonewall Inn, he stopped packing and hurried out to find a cab.24 By the time he got to the Village, the streets were so jammed with rioters that he jumped out on Fourteenth Street, more than a half dozen blocks away from the Stonewall. As he ran toward the bar, he thought, “This is what Lenin must have felt like at the revolution. It’s the best thing that could happen for gays”—though the riot was soon to be the death knell for mannerly homophile groups such as his.
When the excitement was finally over for the night, Dick Leitsch went home, canceled his plane tickets, and began writing an article for the New York Mattachine Newsletter:25 “The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World.”26
Inspector Pine wanted to collar the perps and haul them off—but the paddy wagon and squad cars were already filled to capacity. He was astounded. He’d never seen a horde of fighting homosexuals. The officers of the Public Morals Division had always said that homosexuals were “easy arrests. They never gave you any trouble. Everybody behaved.”27 How had things changed so dramatically?
Howard Smith attributed the gay violence in the early hours of June 28 to the full white moon that illumed the night sky.28 The summer heat might have had something to do with it, too: the black riots in New York and Philadelphia in 1964, in Watts in 1965, the 1966 riots in Cleveland and Omaha, the 1967 riots in Detroit and Newark—all of them took place in summer heat. Or perhaps gay people rioted at the Stonewall that June night because throughout the decade violent clashes with the police had been dramatizing the frustrations felt by the powerless of various stripes, including protesters against the Vietnam War and even students on college campuses. Riots brought media attention to the gripes of the disenfranchised as nothing else could. Emotions might have been stoked, too, by the multiple raids of Greenwich Village gay bars in the previous weeks, and by the circulars that John O’Brien’s group had plastered all over Greenwich Village.
Nor were the actions of John O’Brien’s jeans-wearing, radical-rhetoric-slinging group unique in the lead up to Stonewall. At the beginning of April, two months before the incipient gay militants of the Village began posting “Gays Must Resist!” circulars, Craig Schoonmaker had gotten officials at City College of the City University of New York to give approval to his student organization, Homosexuals Intransigent!, a name that was to appear always italicized and with an exclamation point, young Schoonmaker insisted. He scoffed at the “stupid, cowardly euphemism ‘homophile’ ” that older organizations hid behind.29 He scoffed, too, at the closet, and declared that anyone who wanted to join his group must be openly homosexual. Using City College student body funds, he mimeographed defiant flyers and posted them all over the campus. “Gay is a groove [as in “groovy”],” they announced, “not a rut or ditch!”30
Schoonmaker considered himself a “homosexual separatist” (cf. Black separatist), and to nongays, even bisexuals and sympathetic straights, he declared, speaking for Homosexuals Intransigent!: “Fuck off! Stay out of my life! . . . I view you with disgust.” Nor did he spare lesbians: “I want to live my life among men and manly things! You don’t belong!”31 He hoped to convince masculine gay men to band together in all ways, but especially politically, to take over Manhattan’s Nineteenth and Twentieth Districts, to vote “our own people in.” “Blacks did it,” he exhorted. “Puerto Ricans, Italians, Irish, others too. It works!”32
On the other coast, gay rhetoric was also heating up to boiling in the months before Stonewall. Gale Whittington, a baby-faced, blond, twenty-year-old accounting clerk, had been summarily fired from his job at the States Steamship Company in San Francisco because of a photo and story that appeared in the March 28, 1969, Berkeley Barb: Whittington, bare chested, being embraced by a thirty-six-year-old man, and above them the headline “Homo Revolt: Don’t Hide It.”33 Before Whittington had agreed to pose and let an article be written that identified him as homosexual, he’d thought long and hard, and he concluded, “It was time for homosexuals to declare themselves.”34
The older man in the photo, Leo E. Laurence, had been a writer for the underground New Left newspaper the Berkeley Barb. He’d also been on the board of directors of San Francisco’s largest homophile group, the Society for Individual Rights, and was the editor of Vector, SIR’s magazine, until he was booted out of his editorship because the photo in the Berkeley Barb had made SIR members uncomfortable.
But Laurence was more worried about Whittington than about losing his own job.35 He’d gotten the news of the young man’s firing late at night, and he couldn’t sleep. He went down to an all-night coffee shop and there, on a paper napkin, sketched out plans for a new organization that would fight against injustices such as the firing of Gale Whittington for what he chose to do in his free time.
Laurence guessed that the Society for Individual Rights, despite its name, would not be likely to help. Never one to mince words, Laurence dubbed SIR members a bunch of “middle-class, uptight, bitchy old queens,” whose main policy was “NOT to get involved in anything controversial.”36 Ironically, SIR had been started in 1964 because some San Francisco homosexuals thought the older homophile groups timid. SIR organized one of the first gay community centers in the country. They were able to get candidates for citywide political office to come speak to them. But as Laurence had predicted, when he and Gale Whittington approached SIR leaders to request help in picketing the States Steamship Company, they answered, “We’re too busy getting things done to stop and make signs to carry.”37 That clinched Laurence’s conviction that SIR was to homosexuals what the NAACP was to black militants. SIR was completely incapable of seeing that times were changing.38 He decided to name his organization the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, and he worked with Gale Whittington to refine the plans he’d first designed on the coffee-shop napkin.
Laurence, who saw himself as a radical of the New Left, believed that the Committee for Homosexual Freedom needed to be like militant black groups. “The black man found self-respect and dignity when he said, ‘Black is beautiful, and I am proud.’ Now homosexuals are starting to say, ‘Gay is good, and I too am proud,’ ” Laurence declared on behalf of the committee.39 Through one of his associates on the Barb, Laurence got himself invited to Black Panther headquarters in the Fillmore, a black district of San Francisco; there, in a Victorian house lined on the inside with steel, he met Panthers leader Huey Newton, who encouraged him to fight fiercely for gays.40 Laurence and Whittington wasted no time in organizing picketers who would help them send their militant message, and with more than a passing nod to the Black Panthers, they dubbed their picketers the “Pink Panthers.”41
But though Laurence succeeded in getting a gay activist, Reverend Troy Perry—joined by a handful of other gays and several students from the Claremont College of Theology—to stage simultaneous pickets in front of the States Lines office in downtown Los Angeles,42 there were no swells of public opinion nor masses of out homosexuals to boycott the company; and States Lines never bent. Despite that frustration, Laurence and his group carried on, holding demonstrations at Tower Records when it seemed that a homosexual employee was being discriminated against, at the San Francisco Examiner Building when a reporter wrote a disrespectful article about homosexuals, at Macy’s when the store was complicit with the San Francisco police in entrapping gay men in its restrooms.43 The organization also inspired a document that came to be considered “the bible of gay liberation.” Carl Wittman, a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and a war resister, was a participant in the pickets when he wrote “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto.” “Come out everywhere,” Wittman exhorted gay people. “Initiate self-defense and political activity.”44
The full moon, the heat, the police pulling the plug on the jukebox—all came together to create a perfect storm that brought on the riot at the Stonewall. But surely gay people would not have rioted that night if they hadn’t watched for almost the entire decade as oppressed minorities angrily demanded to be treated like human beings and American citizens. Righteous ire stoked, irate gay rhetoric formulated, they understood the time had come for them to make demands just as other minorities had, and in the same way.
Inspector Pine had been in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II; he’d written a well-respected training manual on the subject of hand-to-hand combat. “But there was never any time that I felt more scared than I had that night,” he later admitted.45 There were only five other policemen and two policewomen with him at the Stonewall, and the mob had somehow grown to maybe a thousand.46 More bad actors needed to be arrested as soon as possible, Pine thought, or the police would not regain control. He needed backup. He used his police radio to call Sixth Precinct headquarters, only a few blocks away—but inexplicably his calls would not go through.47 It seemed he had no choice about what to do next. He dispatched the three squad cars and the paddy wagon packed with prisoners. “Hurry back!” he ordered the drivers. “Just drop them off at the Sixth Precinct and hurry back!”48 The officers turned the squad car sirens on to shriek. Rioters pounded on the cars’ hoods and screeched “Pigs!” as the police vehicles drove off.
The eight officers were left alone on the street with a mob that kept growing. “Let’s get them!” somebody screamed.
“Back inside! We’ll lock ourselves inside!”49 Pine ordered his officers, and they beat a hasty retreat into the gay bar. Now they could hear the crowd screaming, “Kill the cops!” “Police brutality!” “We’re not going to take this anymore!” “Let’s get ’em!”50
A nearby parking meter had been loosened from the concrete sometime earlier by a bad driver. John O’Brien, together with a shirtless, buff man with curly brown hair, and a couple of other gays, rocked it till they pried it up. Then they ran with the phallic battering ram toward the Stonewall and crashed open its door.51 Hurled beer cans and garbage followed. Blood spurted from under Patrolman Gil Weisman’s eye when he was hit by a flung coin. The other officers grabbed their guns from their holsters. “We’ll shoot the first motherfucker that comes through the door!” Inspector Pine yelled.52 No one entered, and he pulled the broken door closed. A couple of the policemen went from room to room looking for a safe exit. They found a vent that opened out to the rear of the building. Only the more petite of the two women officers could slip out. She ran to a nearby firehouse, where she could call the Sixth Precinct for backup.53
But before backup arrived Pine and his crew may as well have been in a war zone. A hand reached in through the Stonewall’s broken window, squirted lighter fluid that had been liberated from the United Cigar Store on Seventh Avenue, and dropped a match. Flames whooshed. A trash can, stuffed full with burning paper, landed inside with a thud. “Cook the pigs!” someone yelled.54 The policemen grabbed the emergency hose from the back wall of the bar and put out the fires. Then three officers wedged the hose through a crack in the door and turned it on full force, hoping to douse the crowd and disperse them. A cold spray shocked the front-row rioters, but it didn’t last long.55 The hose was old and frayed, and when it split the water turned the Stonewall Inn into a small river, and police officers found themselves slipping and sliding on the concrete floor. Miserable and desperate, a couple of policemen again drew guns. Inspector Pine saw disaster looming. He walked up to each one of his officers, looked him in the eye, called him by name, and said, “If you fire that gun without me saying your name and the word ‘fire,’ you’ll be walking a beat on Staten Island all alone for the rest of your career. Do you understand me?”56
Finally, at 2:55 a.m. police buses arrived carrying the Tactical Patrol Force, whose major job had been to quell New York City’s race riots and out-of-control antiwar protests. Wearing riot helmets with long visors and carrying shields, they formed a phalanx like a Roman army. They were met by a Rockettes-style chorus line of queens who linked arms, kicked high, and to the tune of “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay” bellowed sassily, “We are the Stonewall girls / We wear our hair in curls / We don’t wear underwear / We show our pubic hair / We pick up lots of tricks / That’s how we get our kicks / We wear our dungarees / Above our nelly knees.” Officer Andrew Scheu of the Tactical Police Force tried to arrest one man, Wolfgang Podolski, who struck him in the left eye with a rolled-up newspaper. In the scuffle, Scheu fell down and broke his wrist—which, ironically, went limp.57 Another officer, Charles Holmes, was bitten on the wrist when he tried to make an arrest, and he had to be taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital for a tetanus shot.58 But the rest of the Tactical Police Force cracked heads up and down Christopher Street until the rioters were finally dispersed at about four in the morning.59
The next day, the New York Times—not as astute as Sylvia Rivera claimed to be about the meaning of the night’s events (“It’s the revolution!”)—reported the unprecedented melee on page 33 in a short article that bore the headline, “Four Policemen Hurt in ‘Village’ Raid.”60
During the day on Saturday, exhausted rioters slept. But many gays who had not been there heard of the riot that morning on the “alternative” radio station, WBAI, which had been sympathetic to gays since the early 1960s. It was through WBAI that Frank Galassi, a closeted young college professor, learned there’d been a riot in his favorite gay bar. Galassi had been fired from St. John’s College a couple of years earlier because it was suspected he was gay, and since then he’d tried to be very careful out in the world. But on nights when his partner, a male nurse, had to work, Galassi donned jeans and went to the Stonewall to dance. He loved the electric energy there, and the mix of ethnicities, and the exuberantly uninhibited dance moves he could learn nowhere else. Now, at about eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, Galassi hurried across town to the Stonewall. The WBAI commentator said the riots had been quelled, but Galassi was drawn to the site—just to see what was happening now, just to be there.61
There were traces of the riot—the shattered window, the broken door, the rubble on the street, the gray wooden sawhorses that announced “Police line. Do not cross.” But there were no rioters, only a bunch of gays, ignoring the sawhorses’ warning, walking in front of the Stonewall with signs that demanded “Equality for Homosexuals.” Across the street at Sheridan Park, gay people were holding hands and kissing in broad daylight. Policemen were standing, hands on hips or arms crossed, watching it all. A couple of days earlier, the gaze of the police would have worried Frank Galassi. He’d never even have dared participate in one of Frank Kameny’s pickets. Now he took up a sign and marched.62
Though the riot had been led by young street people, Galassi wasn’t the only middle-class or professional gay person soon to feel liberated by it. Dr. Howard Brown lived in Greenwich Village, not far from the Stonewall. He’d served under Mayor Lindsay as the New York City health commissioner but resigned in 1967, when he heard that columnist Drew Pearson intended to out him in the pages of the New York Times.63 Two years later, in the heat of the June night, Brown had heard through his open windows the rioters’ roar. He went out to discover what the hubbub was about. The homosexuals he saw in front of the Stonewall were nothing like him. In fact, he thought, they were more like prisoners he’d seen on his official rounds of the Tombs, the municipal jail in Lower Manhattan—“obviously poor, most of them sort of limp wristed, shabby, or gaudy gays that send a shiver of dread down the spines of homosexuals who hope to pass as straight.”
But, he had to admit, the scene brought to mind every civil rights struggle he’d ever witnessed. It was the riot that eventually “broke the spell” of his fears, Brown realized.64 It enabled him sometime later, at a conference of six hundred medical people—a crowd of alerted reporters poised to jot down his words—to take the microphone and say, “I am publicly announcing my homosexuality in the hope that it will help to end discrimination against homosexuals.” And to end silly stereotyping, too: “I have met more homosexual politicians than homosexual hairdressers,” he informed his audience, challenging their willful ignorance about homosexuals in even the most “respected” walks of life, “more homosexual lawyers than homosexual interior decorators.”65
Not all middle-class gays, of course, understood right away that the rioting of street-people types would be a good thing for them, too. An unidentified representative of Mattachine Society New York was quick to chalk a message on Stonewall’s boarded-up window that betrayed the immediate response of many “respectable” gays: “We Homosexuals Plead With Our People To Help Maintain Peaceful And Quiet Conduct On The Streets Of The Village.”66 But a new generation had just ushered in a new gay era, and the Mattachine plea for “peaceful and quiet conduct” seemed to them nothing short of laughable. For Village gays, the riot had been the equivalent of Rosa Parks taking a forbidden seat in the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The rest of the world might not know it yet, but they knew that there was no going back to the way things had been.
Craig Rodwell, who’d opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop a year after his 1966 Mattachine sip-in with Dick Leitsch, had pasted a “Gay Is Good” sticker in his store’s window as soon as Frank Kameny coined the phrase in 1968; a few months later, Rodwell had coined a more militant-sounding slogan, “gay power.” It was inspired by “black power,” just as “Gay Is Good” had been inspired by “Black Is Beautiful.”67 Rodwell had been waiting for years for the spark that would ignite the fire. As a seventeen-year-old living in Chicago in 1958, he’d made a hundred flyers proclaiming “Homosexuals Unite! Tear Off Your Masks!” and had stuffed them into neighborhood mailboxes—nothing much happened except that two hairdressers were suspected of the deed and evicted from their apartment.68 But when the riot started, Rodwell “recognized instantly that this was it!”69 He ran through the streets screaming, “Gay power! Gay power!”70 His cry was taken up by others among the rioters as they, too, ran around Greenwich Village.71 (Lucian Truscott even headlined his Village Voice account of the riot, “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square.”) “Support Gay Power!” someone chalked on the Stonewall window the next day. It captured the exhilarating anger that the rioters didn’t forget even after they got some sleep.
That evening, they gathered again at the Stonewall. “Fat Tony” Lauria, the Stonewall’s Mafia owner, had had a clean-up crew working all day, repairing whatever damage they could, though the main room was still charred and blasted and the only lights were dim, naked bulbs.72 The jukebox had been destroyed, so a sound system was brought in and speakers placed around the room. To entice customers back, the management announced there would be no cover charge that night—and though liquor could not be sold until they straightened out the misunderstanding about a license, sodas would be free. The Stonewall was soon jammed, as was the street in front of it—not only with gays but also with the curious that had come to see the riot site.
What developed spontaneously was at first nothing more than a block party, with queens camping and posing for pictures and some gays shouting, “Gay power!” “We want freedom now!” “Equality for homosexuals!” But as the crowd grew, it spilled over from the sidewalk into the street and overflowed to Sheridan Square Park, and soon the streets were mobbed over a five-block area.73 A bus driver, bringing his empty vehicle back to the car barn for the night, loudly honked his horn. Someone tore off a big cardboard advertisement from the bus’s side and blocked the windshield with it. It was like a signal. The crowd beat on the bus thunderously and yelled, “Christopher Street belongs to the queens!” “Liberate the streets!” The bus was finally allowed to pass, but other vehicles were stopped and mounted by gays who danced on their roofs and hoods. When police cars arrived, rioters pelted them with garbage and a concrete block, pounded them with fists and feet, and knocked the flashing red light off one of the cars.74 Four precincts were summoned for backup. By then, the crowd was about two thousand strong.
By the time the busloads of Tactical Police Force showed up, the second full-scale gay riot of the weekend was under way. TPF officers, riot visors already covering their faces, jumped from the buses, linked arms, and formed a flying wedge. They pushed the crowds before them until they got the rioters onto Tenth Street and Sixth Avenue. But some rioters circled back—and they showed up behind “Alice Blue Gown,” as the queens jeeringly called their adversaries, taunting them with the Rockettes dance they’d perfected the night before. The Tactical Police Force pushed the crowds forward again, and again a troop of queens circled round the block, showed up behind the TPF, and kicked high in time to “We are the Stonewall girls / We wear our hair in curls . . .”
Some officers broke off from the wedge and, brandishing billy clubs, pursued rioters down side streets. At one point, two policemen chased a huge crowd of gays down Waverly Place—until someone shouted, “Hey, there are only two cops! Let’s catch them and rip off their clothes and screw them!” The officers turned on their heels and ran back to their squad.75 Lesbians who were in the lesbian bar Gianni’s came out and joined the fray.76 Jean Devente had been walking around the Village with Jimmy the Dyke, and when they saw the police knocking heads, they threw themselves into combat. Devente was felled by a policeman and kicked in the face. Marsha P. Johnson, back from the night before, took off her blouse and stanched the blood. “Get up, girl,” the drag queen ordered the lesbian. “We got a fight on our hands.”77 It lasted until five thirty in the morning, when finally the TPF captain deemed the area “secured,” and the officers could pile back into their buses and go home.
Sunday night: the Stonewall management again advertised a “free store.” Hundreds of gays went inside the bar or milled around outside. Police were under orders to head off trouble and avoid a third night of riots that had already cost the city big bucks. With considerably more tact than they’d practiced in the preceding days, they tried to get people off the street. “It’s okay, go on in,” they urged those who stood outside the Stonewall. As Dick Leitsch observed with bitter amusement, “The citizenry was treated to the sight of the cops begging homosexuals to go inside the bar that they had chased everyone out of a few nights before.”78
There were many more toughs in the Sunday night crowd, including a large “leather” contingent. A bunch of people tried to overturn a police car, and several were arrested.79 But the energy to riot was not what it had been the previous two nights. Gays seemed to know they’d already won and now it was time to enjoy the fruits of winning. Many did go inside the Stonewall and reveled in a victory dance. Poet Allen Ginsberg and his friend Taylor Mead, the Andy Warhol star, dropped in at the Stonewall about one in the morning, after hearing tales about the two previous nights’ riots. Village Voice reporter Lucian Truscott, still on his beat and recognizing the famous poet, followed them for the sake of the story. Ginsberg greeted Tactical Police Force members by flashing a two-fingered “V,” the peace sign—or was it a victory sign? He danced with euphoric young gays, veterans of the riot, and he picked up the rapture of their mood.
“You know, the guys there were so beautiful. They’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago,” Ginsberg said to Truscott as they walked out together. “Defend the fairies!” he bid the reporter before they parted at Cooper Square.80
• • •
On Monday and Tuesday the streets of Greenwich Village were quiet. But the mood changed on Wednesday. The Village was overrun by Yippies and Up Against the Wall/Motherfuckers81 and Crazies (two New York–based anarchist groups), Black Panthers, and young toughs from street gangs all over New York and New Jersey—all ready to rumble: though it wasn’t clear if they were there to fight the police or play “the old game of beating up queers”;82 and businesses that most Village gays would have protected were looted, such as a toy shop, the Gingerbread House, run by an elderly woman who was beloved on Christopher Street. Beer cans and bottles were again thrown at the police. Fires were set in trash cans. Again, the Sixth Precinct and the Tactical Police Force were called out to control the streets.83 The conciliatory mood of Sunday night was gone. People were beaten so badly that Dick Leitsch, writing for the New York Mattachine Newsletter, observed that Seventh Avenue from Christopher to West Tenth Street “looked like a battlefield in Vietnam.”84
But Leitsch wasn’t alone in concluding that, despite cracked heads and broken limbs, victory belonged to the gays. Craig Rodwell and his lover, Fred Sargeant, printed up five thousand leaflets that they distributed everywhere gay people congregated in New York, proclaiming that the riots would “go down in history [as] the first time that thousands of Homosexual men and women went out into the streets to protest.”85 The government and police had been “put on notice that homosexuals won’t stand being kicked around.”86
However, the heady significance of the riots was clear mainly to those who’d been on the spot, rioting, and to a few gay newspapers. Outside New York, the Stonewall riots had been largely ignored—and even in New York, when the riot stories weren’t relegated to the back page in mainstream newspapers, they were mocked with headlines such as “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad.”87 It would be a huge challenge to figure out how to spread the word about what gay people had done in a little corner of New York at the start of the summer of 1969. Before that summer was over, Jack Nichols and his lover and coauthor, Lige Clarke, were nervously asking readers of a gay newspaper, “Will the spark die?”88