The Stonewall riots, which as a whole are often called the Stonewall Rebellion, were a series of violent conflicts between gay men and women and police officers in New York City. The first night of rioting began on Friday, June 27, 1969 not long after 1:20 a.m., when police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. "Stonewall," as the raids are often referred to, is generally considered a turning point for the modern gay rights movement worldwide, as it is one of the first times in modern history a significant body of gay people resisted arrest.

Police raids on gay bars and nightclubs were a regular part of gay life in cities across the United States, until the 1960s, when sudden raids on bars in many major cities became markedly less frequent. Most conclude that the decline in raids can be attributed to a series of court challenges and increased resistance from the Homophile Movement.

Prior to 1965, the police would sometimes record the identities of all those present at the raids, which on some occasions was published in newspapers. At the time, the police used any number of reasons they could think of to justify an arrest on indecency charges including: kissing, holding hands, wearing clothing traditionally of the opposite gender, or even being in the bar during the raid.

It is important to look back to before 1969 and examine the changing attitudes in New York towards gay bars and gay rights. In 1965, two important figures came into prominence. John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, was elected mayor of New York City on a reform platform. Dick Leitsch became president of the Mattachine Society (an early gay rights organization in the United States) in New York at around the same time. Leitsch was considered relatively militant compared to his predecessors and believed in direct action techniques commonly used by other civil rights groups in the 1960s.

In early 1966, administration policies had changed because of complaints made by Mattachine that the police were on the streets entrapping gay men and charging them with indecency. The police commissioner, Howard Leary, instructed the police force not to lure gays into breaking the law and also required that any plain clothes officers must have a civilian witness when a gay person was arrested. This policy caused entrapment of gay men to become much less common in New York (D’Emilio 207).

In the same year, in order to challenge the State Liquor Authority (SLA) regarding its policies over gay bars, Dick Leitsch conducted a “sip in.” Leitsch had called members of the press and planned on meeting at a bar with two other gay men—a bar could have its liquor license taken away for knowingly serving a group of three or more homosexuals—to test the SLA policy of closing bars. When the bartender at Julius turned them away, they made a complaint to the city’s Human Rights Commission. Following the “sip in,” the chairman of the SLA stated that his department did not prohibit the sale of liquor to homosexuals. In addition, the following year two separate court cases ruled that “substantial evidence” was needed in order to revoke a liquor license. No longer was kissing between two men considered indecent behavior. The number of gay bars in New York steadily rose after 1966 (D’Emilio 208).

The question then remains why the Stonewall was raided if gay bars were legal and on the rise. John D’Emilio, a prominent historian, points out that the city was in the middle of a mayoral campaign and John Lindsay, who had lost his party’s primary, had reason to call for a cleanup of the city’s bars. The Stonewall Inn had a number of reasons that the police would target it. It operated without a liquor license, had ties with organized crime, and “offering scantily clad go-go boys as entertainment, it brought an ‘unruly’ element to Sheridan Square” (D’Emilio 231).

Race is said to have been another factor. The Stonewall bar was heavily frequented by blacks and Hispanics. The decision by the police to raid the bar in the manner they did may have been influenced by the fact that most of the "homosexuals" they would encounter were of color, and therefore even more objectionable. A large percentage of the rioters were also men of color.

Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, who led the raid on the bar that first night, claims that he was ordered to close the Stonewall Inn because it was the central location for gathering information on gay men who worked on Wall Street. A recent increase in the number of thefts from brokerage houses on Wall Street led police to suspect that gay men, forced by blackmail, were behind the thefts. (Carter 262)

The patrons of the Stonewall were used to such raids and the management was generally able to reopen for business either that night, or the following day. What may have made the June 1969 raid different was the death a week earlier of Judy Garland, an important cultural icon with whom many in the gay community identified. The palpable grief at her loss culminated with her funeral on Friday, June 27, attended by 22,000 people, including perhaps 12,000 gay men. Many of the Stonewall patrons were still emotionally distraught when the raid occurred that night, and refused to react passively. However, historians still differ on whether her death's proximity to the Stonewall riots was mere coincidence, or if it was a true cause of the riots.


Stonewall, 2003
The Stonewall raid and the aftermath

The Stonewall Inn.A number of factors differentiated the raid that took place on June 28 from other such raids on the Stonewall Inn. In general, the sixth precinct tipped off the management of the Stonewall Inn prior to a raid. In addition, raids were generally carried out early enough in the night to allow business to return to normal for the peak hours of the night. At approximately 1:20 AM, much later than the usual raid, eight officers from the first precinct, of which only one was in uniform, entered the bar. Most of the patrons were able to escape being arrested as the only people arrested “would be those without IDs, those dressed in the clothes of the opposite gender, and some or all of the employees” (Duberman 192).

Details about how the riot started vary from story to story. According to one account, a transgendered woman named Sylvia Rivera threw a bottle at a police officer after being prodded by his nightstick (Duberman). Another account states that a lesbian, being brought to a patrol car through the crowd put up a struggle that encouraged the crowd to do the same (D’Emilio 232). Whatever the case may be, mêlée broke out across the crowd—which quickly overtook the police. Stunned, the police retreated into the bar. Heterosexual folk singer Dave van Ronk, who was walking through the area, was grabbed by the police, pulled into the bar, and beaten. The crowd’s attacks were unrelenting. Some tried to light the bar on fire. Others used a parking meter as a battering ram to force the police officers out. Word quickly spread of the riot and many residents, as well as patrons of nearby bars, rushed to the scene.

Throughout the night the police singled out many effeminate men and often beat them. On the first night alone 13 people were arrested and four police officers, as well as an undetermined number of protesters, were injured. It is known, however, that at least two rioters were severely beaten by the police (Duberman 201-202). Bottles and stones were thrown by protesters who chanted “Gay Power!” The crowd, estimated at over 2000, “did battle” with over 400 police officers.

The police sent additional forces in the form of the Tactical Patrol Force, a riot-control squad originally trained to counter anti-Vietnam War protesters. The tactical patrol force arrived to disperse the crowd. However, they failed to break up the crowd, who sprayed them with rocks and other projectiles.

Eventually the scene quieted down, but the crowd returned again the next night. While less violent than the first night, the crowd had the same electricity that was seen in the first. Skirmishes between the rioters and the police ensued until approximately 4:00 AM. The third day of rioting fell five days after the raid on the Stonewall Inn. On that Wednesday, 1,000 people congregated at the bar and again caused extensive property damage. Anger and outrage against the way police had treated gay people for decades previous burst to the surface.


2004 Gay Pride Parade in São Paulo, Brazil
Legacy

The forces that were simmering before the riots were now no longer beneath the surface. The community created by the homophile organizations of the previous two decades had created the perfect environment for the creation of the Gay Liberation Movement. By the end of July the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was formed in New York and by the end of the year the GLF could be seen in cities and universities around the country. Similar organizations were soon created around the world including Canada, France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand.

The following year, in commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, the GLF organized a march from Greenwich Village to Central Park. Between 5,000 and 10,000 men and women attended the march. Many gay pride celebrations choose the month of June to hold their parades and events to celebrate “The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World" (D'Emilio 232). Many major American cities including New York City, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and Minneapolis as well as other cities such as Montréal and Toronto, hold Gay Pride Marches on the last Sunday of June, in honor of Stonewall. The prominent British gay rights group Stonewall is named after the riots. Numerous gay bars around the world take their name from the revolutionary bar - two of the most famous are The Stonewall and Moose Lounge in Allentown, Pennsylvania and Bar Stonewall in Sydney, Australia.

The general atmosphere of the days immediately before the riots are dramatized in a 1995 film called Stonewall.









[Edited 6/27/06 9:56am]

such a shame people have to fight like that for basics

XxAxX said:

i think of it everytime i walk down Christopher Street.

Wow it was on this day. It's still tough but I could only imagine what life was like 40-50 years ago. Thank God for those gay men and women who fought to make it possible for all of us gay people to come out and be proud of who we are today.

purplecam said:

i love this:

wow, I knew nothing of this. What would they "arrest" them for borg?

jerseykrs said:

"indecency"

anything could consitute it. holding hands, kissing, makeup, anything. simply being in that bar was enough to be arrested
[Edited 6/27/06 10:06am]

wow... great thread...i learned from it ( i love that !! )



it's so simple and humans fuck it up so easy

peace and love man &

Mach said:

glad to see if nothing else, you and jers both learned something new. that alone makes it worth it
[Edited 6/27/06 10:08am]

cborgman said:

hhhmmmm, very sad. Even with my admitted slight homophobia, I would never think it is okay to tell people what they can and can not do.

I've realized the aversion gays have faced due to this board.

cborgman said:

i try to learn something new all the time ... everyday

thank you

jerseykrs said:

right the fuck on, brother.

cborgman said:

keep your pawing hands off me.

this one is a bit less clinical...

The Stonewall Riots were a turning point in the struggle for homosexual equality. Yet the brutal 1998 murder of 21-year-old U.S. student Matthew Shepard, and the British government's unwillingness to implement promised reform, indicate how far there is to go. Lionel Wright assesses the role Stonewall played in shaping the modern lesbian, gay, and bisexual movements.


Something unremarkable happened 30 years ago on June 27, 1969 in New York's Greenwich Village, an event which had occurred a thousand times before across the U.S. over the decades. The police raided a gay bar.

At first, everything unfolded according to a time-honored ritual. Seven plain-clothes detectives and a uniformed officer entered and announced their presence. The bar staff stopped serving the watered-down, overpriced drinks, while their Mafia bosses swiftly removed the cigar boxes which functioned as tills. The officers demanded identification papers from the customers and then escorted them outside, throwing some into the bowels of a waiting paddy-wagon and pushing others off the sidewalk.

But at a certain point, the "usual suspects" departed from the script and decided to fight back. A debate still rages over which incident sparked the riot. Was it a 'butch' lesbian dressed in man's clothes who resisted arrest, or a male drag queen who stopped in the doorway between the officers and posed defiantly, rallying the crowd?

Riot veteran and gay rights activist Craig Rodwell says: "A number of incidents were happening simultaneously. There was no one thing that happened or one person, there was just... a flash of group, of mass anger."

The crowd of ejected customers started to throw coins at the officers, in mockery of the notorious system of payoffs - earlier dubbed 'gayola' - in which police chiefs leeched huge sums from establishments used by gay people and used "public morals" raids to regulate their racket. Soon, coins were followed by bottles, rocks, and other items. Cheers ran out as the prisoners in the van were liberated. Detective Inspector Pine later recalled, "I had been in combat situations, but there was never any time that I felt more scared than then."

Pine ordered his subordinates to retreat into the empty bar, which they proceeded to trash as well as savagely beating a heterosexual folk singer who had the misfortune to pass the doorway at that moment. At the end of the evening, a teenager had lost two fingers from having his hand slammed in a car door. Others received hospital treatment following assaults with police billy clubs. The historian of the riots, Martin Duberman, claims that the police singled out "camp," or "feminine," young men for special treatment.

D.I. Pine and his subordinates were almost burned alive when someone squirted lighter fluid through the door of the Inn and tried to ignite it. Meanwhile, a parking meter lying nearby was co-opted as a makeshift battering ram. People in the crowd started shouting "Gay Power!" And as word spread through Greenwich Village and across the city, hundreds of gay men and lesbians, black, white, Hispanic, and predominantly working class, converged on the Christopher Street area around the Stonewall Inn to join the fray. The police were now reinforced by the Tactical Patrol Force (TPF), a crack riot-control squad which had been specially trained to disperse people protesting against the Vietnam War.

Duberman describes the scene as the two dozen "massively proportioned" TPF riot police advanced down Christopher Street, arms linked in Roman Legion-style wedge formation: "In their path, the rioters slowly retreated, but - contrary to police expectations - did not break and run ... hundreds ... scattered to avoid the billy clubs but then raced around the block, doubled back behind the troopers, and pelted them with debris. When the cops realized that a considerable crowd had simply re-formed to their rear, they flailed out angrily at anyone who came within striking distance.

"But the protestors would not be cowed. The pattern repeated itself several times: The TPF would disperse the jeering mob only to have it re-form behind them, yelling taunts, tossing bottles and bricks, setting fires in trash cans. When the police whirled around to reverse direction at one point, they found themselves face-to-face with 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!'

"It was a deliciously witty, contemptuous counterpoint to the TPF's brute force." (Stonewall, Duberman, 1993) The following evening, the demonstrators returned, their numbers now swelled to thousands. Leaflets were handed out, titled "Get the Mafia and cops out of gay bars!" Altogether, the protests and disturbances continued with varying intensity for five days.

In the wake of the riots, intense discussions took place in the city's gay community. During the first week of July, a small group of lesbians and gay men started talking about establishing a new organization called the Gay Liberation Front. The name was consciously chosen for its association with the anti-imperialist struggles in Vietnam and Algeria. Sections of the GLF would go on to organize solidarity for arrested Black Panthers, collect money for striking workers, and link the battle for gay rights to the banner of socialism.

A gay magazine in New York published a special riot edition, which offered a camp tribute to John Reed's book about the October Revolution, Ten Days That Shook The World, with its title: The Hairpin Drop Heard Round The World. During the next year or so, lesbians and gay men built a Gay Liberation Front (GLF) or comparable body in Canada, France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Australia, and New Zealand.

The word 'Stonewall' has entered the vocabulary of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people everywhere as a potent emblem of the gay community making a stand against oppression and demanding full equality in every area of life. Since the riots, it has been adopted in all manner of gay-related contexts, from housing organizations to holiday firms. And a prominent gay rights group in Britain passes under the name Stonewall, although its strategy of backroom lobbying and deals with the New Labour government is far removed from the heroic spirit of resistance shown on Christopher Street in June 1969.

The GLF is no more, but the idea of Gay Power is as strong as ever. Meanwhile, in many countries and cities the concept of "gay pride" literally marches on each year in the form of an annual Gay Pride march.

The present generation of young lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and many of today's gay rights activists were born or grew up after 1969. And over the intervening decades, politics in the U.S. have passed through a very different period. During this time, the wider significance of the riots has been eclipsed by a sort of Stonewall legend.

Developing Subculture
Why did the Stonewall events happen when they did? How did the initial actions of less than 200 people lead both to a wider protest and then the birth of Gay Liberation?

In his 1983 book Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, the historian John D'Emilio has revealed the pre-history of Stonewall. The author shows how the process of industrialization and urbanization, and the movement of workers from plantations and family farms to wage labor in the cities, made it easier for Americans with same-sex desires to explore their sexuality. By the 1920s, a homosexual subculture had crystallized in San Francisco's Barbary Coast, the French quarter of New Orleans, and New York's Harlem and Greenwich Villages.

There is substantial evidence that people with same-sex desires have existed throughout history. What has varied is the way society has viewed them, and how the people we now describe as gay and lesbian regarded themselves at different stages.

The significance of the social change described above, and the emergence of a subculture, for the development of a gay rights movement is that an increasing number of individuals with same-sex desires were able to break out of isolation in small and rural communities. However discreetly, they learned of the existence of large numbers of other gay people and started to feel part of a wider gay community.

In society at large, the penalties for homosexuality were severe. State laws across the country criminalized same-sex acts, while simple affectionate acts in public such as two men or women holding hands could lead to arrest. Even declaring oneself as a gay man or lesbian could result in admission to a mental institution without a hearing.

Within the embryonic subculture, there were less places for lesbians than gay men because women generally had less economic independence, and it was therefore harder for a woman to break free from social norms and pursue same-sex interests. During the Second World War, all this changed. With the set routines of peacetime broken, gay people of both genders found more opportunities for freer sexual expression.

Women entered both the civilian workforce and the armed services in large numbers, and also had new-found spending power with which to explore their sexuality. In the documentary film Before Stonewall, a lesbian ex-servicewoman called Johnnie Phelps relates how she was called in with another female NCO to see the general-in-command of her battalion - which she estimated was "97% lesbian."

General Eisenhower - for it was he - told her he wanted to "ferret out" the lesbians from the battalion, and instructed her to draw up a list to that end. Both Phelps and the other woman politely informed the General that they would be pleased to make such a list, provided he was prepared to replace all the file clerks, drivers, commanders, etc. and that their own names would be at the top of the list! Eisenhower rescinded the order. A few years later as U.S. president, however, Eisenhower would get lists aplenty during the McCarthy witch-hunts that were unleashed against thousands of both suspected Communists and "sexual perverts."

Renewed Repression
With the return to peacetime conditions, the millions of Americans who had encountered gay people and relationships in the services or war economy saw this temporary opening-up of U.S. society come to an end. Most of the new wartime gay venues closed their doors, as service people were demobilized and the bulk of the new women workers were sent home from the factories.

The lid of sexual orthodoxy came crashing down, and a dark age was about to dawn for gay people. But the genie of lesbian and gay experimentation had been let out of the bottle. Things could never be quite the same again. One of the enduring effects of the war was the large number of lesbian and gay ex-servicepeople who decided to stay in the port cities to retain some sexual freedom, away from their families and the pressure to marry.

In particular, during the war the gay population of San Francisco had started to rise as lesbians and gay men purged from the army settled in the city. Over the course of a decade, this, combined with California state's less repressive policy towards gay bars - plus factors such as the validation of homosexuality offered by the literary movement of the "Beats" around writers such as Jack Kerouac - would help transform San Francisco into the "gay capital" of the U.S.

Recently, in Britain we have seen with successive Conservative and New Labour governments, who both support the free market, how the ideology of the family is used to buttress the social and economic system. The two parties' attacks on single parents provide one example.

In the U.S. of the 1940s and 1950s, post-war reconstruction and the shift to consumer production, taking place against the background of the Cold War, resulted in the authorities heavily promoting the model of the orthodox nuclear family. The other side of the coin was a clampdown on those who stepped out of the magic circle of matrimony, parenthood, and home-making by engaging in same-sex relationships.

The inquiries of the House Un-American Activities Committee led to thousands of homosexuals losing their jobs in government departments. The ban on the employment of homosexuals at the federal level remained in place until 1975. D'Emilio demonstrates the comprehensive nature of the attack on homosexuals. In the District of Columbia alone, there were 1,000 arrests each year in the early 1950s. In every state, local newspapers published the names of those charged together with their place of work, resulting in many workers getting fired. The postal service opened the mail of gay men and lesbians and passed on names. Colleges maintained lists of suspected gay students.

The Birth of Gay Rights
It was against this hostile background that the gay rights movement in the U.S. came into existence. In 1948, Harry Hay, a gay man and long-standing member of the U.S. Communist Party (CP), decided to set up a homosexual rights group. This was the first chapter in what gay people at the time described as the "homophile" movement.

Like all Communist Parties around the world, the U.S. party claimed to uphold the tradition of the October Revolution in Russia. One of the early measures of the Bolsheviks had been to end the criminalization of gay people. But by the 1930s, the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy had resulted in the resumption of anti-gay policies both in the Soviet Union and world Communist Parties.

In this situation, determined to pursue his project, Hay asked to be expelled from the CP. In view of his long service, the party declined his request. Together with a small group of collaborators including other former CP members, Hay launched the Mattachine Society (MS) in 1950. This took its name from a mysterious group of anti-establishment musicians in the Middle Ages, who only ever appeared in public in masks, and were possibly homosexual.

D'Emilio describes the program of the Mattachine Society as unifying isolated homosexuals, educating homosexuals to see themselves as an oppressed minority, and leading them in a struggle for their own emancipation. Hay called for "an ethical homosexual culture," and compared this to the emerging cultures of the black, Jewish, and Mexican peoples in the U.S. The MS organized local discussion groups to promote the "ethical" program. These argued that "emotional stress and mental confusion" among gay men and lesbians was "socially conditioned."

Notwithstanding the Stalinist degeneration of the CP in which Hay had received two decades of training, the MS founders clearly applied Marxist methods to understand the position of gay people and chart a way forward. For the structure of Mattachine, Hay utilized the methods of secrecy which the CP had employed in the face of attacks by the authorities, but which also developed against the background of the undemocratic methods of Stalinism in the workers' movement.

To combat the persecution facing gay people, the Mattachine Society was based on a network of cells arranged in five tiers, or "orders." Hay and the other leaders comprised the fifth order, but would be unknown to members at first and second "order" levels. For three years, the MS steadily expanded its network of discussion groups. Growth accelerated in 1952 after MS won a famous victory over the police when charges against a Mattachine member in Los Angeles were dropped, following a campaign of fliers by a front organization called the "Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrapment."

However, the following year, after a witch-hunting article by a McCarthyite journalist in Los Angeles, the fifth order decided to organize a "democratic convention." When this took place, the Hay group was criticized from the floor by conservative and anti-Communist elements who demanded that the MS introduce loyalty oaths, which was a standard McCarthyite tactic. The radical leadership managed to defeat all the opposition resolutions, and the demand for a loyalty oath never gained a majority in Mattachine.

Nevertheless, Hay and his comrades decided not to stand for positions in the organization they had established and built. This effectively handed the group over to the conservatives. Many who had supported the original aims left in disgust, and it took two years for the membership to be built up again. If the Hay group had stayed active, it could have offered a pole of attraction for militant gay men and lesbians. As it was, the movement was thrown back and a decade was lost.

Whereas the Mattachine founders had advocated an early version of "gay pride," the new leadership reflected the social prejudice prevalent against homosexuals. The new MS president, Kenneth Burns, wrote in the Society journal, "We must blame ourselves for our own plight ... When will the homosexual ever realize that social reform, to be effective, must be preceded by personal reform?"

The position of the new leadership was that gay people could not fight for changes in U.S. society but had to look to "respectable" doctors, psychiatrists, etc. through whom to ingratiate themselves with the authorities in the hope of more favorable treatment. But the problem was that the vast majority of such figures advocated the idea that homosexuality was a sickness. In a manner which present-day lesbian and gay activists will find incredible, orthodox anti-gay "experts" were allowed to write articles in MS publications and speak at meetings.

Towards the end of this period, when a professional named Albert Ellis told a homophile conference that "the exclusive homosexual is a psychopath," someone in the audience shouted: "Any homosexual who would come to you for treatment, Dr. Ellis, would have to be a psychopath!"

The Rise of Gay Activism
It is thought that many gay men and lesbians who had yet to "come out" - publicly identify themselves as homosexual - became workers in the black civil rights campaign that began in the 1950s. By the following decade, the influence of the civil rights movement was making itself felt within the homophile movement. The "accommodationist" establishment of people such as Burns increasingly came under attack from a fresh generation of militant activists.

Eventually, in both the Mattachine Society and a similarly conservative lesbian group called the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the leadership chose to dissolve the national structure rather than see the organization fall into the hands of radicals. Individual MS and DOB branches then continued on a free-standing basis. In these and other city-based groups, militant leaders managed to win majorities, often after colossal battles.

Within this process, an influential figure was an astronomer Frank Kameny who had been fired from a government job in the anti-gay purges. After unsuccessfully fighting victimization in the courts, he concluded that the U.S. government "had declared war on him" and decided to become a full-time gay rights activist. Kameny was scathing about the old leadership of the homophile movement in their craven deference towards the medical establishment: 'The prejudiced mind is not penetrated by information, and is not educable." The real experts on homosexuality were homosexuals, he said.

Referring to the organizations of the black civil rights movement, Frank Kameny noted: "I do not see the NAACP and CORE worrying about which chromosome and gene produced a black skin, or about the possibility of bleaching the Negro." As the struggles of U.S. blacks produced slogans such as "Black is Beautiful," Kameny coined the slogan "Gay is Good" and eventually persuaded the homophile movement to adopt this in the run-up to Stonewall.

The militant homophile campaigners started public picketing with placards and other direct actions, and mounted an offensive against the police and government over criminal entrapment, the employment ban, and a range of other issues. The conservative leaders of MS and DOB had counseled their members to keep their distance from the working-class environment of the gay bars. But by the 1960s in San Francisco, for the first time gay bars became a key forum for activists to recruit to gay groups and organize campaigns. D'Emilio describes this as "the movement and the subculture merging."

Twenty years after Harry Hay had first conceived the idea of the Mattachine Society, U.S. society had undergone a transformation. The rise of a women's movement (with lesbians prominent among the organizers), the shift among black people from a civil rights to a black power movement - parts of which embraced socialist ideas, a revolt against the U.S. war in Vietnam on American campuses influenced by the May 1968 events in France, plus the side effects of other developments such as a rebellion against establishment values in dress and personal relationships among groups such as the hippies, all contributed to gay and lesbian rights campaigns moving into a more militant phase.

One of the strands within the Gay Liberation Front argued that a revolutionary struggle against capitalism to build a socialist society was needed to finally end the oppression of gay people.

Craig Rodwell concludes: 'There was a very volatile active political feeling, especially among young people ... when the night of the Stonewall Riots came along, just everything came together at that one moment. People often ask what was special about that night ... There was no one thing special about it. It was just everything coming together, one of those moments in history that if you were there, you knew, this is it, this is what we've been waiting for."

Socialism Today #40, July 1999
[Edited 6/27/06 10:28am]

cborgman said:

In Spain they were arrested for contravening(?) the "Law Of The Lazy And The Wicked"

It's true

jerseykrs said:

PANDURITO said:

tell us more?

cborgman said:

The only funny thing was the name of the Law (Vagos y Maleantes)
It was during the 40 years of dictatorship last century (1936-1975)

Police did raids and they (Violets they called them) were imprisoned for years of hard works .
And this lasted till just 35 years ago

Sorry.I don't know more but it's a real shame. T

The politics of drag:

http://www.prince.org/msg...msg_565771

Without dykes and drag queens, we would not have rights.

Thx for sharing.

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

right on

AndGodCreatedMe said:

thanks for reading and caring

Yes, honey, it took a Puerto Rican draq queen to start
it all. Woo hoo!!!


M
[Edited 6/27/06 13:07pm]

June 27th was also my sweetie's and my 4 year anniversary.


wish we could have been together for it but i suppose there are worse ways to spend it apart from him than working in Hawaii for a month.

purplecam said: