Every social movement eventually experiences a watershed moment. The LGBTQ+ community saw theirs take place 50 years ago, when something known as the Stonewall riots broke out in Manhattan, New York. Thanks to this episode, the LGBTQ+ community began organizing and achieving many of the milestones we all enjoy today. But what is Stonewall and how did it all begin?
Following WWII, the United States and the American public felt a strong desire to go back to a certain stability. Even though it seems like communism has little to do with gay movements, these two phenomenons conflated when they became targets of a national sense of paranoia notoriously led by senator Joseph McCarthy. Never mind that the United States and the USSR had fought fascist forces together; in the 1950s and 60s, communists became America’s sworn enemies. Therefore, anything deemed un-American was considered subversive and dangerous. This included the gay community.
It was enough to be suspected of being gay for men to be denied job applications, or for soldiers to be discharged from the army. The government kept tabs on gay publications, while police constantly raided gay bars to find patrons who were later exposed or extorted in exchange for their names not to be made public; other bars simply closed down. Gay sex was considered a “perversion” or a “disorder,” and then states started passing a series of laws that outlawed homosexual relationships all together. Gays and lesbians began standing up to these extremist measures, but a particular event was about to change it all.
In a much broader context, the sixties were a world-changing decade, and the United States saw itself become a society ripe for outbreaks. The Vietnam war was the cause of major demonstrations, and civil rights activists were brutally repressed. Tensions, however, were also amounting. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. So had been Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. All of this contributed to a climate of social unrest, while a counter-culture formed behind the scenes.
Meanwhile, located in Greenwich Village, a hotspot for outsiders, the Stonewall Inn was a pub and a popular hangout for some of the LGBTQ+ community’s most marginalized members. However, several things were… off. And none of them were the fact that it was a gay bar. It’s widely known that the Stonewall Inn pub was owned by the Mafia and that it did not have a liquor license. The owners would regularly pay authorities off to keep the business running.
The Stonewall became known as the “it” gay club of the time. Aside from being the the only club where you could dance, it also had extra perks, like diversity among its patrons, a bouncer who would let people in only if they looked gay, and had a system wherein a white light would be turned on if police were in sight, signaling everyone to stop dancing and touching. But raids were getting more and more frequent until one day, on June 28, 1969, the police raided The Stonewall Inn again. For many people at the pub, it was one too many times.@madcapheiress25
Some undercover police and some officers began arresting people, though an unusual discomfort among the patrons began brewing. Many things began happening at the same time as patrons taunted policemen, Mafia members being arrested and more and more people gathered outside the bar. As the police knocked a few people down, the larger crowd became angrier and angrier. Pennies and other coins were thrown at the cops.
By now, the crowd was made up of nearly 500 people, far more than were inside the bar and definitely more than the police. A nearby construction site provided the crowd with bricks. Some policemen were injured, windows were broken, and garbage cans were set on fire.
No one knows who threw the first brick, but the police were ineffective when they tried to disperse the crowd, and they were humiliated. People gathered outside the bar the next day and another riot took place, and then another the day after that, effectively helping make the LGBTQ+ struggle more visible and kickstarting a stronger and tighter fight for equal rights. By the following year, the first Pride parades were held in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.