One hot summer night in June of 1969, at the seedy Stonewall Inn bar in the heart of New York City’s West Village, a diverse group of gender and sexual minorities stood up to the police brutality and repression that had become so familiar to them. The Stonewall Inn was not the first or only place that LGBTQ people had fought back. But it was the one that stuck, the one that sparked an organizational revolution that led to the modern LGBTQ movement. It is probably the one you know about, if you are familiar at all with LGBTQ history in the US. It is where most popular accounts of the mass movement for LGBTQ social justice tends to start. Yet to understand the ways in which LGBTQ people have defined and understood themselves in the US, built communities, and developed a complex and wide-ranging set of politics, we need to reach back further in history, to the early twentieth century. Stonewall was a beginning, but it was also a culmination.
By learning a bit about this history, we can find the roots of some of the key themes of the modern LGBTQ movements. First, we see that social organizing and resistance take many forms. We see that early gay liberationists organized mass demonstrations and marches, as well as smaller direct actions. We also see that people have used culture, language, and alternative institution-building to create collective identities and safe spaces for themselves that were in themselves a form of resistance. Second, we see how movements develop in relation to one another, gaining language, strategies, and confidence from other social movements of the time. Post-Stonewall movements took what they learned both directly and indirectly from civil rights, Black Power, the New Left, and second wave feminism as they built LGBTQ-focused organizations. Third, we see that some of the key ideological divisions in LGBTQ movements have their roots in the homophile movements of the post-World War II era. Perhaps the most significant of these is the division between assimilationists and liberationists (Rimmerman, 2008). This division dates at least as far back as the early 1950s. Faderman writes of a “bitter clash” in 1953 between “radicals who’d regarded homosexuals as a different species from heterosexuals” and “assimilationists who’d insisted homosexuals and heterosexuals were almost exactly the same,” which “would divide lesbian and gay communities even into the twenty-first century” (2015, p. 73). Finally, we see, in the anti-gay backlash – which developed first in an organized way during and after World War II and then with unprecedented vitality in the late 1970s with the rise of the Religious Right1 – that social action often produces a response, which then impacts and shapes subsequent social action, such that repression and revolution often occur together.
There were thriving gay and lesbian cultures, communities, and even organizations in the decades before Stonewall.2 Here, I focus on three pre-Stonewall institutions: cities, the military, and medical and psychological sciences. These were three of the most important sites for lesbian and gay visibility and community-building in the first half of the twentieth century in the US. They presented opportunities for lesbian and gay people to come together, develop distinctive cultures, and build a sense of shared experience and common language. They also, conversely, presented opportunities for state and cultural subjugation of gender and sexual minorities. This combination of increased visibility and community with heightened institutional repression created the political opening into which Stonewall emerged at the end of the 1960s.
Gay men and lesbians were creating their own vibrant and visible communities in large US cities by the beginning of the twentieth century. In Gay New York, historian George Chauncey “challenges three widespread myths” of pre-Stonewall gay life: “isolation, invisibility, and internalization” (1994, pp. 1–2). Gay men in New York City built successful institutions and neighborhoods throughout the city, developing an “immense gay world” around their city’s streets, bars, bathhouses, restaurants, and hugely popular drag balls (1994, p. 2). Rather than separating themselves, they were integrated into the social lives of their straight neighbors and neighborhoods, while inventing “a highly sophisticated system of subcultural codes – codes of dress, speech, and style – that enabled them to recognize one another on the streets, at work, and at parties and bars” (1994, p. 4). Finally, gay New Yorkers in this pre-World War II era generally did not internalize a view of themselves as “sick, criminal, and unworthy,” but instead “celebrated their difference” and pushed back against homophobia (1994, pp. 4–5).
Chauncey argues that gay culture- and community-building was itself a kind of innovative and collective “everyday resistance” that pre-dated the explicitly political organizing of the 1960s and 1970s (1994, p. 5). This included individual ways of asserting visibility and presence through, for example, fashion (like red ties) and language. Other acts of resistance were communal. Gay men in New York City made communities out of their city’s institutions: the YMCA (popularized as a gay institution, but not first discovered, by the Village People!); bathhouses that they made their own; drag balls that drew crowds of hundreds, even thousands; and local cafeterias and lunch counters. Well before Stonewall, gay New Yorkers – and people in other cities around the world – built lives and communities for themselves, fashioned out of their cities.3
While Chauncey focuses on men in New York City, Faderman (1991), Faderman and Stuart Timmons (2009), and Rupp (2009) write about the vibrant and visible lesbian urban communities that flourished during this same time in a number of other cities, in the US, Canada, and Western Europe.4 Women had more economic and cultural constraints, and some of their public communities developed a bit later than those of men; but lesbians did create thriving community institutions – like, for example, working-class lesbian bars that catered to butch-femme couples (D’Emilio, 1998; Rupp, 2009).
With increased visibility and vibrancy for urban gay men and lesbians – and in the context of 1920s and 1930s politics and economics – came increased repression. Chauncey argues that the closet did not always exist and was not inevitable, nor has the history of the past century been a story of linear progress out of the closet. Rather, the closet was a product of the mid-twentieth century, starting in the 1920s. It was a deliberate construction by the state. He contends that the apparatus of police control, surveillance, and repression that developed in a broad way during the Prohibition era was applied to gay nightlight and public socializing. So, too, the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s put many men out of work, which meant that they could not fulfill their traditional gender roles as economic providers for wives and children. “Lesbians and gay men,” Chauncey writes, “began to seem more dangerous in this context – as figures whose defiant perversity threatened to undermine the reproduction of normative gender and sexual arrangements already threatened by the upheavals of the thirties” (1994, p. 354).
Just as cities like New York and Los Angeles provided opportunities for lesbian and gay visibility and community in the early part of the twentieth century, so the World War II-era military offered a much broader opportunity for community-building across the country. This military also proved to be a site for a new level of persecution and marginalization. The war created an institutional space that allowed people who may have been otherwise isolated from each other, who may have “grown up in rural areas or small towns and … regarded themselves as singular freaks” (Duberman 1993, p. 76), to find each other. The war also created a demand for women workers, and, with it, a new dominant narrative about femininity that allowed a broad range of women to come out of their homes and into new all-women’s communities (Faderman, 1991).
Allan Bérubé (2010) writes that the US military had not historically excluded gay service members as people. Rather, it had criminalized sodomy between men as an act – and generally had no policy at all about sex between women. As it mobilized for a massive draft for World War II, however, the Selective Service initially set a number of explicit restrictions on draftees. It excluded women, homosexuals as a category of people, and, in some branches, African Americans, on the assumption that “their integration would turn the military into a testing ground for radical social experimentation rather than a strong fighting force” (2010, p. 2). However, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the military could not afford to exclude people so categorically. And, once enlisted, gay and lesbian service members found one another, developed collective identities and a new sense of shared experience, came out, and built communities.
These new GI communities endured beyond the war years. An expanded gay and especially lesbian bar scene developed out of the war, as did the growth of enclave cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, as new veterans chose to maintain the ties they had formed in the service.5 Their experience through the war had changed gay and lesbian GIs, giving them a lasting sense of collective identity and strength and a pride in their contribution to the war effort. Their experience also gave them a sense that they constituted a group: a persecuted minority – both in and outside the military – that shared a common experience and that could and should fight for its own rights and receive the entitlements due to other GIs (Bérubé, 2010). It also brought a new experience of public community. Ghaziani argues that new urban institutions, like bars, “cemented dense social networks and inspired gays and lesbians to assert a right to gather in public places” (2014, p. 15).
World War II also brought new repression for gay and lesbian GIs. First, the military moved from a criminal justice model to a reliance on psychiatrists and a psychiatric model for defining, sussing out, and punishing homosexuality. This move was meant as a liberal and decriminalizing reform effort, but it had the effect of shifting the focus from the act of sodomy as criminal to the person of the homosexual as sick. At the time, as Bérubé argues, in the service of “pursuing their agenda of showing how psychiatry could contribute to the war effort,” psychiatrists introduced broad-reaching mental health screens for new recruits (2010, p. 9). This involved developing and administering elaborate screening tests to detect and root out any possible male homosexuals in their midst (women were less actively targeted initially).6 Repression and anti-gay panic grew all the more emphatic in the military by the late 1940s, as it no longer needed the millions of recruits it had relied on during the war. An October 1949 memo from the Department of Defense declared plainly: “Homosexual personnel, irrespective of sex, should not be permitted to serve in any branch of the Armed Forces in any capacity, and prompt separation of known homosexuals from the Armed Forces is mandatory” (Faderman, 2015, p. 32).
In the Cold War era, when Senator Joseph McCarthy stirred up anti-Communist hysteria and a concern for national security, gay men, especially, became ready scapegoats, and military discharges increased significantly (Adam, 1995; D’Emilio, 1998). In December 1950, a Senate report urged that any “sexual pervert” should also be refused all federal jobs. Their “lack [of] emotional stability” and weak “moral fiber” were so great that they “[tend] to have a corrosive influence upon … fellow employees” (D’Emilio, 1998, p. 42). Officials further argued that (closeted) gay government workers were national security risks as they would be easy targets of blackmail. In April 1953, soon after taking office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower codified this exclusion by signing Executive Order 10450.
This unprecedented state-sponsored framing of gay and lesbian veterans and government workers as national threats played out against a postwar return to restrictive gender roles that pathologized independent and working women. Lesbians might have been allowed to be the “hero” during World War II, but they were the “sicko” of the 1950s (Faderman, 1991, p. 119). As Bérubé (2010) argues, the psychiatric framing of homosexuality as a mental illness, which had originated with military practice, became part of public culture. Gay men and lesbians were subject to police intimidation, random raids, and entrapment in bars and public spaces, even in private spaces like their homes. “Lewd and lascivious conduct” was a common charge against gay men, while women were most commonly picked up and harassed by police for the charge of “masquerading” in clothes that authorities considered masculine or for men only (Faderman & Timmons, 2009, pp. 81, 93). Amid anti-Communist fervor, gay men and lesbians during this period became “invisible enemies who could live next door and who threatened the security and safety of children, women, the family, and the nation” (Bérubé, 2010, p. 258). This framing was new (Chauncey, 1994), and – as we will see – powerfully enduring.
Along with American cities and the military, science was a third pre-Stonewall site of both early gay and lesbian visibility and community and a repressive backlash against it. First, there was the science at work in the military, as we saw it in operation during and after World War II. Service members were prodded and interrogated, all for the goal of categorizing and rooting out homosexuality. On the other hand, after the war, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey published two bestselling and widely reviewed reports on male and female sexuality (in 1948 and 1953 respectively) that indicated that there was much more same-sex desire and sexual activity among Americans than anyone had previously imagined. The reports, based on interviews with more than 10,000 white women and men, were broad looks at sexual desires, practices, and identities. They both spent months on the New York Times bestseller list, selling close to 250,000 copies each, and Kinsey was featured on the cover of Time magazine (D’Emilio, 1998).
Kinsey’s work revealed that 37 percent of men in the study reported having at least one adult same-sex experience, while 13 percent of women reported the same. In addition, 50 percent of men and 28 percent of women reported that they responded sexually to people of the same sex, regardless of their sexual behavior, and 10 percent of men reported that they were “more or less exclusively homosexual” for three years or more (Faderman, 2015, p. 5; also see D’Emilio, 1998, p. 35). These numbers, which Kinsey and his colleagues found to be surprisingly high, were headline news for the American public.
Out of this increased visibility and a McCarthy-era national and local atmosphere of fear, intimidation, and state-sponsored repression grew the first modern gay and lesbian rights organizations and activists. These new organizations were part of the burgeoning homophile movement (homo meaning same and phila meaning love; see Faderman & Timmons, 2009, p. 111). Although they operated in secret initially, they represented the first sizeable political groups organized around shared sexual identity in the US. They were also the first organizations to grow out of a new selfunderstanding of gay men and lesbians as minorities with a defined identity and with claims to rights and to civil equality (Bérubé, 2010; Armstrong, 2002). This mirrored the ways in which other movements – like the civil rights movement for African American equality – framed identity and social change at the time.
The Mattachine Society, founded in Los Angeles in 1950, was the first of the newly formed groups. Harry Hay, a member of the Communist Party living as a struggling actor and writer in Hollywood, had been moved by Kinsey’s report and by the federal postwar program of anti-gay suppression and exclusion. Hay and a very small group of men founded the organization, with its radical roots and its progressive understanding of homosexuals in American society as a marginalized minority. The group’s name came from the Italian Matachinos, masked court jesters who could speak truth to power behind their masks. The group met secretly in Los Angeles homes, in basements or with shades drawn, and with someone always on the lookout for police raids. By 1953, political splits within the group had pushed Hay and his radical allies out of Mattachine as “accommodation replaced militancy … [T]he Mattachine Society pursued respectability and abandoned the quest for self-respect” (D’Emilio, 1992, p. 46). As we will see, the debate over assimilation versus radicalism that led to Hay being ousted would continue to mark the politics of LGBTQ social change.7
Over the course of the early 1950s, small Mattachine chapters were founded throughout California and in other cities across the country. Mattachine had not really attracted women, however, and there was as yet no substantial lesbian organization in the US. The Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), a lesbian group founded in San Francisco in 1955, became another primary organizational player in the homophile movement of that era. It took its name from “Songs of Bilitis,” a collection of late nineteenth-century French lesbian erotic poetry. The DOB was small, with just a few hundred members across all of its chapters nationwide. But its monthly magazine, The Ladder, reached a broader audience, notably women in areas with little lesbian visibility or community. Although the founders of DOB did not know about the Mattachine Society at first, they did eventually work with the group, but they were aware of the sexism in these gay male spaces. “Lesbians are not satisfied,” said one of DOB’s founders at a Mattachine meeting in 1959, “to be auxiliary members or second-class homosexuals” (D’Emilio, 1998, p. 105; for this paragraph, also see Faderman, 2015).
The founders of DOB, couple Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, together with a small group of others, initially were not especially interested in politics. They were looking for ways for lesbians to meet and find each other in venues other than bars. In time, however, splits developed in DOB, such that Martin, Lyon, and other middle-class members eventually took the group in a more outward-facing direction, while the working-class members left to start their own solely social group (D’Emilio, 1998; Armstrong, 2002).
Both the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis ascribed to the goal of gay men and lesbians “fitting in” to their broader communities, which included conforming to normative gender presentation and expression. “To be invited to Mattachine,” one man recalled, “you had to be wearing a Brooks Brothers three-piece suit. Those who were unusual dressers or had unusual hairstyles were not invited. If you made the mistake of bringing someone who was too flamboyant, you could be asked to leave” (Faderman & Timmons, 2009, pp. 113–114). Rejecting alternative gender presentation, the DOB warned in an issue of The Ladder: “The kids in fly front pants and with butch haircuts and mannish manner are the worst publicity that we can get” (Rupp, 1999, p. 163). In explanation of this political strategy, sociologist Barry D. Adam wrote: “After the McCarthy terror, accommodation seemed the only realistic choice” (1995, p. 70).
By the mid-1960s, the burgeoning gay and lesbian movements were growing in the context of, and in many ways directly out of, other 1960s movements for social change, thereby becoming more explicitly political and less accommodationist (D’Emilio, 1992). Frank Kameny, a Washington, DC astronomer who worked for the Department of Defense’s Army Map Service, and who was fired for being gay as he was starting his career, embodied this new political approach. He went on to found the Mattachine Society of Washington (no connection to the national Mattachine) in the fall of 1961 and then a coalition group called the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) at the end of 1962 (Long, 2014; Faderman, 2015). Kameny described himself, and even his early work, as “activist militant” (Marcus, 2002, p. 83) and as directly in contrast to the work of the preceding homophile movement. He took direct lessons in strategy and approach from the African American civil rights and Black Power movements, particularly in being unapologetic and stridently proud of his marginalized identity: “I take the stand that not only is homosexuality … not immoral, but that homosexual acts engaged in by consenting adults are moral, in a positive and real sense, and are right, good, and desirable, both for the individual participants and for the society in which they live” (D’Emilio, 1998, p. 153).8
As the gay and lesbian movement grew increasingly visible and active, no longer hiding behind drawn curtains and in basements, it drew on the language and symbolism of movements for racial justice in particular. In 1967, the new national gay magazine, The Advocate, used the slogan “Gay Power” for the first recorded time. It also drew on the tactics of these movements: from nonviolent sit-ins to more aggressive pushing back against state repression and police brutality. A general radicalization of social movements in 1968 and 1969 – with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April of 1968, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the student movement and the New Left, and the radicalized racial justice movements and feminist movements – all inspired and set the tone for the emerging gay and lesbian liberation movement. Many LGBTQ people already had taken part in other movements at the time and, by the late 1960s, began to move to apply what they had learned as activists to their gay and lesbian activism.9
The first use of gay pride in this context was probably in the name given to the organization Personal Rights in Defense and Education (PRIDE), which was founded in Los Angeles in 1966. It described itself as an “activist militant” group that encouraged pride and openness and protested against police brutality and other forms of repression (Faderman & Timmons, 2009, pp. 155–156). By 1968, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) had embraced the slogan “Gay is Good,” which Kameny developed in line with the African American freedom movement’s “Black is Beautiful” campaign (Faderman, 1991; Carter, 2004; Chauncey, 2005). This was also the beginning of the time when activists began to use the word gay explicitly. The label was a move away from homosexual, which had come from a psychiatric, pathologized view of same-sex love, desire, and connection (Armstrong, 2002; Stein, 2012).
These years before Stonewall also saw many forms of gay and lesbian collective protest, often led by the most disaffected and marginalized of the broader community in terms of age, race, income and professional status, and gender identity. As we know, the most marginalized people tend not to be the subject of American historical narratives, textbooks, or celebrations. So, even these few (pre-Stonewall) events that I mention here are evidence of a much greater absence in the telling of American history. Cooper Do-nuts in downtown Los Angeles was the site of “perhaps the first homosexual uprising in the world,” according to Faderman and Timmons (2009, p. 2). But it did not get much press at the time and has been largely ignored by historians. The coffee and doughnut shop, whose customers were mostly Black and Latino hustlers, drag queens, and their friends, was a regular focus of the local police department. One night, in the spring of 1959, two officers came into the shop and insisted on collecting identification from some customers, before commanding them to get into their waiting squad car. Some customers fought back, throwing doughnuts, cups, sugar cubes, and coffee stirrers (also see Faderman, 2015).
In San Francisco, Gene Compton’s Cafeteria was a Northern California version of Cooper Do-nuts, a spot for cheap coffee, food, and community. As at Cooper’s, the largely Black and Latino clientele was used to police harassment and intimidation. But, one night in the summer of 1966, as Faderman describes: “As a policeman approached a queen to demand identification, she threw hot coffee in his face. It sparked California’s second homosexual brush fire – fifty young homosexuals hurling dishes, breaking windows, vandalizing a police car parked outside the cafeteria, setting a nearby newsstand on fire” and fighting back against police intimidation (2015, p. 119; also see Screaming queens, 2005).
In sum, by June 1969, just before Stonewall, there was a small but active and complex gay and lesbian movement. The movement was centered primarily on the US coasts. D’Emilio (1992) estimates that there were likely about 50 groups with a few thousand members in total. Through this early organizing, gender and sexual minorities began to develop collective identities and to mobilize these as they built the beginnings of an organizational infrastructure. There were also already ongoing disagreements within the movement over the kind and pace of change. Some held onto the older, homophile strategy of accommodation, and they stressed sameness between gay and lesbian and straight people and communities. Some, on the other hand, emphasized that “gay is good” and different and worthy of pride and of legal protection (Rupp, 1999; Faderman & Timmons, 2009; Ghaziani et al., 2016). It was out of this movement and all of its complexity that the Stonewall moment took hold.
Located at 53 Christopher Street in the West Village, New York City, The Stonewall Inn was a seedy club that had been bought by a small group of Mafia men and reopened as a gay bar in the spring of 1967. It was officially a private “bottle club” rather than a public bar, to get around the fact that it lacked a liquor license. It was dark, dingy, and did not even have running water to wash glasses. It served diluted drinks, had filthy bathrooms, and played music through a jukebox and a shabby sound system. But the bar and its two dance floors were popular, crowded, and profitable. Martin Duberman writes that the bar mostly appealed to a younger crowd: teenagers to people in their early-30s. It did not attract many lesbians or “full-time transvestites,” but it did serve a wide “melting pot” (1993, pp. 188–190). David Carter (2004) writes that the bar attracted a racially mixed but segregated clientele. White customers tended to hang out in the front room, while the back room was sometimes called “the ‘black’ or ‘Puerto Rican room’” and was mostly for the younger crowd. Some of those who frequented the Stonewall were homeless. In the words of gay writer and activist Vito Russo, the Stonewall “was a bar for the people who were too young, too poor or just too much to get in anywhere else” (Carter 2004, pp. 73–74).
For many decades in many US states, it was illegal for gay men and lesbians to congregate in public and to be served alcohol. These laws were changing through the 1960s, but for years they provided a perfectly legal rationale for police raids on gay bars and the use of vice squads and undercover agents to arrest patrons for their behavior and to close down bars that served gay and lesbian customers (D’Emilio, 1998; Faderman, 2015). One of the reasons why these police raids set high stakes for bar patrons is that many felt they would have a lot to lose both personally and professionally if they were outed as gay or lesbian in the course of a raid and arrest (Armstrong & Crage, 2006; Stewart-Winter, 2016).
In New York City, as Carter (2004) notes, gay bars were raided routinely (every month or so), but there was often close coordination between the police and the bar staff, facilitated by the bars’ regular police pay-offs. The Stonewall’s mob owners – who also were dealing drugs from the bar – paid off corrupt Sixth Precinct cops on a weekly basis, and this kept the bar–police relationship relatively low-key. For instance, officers in the Sixth Precinct often warned Stonewall employees before taking action and would time their raids to occur earlier in the night, when there were fewer patrons in the bars. Stonewall management also kept close watch on the door, with a bouncer who collected cover charges and carefully monitored entrance. When bright lights suddenly illuminated the dark bar, this was the bar staff’s warning to patrons of a raid.
On this particular summer weekend in 1969, police were ending an active couple of weeks of raiding gay bars in the area and already had been to the Stonewall earlier in the week. This raid was different, though. It came later at night, without warning, when the bar was already packed with about 200 patrons. At about 1:20 a.m., on what was technically Saturday, June 28, six members of Manhattan’s First Division Public Morals Squad entered the Stonewall and joined two undercover women officers from inside the club. They locked the doors, collected and seized alcohol stock, and began checking IDs of bar patrons, looking for underage and “masquerading” customers. The police released most patrons but placed some under arrest.
This raid then took an unexpected and very unusual turn when bar patrons began to fight back. Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, who had organized the action, remembers the growing resistance and the role that transgender women took, as police urged them into the bathrooms to be “examined” on “masquerading” charges: “We separated the few transvestites that we had, and they were very noisy that night. Usually they would just sit there and not say a word, but now they’re acting up: ‘Get your hands off me!’ ‘Don’t touch me!’ They wouldn’t go in, so it was a question of pushing them in, fighting them” (Carter, 2004, pp. 140–141). As patrons were released into the street, or were roughly arrested outside the bar and shoved into a waiting police wagon or squad cars, they quickly gained the support of others who had been called on payphones to join in this unusual response to the raid and of passersby who were out at a prime time on this first hot, humid weekend night of the summer.
The growing crowd outside the Stonewall began to resist, throwing pennies, glass bottles, cans, bricks, and Molotov cocktails, and yelling at the police. At least one man yelled “Gay power!” A few others started a round of “We Shall Overcome.” Police retaliated, brutalizing Stonewall customers and others who had gathered to join the protest on the street. Eventually, the officers took cover inside the bar as they called for backup, and the crowd outside battered the building with anything they could get their hands on, including trash cans and a parking meter that had been ripped from the sidewalk. The backup was the Tactical Patrol Force (TPF), whose members arrived in riot gear, marching in formation and carrying billy clubs and tear gas. They worked to break up the crowd, which kept re-forming. They were met with what Duberman describes as “their worst nightmare: a chorus line of mocking queens, their arms clasped around each other, kicking their heels in the air Rockettes-style and singing at the tops of their sardonic voices: ‘We are the Stonewall girls / We wear our hair in curls / We wear no underwear / We show our pubic hair … / We wear our dungarees / Above our nelly knees!’” (1993, pp. 200–201). The clash continued until about 3:30 a.m., when the 1,000 or so protesters and hundreds of police officers finally dispersed.
The next night (technically later that day, on Saturday night), protesters returned to the streets outside the Stonewall as word had spread through press and by word-of-mouth. A couple of thousand people gathered, singing the “Stonewall Girls” song again, shouting “Gay power,” “Equality for homosexuals,” and “Liberate Christopher Street.” They again clashed with police, including the TPF, who came in droves, again in riot gear, and brutalized protesters. The demonstrations lasted until the early hours of the next morning. On Sunday afternoon, Mattachine New York posted a sign on the wreckage of the Stonewall Inn urging peace rather than protest: “We homosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the Village – Mattachine,” it read (Carter, 2004, p. 196). The end of the weekend and the increased early police presence likely discouraged large numbers of protesters on that third, Sunday, night. There was only a small number of incidents on the subsequent rainy Monday and Tuesday nights. A larger, 1,000-person protest – and clash with TPF, again – took place on Wednesday, the last of six nights of Stonewall actions.10
Although press coverage of the Stonewall uprisings was limited and derisive, especially in the mainstream press and outside New York City (Rupp, 1999; Faderman, 2015), the uprising was immediately significant and generative for the movement. “[T]o many homosexuals, male and female alike,” Faderman wrote, “the Stonewall Rebellion was the shot heard round the world” (1991, p. 195).
By all accounts, this action had been started and led by people who were marginalized within LGBTQ communities. Some of the best-known activists to come out of the Stonewall moment were young, gender nonconforming people of color. Latina drag queen (her self-identity) Sylvia Rivera and African American drag queen Marsha P. Johnson, who had known each other since they were very young hustlers in Times Square, were both central to the Stonewall uprising. Rivera was not yet 18 years old, and Johnson was just a few years older (Duberman, 1993).
Sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna M. Crage (2006) argue that Stonewall and its significance in the LGBTQ campaign reveal the complexity of power within the movement and the telling of its history. Marginalized gay and gender nonconforming people, especially young queens and hustlers, had stood up to police a number of times before, most notably, perhaps, at Compton’s, three years before Stonewall. But “[w]hat Stonewall had, and Compton’s did not, were activists able and willing to capitalize on such rioting: high-resource, radical gay men” (2006, p. 744). In other words, Stonewall came at a time and place when the actions of marginalized members of the community – by race, class, age, and gender presentation – were celebrated and built upon by privileged members of the mainstream of the movement, often white, gay, middle-class, gender conforming men. Also, coming in the late 1960s, in the midst of countercultural shifts and the rise of racial justice movements, feminism, and the New Left, this moment resonated in new ways. This had the impact of turning the Stonewall uprisings into a symbol for the growing movement and a catalyst for broad organizational development.
Even before the Stonewall weekend, there was already a fight under way about how to move forward in the gay and lesbian movement. This divided approach mirrored similar discussions in other social and political movements at the time, particularly the African American movement, which had seen the birth of Black Power out of the civil rights movement. While the civil rights movement focused on using existing American institutions, such as the law, to bring about social change, Black Power refused this assimilationist approach in favor of claiming pride and power for African Americans, building internally controlled institutions that would better serve their Black communities (see, e.g., Van Deburg, 1992).
Stonewall was politically and culturally controversial, another example of a response to oppression that divided those who were hanging on to a politics of respectability that still characterized the homophile movement from those who were on their way to becoming proud and militant gay liberationists. The Stonewall-era gay and lesbian activists saw themselves as the young vanguards of a new revolution and they saw their older homophile siblings as dated and submissive. The older, more experienced homophile activists and community members saw these newcomers as immature, inexperienced, and probably a bit ungrateful and short-sighted (Duberman, 1993; Rupp, 1999; Armstrong, 2002; Marcus, 2002).
The gay liberation movement took off mere days after Stonewall. Carter (2004) describes in detail how Mattachine New York leaders worked to corral the energy into peaceful protests and reform. Yet, over the course of a few meetings in July 1969, they were met with frustration, impatience, and anger by activists who wanted to take a more radical approach. By the end of July, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) had emerged out of this divide, rejecting assimilation and championing a more liberationist stance. The GLF took its name from the Communist Vietnamese National Liberation Front, signaling its connection to other parts of the New Left and linking its view of gay and lesbian oppression to the capitalist oppression of others in the US and around the world.
The GLF framed its mission in radical terms from the beginning: “We are a revolutionary homosexual group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished…. Babylon has forced us to commit ourselves to one thing … revolution” (Carter, 2004, p. 219). In its mission, it displayed a critique of capitalism that was consistent with the Marxism of other Leftist groups at the time, and it urged an alliance with these groups. In answer to the question: “What makes you revolutionaries?” The group articulated:
We formed after the recent pig bust of the Stonewall, a well-known gay bar in Greenwich Village. We’ve come to realize that all our frustrations and feelings of oppression are real. The society has fucked with us … within our families, on our jobs, in our education, in the streets, in our bedrooms; in short, in has shit all over us. We, like everyone else, are treated as commodities. We’re told what to feel, what to think [….] We identify ourselves with all the oppressed: the Vietnamese struggle, the third world, the blacks, the workers … all those oppressed by this rotten, dirty, vile, fucked-up capitalist conspiracy. (Carter, 2004, p. 220)
Carter writes that the GLF laid the blame for the construction of the closet at the feet of capitalism, theorizing that capitalism was particularly oppressive to gay and lesbian people in that it constructed and reproduced a “system of taboos and institutionalized repressions.” As a result, GLF’s politics focused on visibility as a goal: on coming and being “out of the closet” (2004, p. 220). For the first time in history, coming out was not simply a personal and private act, but a highly important political one (D’Emilio, 1998; Armstrong, 2002). From the beginning, the GLF also emphasized the importance of community and culture, distributing its own publication, called Come Out!, and organizing community-building events, like its popular dances. Soon there were GLF groups in cities and college towns across the country as well as in a few European countries (Rupp, 1999; Faderman, 2015).
Many other radical gay and lesbian groups arose alongside the GLF. “Gay liberation,” Armstrong wrote, “burst onto the scene. It accomplished more in two years than the homophile movement had in the previous twenty, as measured by organizational growth, visibility, and political action” (2002, pp. 56–57). While 50 or 60 groups already existed before the summer of 1969, by just a few years after the Stonewall uprising this number had grown to more than 1,000, maybe more than 2,000 (D’Emilio, 1992; Rupp, 1999; Carter, 2004).
Not surprisingly, divisions and disagreements within and between groups existed from the beginning of this radical phase of the movement. One of the most divisive issues was the extent to which gay liberation efforts should remain “single-issue” – focused on gay issues – or should ally with other Left movements of the time (Armstrong, 2002, p. 75). In November 1969, just months after GLF New York was founded, the group bitterly debated (and ultimately rejected) a motion to donate $500 to the Black Panthers. Those who argued strongly for supporting the Panthers saw the GLF work as connected to racial justice efforts. Those who argued vehemently against it believed that the GLF should prioritize gay issues. They also worried about the homophobia they had seen displayed by the Panthers and some other Black nationalists at the time (Duberman, 1993; Carter, 2004).11
Like many movements and organizations of the time, the GLF began to fall apart as its members failed to resolve volatile internal disagreements. The organization had been unstable from the start, rife with ideological divisions and no clear organizational or leadership structure (D’Emilio, 1992; Faderman, 2015). After the Panther debate in GLF New York, the more liberal members, who wanted to focus on gay causes exclusively and who had a more rights-focused approach to change, broke away and founded the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) in December 1969. Armstrong (2002) argues that the brief gay power phase of the movement gave way, with the founding of the GAA and then the organizational proliferation that followed, to a gay rights and gay pride movement. For some, this signaled that those with privilege and a single-issue commitment had succeeded in defining the movement’s focus. Because the GAA formed initially out of the split with the GLF over the support of the Black Panthers, Armstrong argues, “the conflict between gay pride and gay power” had “a distinctively racial cast. Some GLF activists viewed the abandonment of gay power and the formation of GAA as an expression of the class, race, and gender privilege of middle-class white gay men” (2002, p. 94).12
The GAA had a clear organizational structure, an explicit attention only to gay and lesbian issues, and founding documents that were modeled on US founding documents, like the Constitution (Hirshman, 2013; Faderman, 2015). This new group was focused on civil rights and was therefore more assimilationist. As Duberman notes, it wanted to “win acceptance for gays within the country’s institutional structure – not to topple or transform that structure, as was GLF’s intent” (1993, p. 232). But, the GAA also had a direct action focus that was quite different from the Mattachine-like accommodationist style. The GAA articulated its mission this way:
We as liberated homosexual activists demand the freedom for expression of our dignity and value as human beings through confrontation with and disarmament of all mechanisms which unjustly inhibit us: economic, social, and political. Before the public conscience, we demand an immediate end to all oppression of homosexuals and the immediate unconditional recognition of these basic rights. (Carter, 2004, p. 235)
To this end, GAA activists began to engage in high-profile, disruptive, theatrical direct actions that they called “zaps.” For example:
When Harper’s magazine published an article by intellectual heavy hitter Joseph Epstein, expressing his wish to “wipe homosexuality off the face of the earth,” GAA activists brought cakes and a big coffee urn to the offices of the magazine, interrupting publication to demand equal time to reply. As each of Harper’s employees walked into work that morning, he or she was greeted by a GAA demonstrator: “I’m a homosexual,” the activists said. “Have a doughnut.” (Hirshman, 2013, pp. 122–123)
In keeping with its more assimilationist approach with regard to its faith in existing American institutions, the GAA also focused its zaps efforts on fighting for policy change, like its effort to add sexual orientation to a New York City nondiscrimination law and to call attention to a New York City clerk’s denial of wedding licenses to same-sex couples (Rimmerman, 2002; Faderman, 2015).
The GAA signaled the beginning of the end of the short-lived radical gay liberationist phase of the movement that had developed out of Stonewall. This phase was essentially over by early 1972. Then, throughout the 1970s, the gay liberation phase gave way to a prolific period of culture and political organizing within a more rights- and pride-focused movement. LGBTQ groups formed to fight on a number of different political fronts, and a wide range of LGBTQ communities built and controlled their own cultural institutions (Armstrong, 2002).
One enduring contribution to the movement of the post-Stonewall era was the pride march and parade, which began in 1970 as a way to memorialize the Stonewall uprising. The first New York celebration on June 28, 1970 was a 51-block march of thousands of people up Sixth Avenue from near Christopher Street to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, throughout which participants carried “Gay Pride” placards and yelled “Gay Power” and “Say it clear! Say it loud! Gay is good! Gay is proud!” At the same time, Los Angeles held Christopher Street West, a march down Hollywood Boulevard, and Chicago, for its part, hosted a “Gay Pride Week.” Armstrong notes that, from the beginning, these events were framed less as political “demonstrations” and more as “celebrations” of “pride” (2002, p. 108). The parades grew quickly in the years that followed, and spread to a wide range of US cities throughout the country and in Western Europe. From the beginning, these pride events relied on and built upon the existing organizational infrastructure and institutions (like community media) in local gay communities (Armstrong & Crage, 2006).13
A lesbian feminist movement also grew out of the post-Stonewall moment of gay liberation. It articulated a distinctly gendered analysis of the experience of sexuality and an intersectional understanding of gender and sexuality. Lesbians had experienced sexism within the homophile and gay liberation movements and homophobia within the feminist movements of the time.14 Within the mainstream second wave feminist movement, which developed in the 1960s, the most infamous example of homophobia came from Betty Friedan. In 1963, Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique, which helped to inspire a mainstream feminist civil rights movement.15 In 1966, she also had co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), which became one of the primary players in mainstream feminism, a civil rights organization focused on legal and policy change for women’s equality. Calling lesbians the “lavender menace of the women’s movement,” Friedan worried that they would scare away from feminism those women who “wanted equality but also wanted to keep on loving their husbands and children” (quoted in Faderman & Timmons, 2009, p. 184; Faderman, 2015, p. 235). She worked explicitly to exclude lesbians and lesbian organizations – like Daughters of Bilitis – from the women’s movement.16 Later in the decade, radical feminists, who were critical of the assimilationist, civil rights agenda of Friedan and other liberals, were nevertheless not particularly inclusive of lesbians either. As historian Alice Echols writes of many radical feminists: “Most commonly, they dismissed lesbianism as sexual rather than political”; the women’s liberation movement of the early 1970s was “convulsed by the gay–straight split” within it (1989, pp. 211, 220).
Even as they faced homophobia within both mainstream and radical feminism, lesbians within the gay movement often felt marginalized by gay male activists. Both the GLF and the GAA were primarily founded, led, and joined by men (Carter, 2004; Faderman, 2015), and women within these organizations experienced male activists as sometimes aggressive, dismissive, and stuck in their own traditional notions of gender roles. These women activists also felt that lesbians and gay men had different experiences of their sexuality, and that even the most radical parts of the gay movement had been organized primarily around gay male experiences and priorities (Faderman, 1991; Duberman, 1993; Pride Divide, 1997; Faderman & Timmons, 2009).
By 1970 and 1971, lesbian activists began to organize a “parallel revolution” (Faderman, 2015, p. 227) for themselves and to claim the label of lesbian feminist explicitly. Taylor and Rupp define lesbian feminism as “a variety of beliefs and practices based on the core assumption that a connection exists between an erotic and/ or emotional commitment to women and political resistance to patriarchal domination” (1993, p. 33). Lesbian feminists worked in an explicitly politicized way to build and sustain community-controlled cultural, artistic, athletic, and health institutions and spaces. Just as it demonstrated a division between men’s and women’s cultures and organizing (Pride Divide, 1997), so this kind of lesbian organizing was another example of the political split in the broader gay and lesbian movement, between assimilationists whose interest was in integrating into existing American institutions and separatists who believed that the path to equality and justice was through the creation of their own institutions.17
In this short period in the early 1970s, radical lesbian feminist groups proliferated across the country (Stein, 2012). On the explicitly political front, for instance, a short-lived group, the Radicalesbians, developed out of the frustration of women in the GLF, including charismatic writer and activist Rita Mae Brown (Hirshman, 2013). She had briefly joined the Student Homophile League at Columbia and the New York chapter of NOW, before exploring a radical feminist group called Redstockings. Having found the Columbia group to be sexist and the NOW group to be elitist, she concluded that Redstockings lacked any attention to lesbian needs and politics (Echols, 1989; Faderman, 2015). Brown turned to the GLF hoping for something more inclusive of lesbians, but did not find it there. With a small group of women, she ultimately produced the influential and heavily circulated manifesto “The Woman Identified Woman.” This 1970 document defined “lesbian” broadly and, primarily, politically: “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is a woman who … acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and free human being than her society … cares to allow her” (Faderman, 1991, p. 206). Challenging the mainstream feminist movement of the time, Brown organized a protest of NOW’s Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City in the spring of 1970. As the lights went out in the meeting space, a group of women wearing Lavender Menace shirts took over the stage as Brown took to the microphone, over conference organizers’ strong objections. “This conference,” Brown said, “won’t proceed until we talk about lesbians in the women’s movement” (Faderman, 2015, p. 236). Brown was also at the center of another short-lived early 1970s radical lesbian political group in Washington, DC, The Furies. The group took a separatist stance and viewed lesbianism as a form of radical gender politics. As one founder noted: “Lesbianism is a threat to the ideological, political, personal and economic base of male supremacy” (quoted in Echols, 1989, p. 232).
During this time of organizational proliferation in the lesbian and gay movement, racialized and gendered exclusion inside the movement also spurred activism by lesbian, gay, and bisexual people of color (Cohen, 1999) and transgender activism. For example, Sylvia Rivera had been active in both the GLF and the GAA for a while, even though many in those organizations exhibited transphobia. Rivera and her longtime friend Marsha P. Johnson, co-founded STAR, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, in New York City in 1970 (later renamed the Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries). STAR provided housing and services, especially for young homeless LGBTQ people. It was, Rivera said, “for the street gay people, the street homeless people, and anybody that needed help at that time” (Feinberg, 1998, p. 107) and it had chapters in New York, Chicago, California, and England. Rivera felt that STAR and trans people were often marginalized in the broader movement after Stonewall. “Gay liberation but transgender nothing!” she reflected in a speech in 2001 (n.p.).18
By the early 1970s, gay and lesbian activists were putting their efforts into other areas of politics and culture, demonstrating a broad range of approaches to social change. Some turned to public policy and traditional, assimilationist civil rights pursuits through organizations like the National Gay Task Force (NGTF) and the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, both founded in 1973 (Marcus, 2002; Chauncey, 2005). These were part of a new “professionalized” gay and lesbian rights movement, which, as Bronski notes, “sought change through legislative and electoral channels and worked within the system to make gay people full American citizens” (1998, pp. 73, 70). There were gendered aspects of the shape this movement took. As law and society scholar Kimberly D. Richman (2009) notes, it was only when women began to take on leadership roles that family law issues – like lesbian mothers’ child custody cases – began to be a priority for this civil rights focus of the movement in the 1970s, and new national organizations developed around new legal goals of the movement – for example, Lesbian Mothers National Defense Fund in 1974 and the Lesbian Rights Project, which later became the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), in 1977.
Other activists turned “inward,” toward building community institutions of various kinds (Faderman & Timmons, 2009, p. 192). Some organizations provided health and social service supports – like the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center, founded in the early 1970s, and the Gay VD Clinic in Chicago. Others provided religious support – for example, the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), which had been founded in Los Angeles by gay Pentecostal minister Troy Perry in 1968 and expanded tremendously through the early 1970s; and other religious organizations, like the first gay and lesbian Jewish congregation, Beth Chayim Chadashim, founded in Los Angeles in 1972–73. Other groups focused on race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality – for example, Gay American Indians and the Combahee River Collective. In fact, as historian Marc Stein notes, it “was a period of transformational mobilization” for lesbian and gay activists of color (2012, p. 123). Finally, others provided a range of artistic and cultural outlets, like discos and bars, bathhouses, bookstores, record labels, choruses, and coffee shops.19
Stonewall-era revolutionaries might have celebrated the size and public nature of the broad, diffuse, and visible gay and lesbian movement, but they would have lamented the direction it had taken – like the other social justice movements of its time – toward civil rights and assimilationism rather than alternative community-building and liberationism. Longtime LGBTQ progressive activist Urvashi Vaid noted of the movement by the late 1970s: “From that period on, the gay and lesbian political movement pursued social, legal, cultural, and political legitimation – what I call mainstreaming – rather than social change” (1995, p. 36).
The proliferation of these visible and varied lesbian and gay mobilizations coincided with the beginnings of the flourishing of the American Right in the mid- to late 1970s. Historian Dagmar Herzog (2008) details the rise of the politically active Religious Right and its dependence on a very narrow view of legitimate, moral sexuality. The Religious Right moved away from the church, inserting itself boldly into politics by targeting two issues: abortion and gay rights (also see Diamond, 1995; Vaid, 1995). Sociologist Tina Fetner argues that the Right had a rich and effective internal network and set of community-controlled institutions – like media, churches, and schools – on which to draw for its anti-gay activism, which “marked the entry of evangelical Christians into secular politics” (2008, p. 10). During this time, three moments stand out as historically and politically significant to the development of both LGBTQ movements and movements on the Right: Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children Campaign; the Briggs Initiative in California; and the assassination of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person elected to the San Francisco board of supervisors.
Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign in 1977 was the moment of the birth of a highly visible and organized anti-gay Religious Right (Fetner, 2008). Bryant was an Oklahoman evangelical Southern Baptist and a well-known celebrity who had been a long-time Miami (Dade County) resident. She had been a singer, a beauty queen, a professional Christian with book contracts and speaking tours under her belt, and a Florida orange juice spokesperson with a national platform for her views. Prompted by members of her church, she launched a frenzied and theatrical effort to overturn a Dade County nondiscrimination law that had been newly revised to include civil rights protections for “affectional or sexual preference.” This was the first sexual orientation nondiscrimination law – of approximately 40 laws like it at the time in other regions – to be adopted by any southern city (Shilts, 1982).
Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign collected nearly 65,000 signatures to put a repeal of the law on the June 1977 ballot. Bryant drew on all the Cold War-era depictions of gay men as dangerous, untrustworthy pedophiles who were obsessed with molesting and converting America’s children. As she famously wrote at the time in her autobiography: “[H]omosexuals cannot reproduce – so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America” (Fetner, 2008, p. xiii). The campaign ran a full-page ad in the Miami Herald that read: “There is no ‘Human Right’ to Corrupt Our Children” (Faderman, 2015, p. 337).
Just as the rise and success of the Religious Right was a response to progressive gender and sexual politics of the time, so the gay and lesbian movement emerged in new ways in the late 1970s to respond to the growing public activism of the Right. These two contemporaneous movements arose, were reinforced, and were energized by each other (Fetner, 2008). Gay and lesbian activists fought back against Bryant – including urging a national boycott of Florida orange juice. To ask a majority to vote to protect or extend the rights of a minority is always a tall order, though. Bryant’s campaign had broad appeal and visibility across the country (Faderman, 2015) and in June of 1977 Dade County voters handily revoked the rights that had just been bestowed on lesbian, gay, and bisexual residents.
At her victory celebration in a Miami Holiday Inn, Bryant spoke as if this were just the beginning for the anti-gay Religious Right. She pronounced: “Tonight the laws of God and the cultural values of man have been vindicated! … The people of Dade County – the normal majority – have said ‘Enough! Enough! Enough!’” (Faderman, 2015, p. 353). She vowed to extend her campaign and, on the heels of the Miami vote, St. Paul (Minnesota), Wichita (Kansas), and Eugene (Oregon) all repealed their nondiscrimination protections (Stone, 2012). Bryant also inspired Republican Senator John Briggs of Orange County, California (Fetner, 2008). An evangelical Christian with gubernatorial ambitions, Briggs bet on homophobia to raise his profile, calling gay politics “the hottest social issue since Reconstruction.” He organized to place an initiative before California voters in November 1978. Proposition 6 proposed that teachers or anyone working with children in schools would be fired for “advocating, soliciting, imposing, encouraging, or promoting private or public sexual acts defined in the penal code between persons of the same sex in a manner likely to come to the attention of other employees or students, or publicly and indiscreetly engaging in such actions.” The initiative, which placed in voters’ hands the power of the state to fire teachers for being gay or “promoting” homosexuality in any way, drew on the same tropes of gay perversion and child endangerment as Bryant’s campaign had done. One Proposition 6 flyer, for instance, read: “Preserve Parents’ Rights to Protect Their Children from Teachers Who Are Immoral and Who Promote a Perverted Lifestyle. Vote ‘Yes’ on 6!” (see Faderman, 2015, pp. 368–369).
The Briggs Initiative became another national lightning rod in gay rights politics, mobilizing high-profile support as well as opposition. It was the first time that California voters statewide weighed in on gay and lesbian civil rights (Shilts, 1982). The measure had been leading in the polls in California. In a turning point, conservative former California governor Ronald Reagan opposed the initiative. He was a small-government conservative, and he believed that this law would bring government to the classroom in intrusive, potentially messy ways. Reagan’s involvement went a long way toward sinking the Briggs Initiative. Ultimately, it failed at the polls on November 7, 1978, when Californians voted against it, 58.4 to 41.6 percent. This handed the anti-gay Religious Right a high-profile defeat, but it still had the effect of “consolidat[ing] an activist network opposed to gay rights” (Diamond, 1995, p. 171; also see Faderman, 2015).
A new result of the high-profile anti-gay rightwing bigotry of Bryant and Briggs was that straight allies began to participate in the lesbian and gay movement in an unprecedented way. Faderman argues that young, progressive straights had not previously viewed gay rights as their issue. “But,” she writes, “Anita Bryant’s Bible-thumping took away their neutrality. The sexual sanctimoniousness of Bryant and her ilk were a threat to heterosexual freedoms, too, and straight hip culture began reflecting antipathy” (2015, p. 363). The rise of the Right energized the gay and lesbian movement, helped it develop organizationally, and brought in more allies and more national visibility (Armstrong, 2002; Fetner, 2008).
At the end of the 1970s, the assassination of Harvey Milk became another site and symbol of the clash between the Right and the gay and lesbian movement. Milk’s death and the unjust, inadequate criminal sentence of his murderer further fueled gay and lesbian activism and helped to build a movement that was increasingly national in scope. Milk, a San Francisco Supervisor (equivalent to a city council member), was one of the first openly gay elected officials in the country and had fought hard against the Briggs Initiative. A transplant from New York, a former banker and political conservative-turned-hippy, gay rights activist, and the co-owner of a small camera shop in San Francisco’s heavily gay Castro neighborhood, Milk had run unsuccessfully for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1973 and 1975. He finally won in 1977. With humor and a huge amount of charisma and energy, Milk became a national gay rights superstar. He spoke frequently about the importance of visibility, of coming out, and of gay leadership.20 He was an energizing force for the local and the national movement, making a strong case for gay rights and linking this fight to other movements and causes.21
A few days after the failure of the Briggs Initiative, conservative Supervisor Dan White, who had sparred with Milk on a number of local issues, including gay rights, resigned from the Board of Supervisors. Just 10 days later, he asked the liberal San Francisco mayor, George Moscone, for his job back. On November 27, 1978, while awaiting final confirmation from the mayor that his reappointment would not be accepted, White walked into City Hall and fatally shot both Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk, five times each. His guilt was not in question: he confessed to the murders. But, when a jury handed down a verdict, in May 1979, it was an incredibly light one: voluntary manslaughter in both cases. For this charge, White was sentenced to the maximum possible total of seven years and eight months in prison.
The jury’s failure to charge White with murder spurred an immediate response in San Francisco. With calls of “Out of the bars and into the streets” and “Dan White, Dan White / Hit man for the New Right,” a gathering crowd of eventually thousands made their way from the Castro to San Francisco’s City Hall, where they smashed windows and eventually clashed violently with police (Shilts, 1982; also see Shepard, 1997, ch. 3). Harry Britt, the gay man who was appointed to Milk’s place on the Board of Supervisors after the assassination, said, the day after the confrontation at City Hall: “Now the society is going to have to deal with us not as nice little fairies who have their hair dressing salons, but as people capable of violence. This was gay anger you saw” (Faderman, 2015, p. 409).
It was in the wake of Milk’s assassination – following on the heels of the anti-gay work of Bryant and Briggs – that the first national gay and lesbian march in Washington, DC, was organized. Armstrong writes that there had been “little enthusiasm” for a national march prior to this time, though Milk advocated it. “Sentiment about a national march on Washington,” however, “changed dramatically” after Milk’s assassination (2002, p. 130). Ghaziani argues that one impact of the local organized responses to Bryant and Briggs and to Milk’s assassination was the development of a gay and lesbian “national consciousness” and the awareness of a need to build a movement with a broad reach (2008, p. 36). The October 1979 march, which drew between 75,000 and 125,000 participants from across the country, “gave birth to a national movement” (2008, p. 43). It was, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the “coming out of the movement on the national political agenda” (quoted in Armstrong, 2002, p. 130).
Once lesbian and gay people found each other in large numbers and developed a sense of identity as a collective and as a minority group, they began to resist state oppression – like police raids – and to make demands of their country. The Stonewall uprising crystallized and accelerated a movement that had been building for almost two decades already. Out of it came organizational proliferation and a national movement – and a vehement backlash from a Religious Right that was in the midst of its own moment of growth and accomplishment.
Historians and analysts often understand the divide between assimilationists and liberationists to characterize the LGBTQ movement, dating back to the split within Mattachine in the early 1950s. We see this at play here in many ways throughout these first few decades of the organized movement, between the homophile movement and gay liberation, then between the groups that formed after Stonewall. As Bronski nicely summarizes: “While the homophile movement promoted the idea of private, responsible citizenship, the gay liberation movement called for public displays of identity but did not actively promote a civil rights platform that demanded full participation in the state. This was because, on a deeply political level, the movement deplored the state and its power” (1998, p. 68).
It is important to recognize, though, as you continue to read, that this assimilationist/liberationist distinction is not an easy or an absolute one. Frank Kameny, for instance, understood himself as a militant and urged self-acceptance and pride. Yet he had his own conservative guidelines during protests, urging participants to be “lawful, orderly, dignified,” noting: “If we want to be employed by the Federal Government … we have to look employable to the Federal Government” (Duberman, 1993, pp. 210, 111). When he saw two women holding hands, he broke them apart, scolding “None of that! None of that!” (Carter, 2004, p. 217). He had both a radical and a cultural accommodationist side. So, too, organizations that demanded rights from the state (as assimilationists tend to), like the GAA, adopted direct action tactics, in the form of their protests, that some might describe as quite militant. Later in the 1970s, lesbian women and gay men developed their own community organizations – a strategy that might be called liberationist. But, many of these were cultural in nature (like religious organizations) or social service-oriented and did not necessarily make policy demands. As you read, keep the liberationist/assimilationist distinction in mind, as it is a central lens through which to understand the complexity of LGBTQ politics. But also keep in mind that the distinction can be complex and messy.
Finally, if a national LGBTQ movement was born from the moment at Stonewall when young, marginalized by race and class, gender nonconforming members of the community spontaneously stood up to police repression, so, too, we can understand the Stonewall moment as solidifying the reality that the mainstream movement would center around white, middle-class, gay men. We will see this in the remaining chapters, that this group has always held a lot of privilege in the mainstream LGBTQ movement. Armstrong argues that the development of this national movement was predicated on this privilege: “Race, gender, and class exclusions were built into the gay identity movement” (2002, p. 153). She argues that the mainstream, national movement did develop in a way that celebrated diversity and that saw itself as representing the broad interests of a diverse group of gender and sexual minorities. In reality, though, the movement was largely led, and its agendas primarily set, by privileged white, gay men who believed that their interests and issues were shared by people who were economically less-advantaged, women of all backgrounds, and people of color of all genders in the movement. In other words, they universalized their interests, believing they spoke for a diverse movement. “The movement,” Armstrong argues, “understood itself as in the general interest of all people engaged in nonnormative sexuality, while concretely embodying the evolving interests of middle-class, white gay men” (2002, p. 135). This, too, is a legacy of Stonewall that we see play out in the generations to come.