Stonewall and the

Gay Liberation
Movement
1969-1985
Sallie Cook, Tianni Ivey, Ani
Laliashvili
 Background
One of few places allowing LGBTQs to congregate and dance freely
● Welcomed a wide spectrum of LGBTQs including the most marginal
members
Greenwich Village
● “As far back as the 1920's, Greenwich Village had been known as a
bohemian enclave whose residents included prominent homosexual artists
and intellectuals. By 1969, so many of the district's residents and visitors
were gay, and so many of its commercial establishments gay-oriented”
Routine police raid on June 28, 1969
● Instead of submitting as usual, patrons and the crowd that gathered
outside fought back against the police.
A key symbolic event in the modern LGBTQ rights movement
● Organized activism and the founding of groups like the Gay Liberation
Fund and Gay Activist Alliance
● Commemorative marches and first annual Pride march
A History of Oppression
1917: Foreign LGBTQ people were banned from immigrating to the United States due to
their “psychopathic personality disorder.”

1953: President Eisenhower signed an executive order that established “sexual perversion”
as grounds for being fired from an executive job.
● Carries over into the private sector

1966: “Stonewall dress rehearsal” in the San Francisco’s Tenderloin District where a police
officer’s “manhandling” of a transvestite at a local LGBTQ restaurant named Compton’s
Cafeteria led to the smashing of windows and burning of a newstand by gay youth.

1973-1977: Investigation on 161 gay murder victims:

● ⅔ of of victims were highly secretive about their homosexuality…36% were
heterosexually married with wives and children at time of death
● Male prostitutes killed 64% of the gay victims, and the remainder were murdered by
gay-bashing gangs
● Can probably be illustrative of the previous decades
 ● Sex between consenting same-sex adults was punishable under the law by life in

Cultural Rejection ●
prison, confinement in a mental institution, or castration
New York’s penal code called for the arrest of anyone in public wearing fewer than
three items of clothing “appropriate” to their gender
● California’s Atascadero State Hospital was compared with a Nazi concentration
camp and known as a “Dachau for queers” for performing electroshock and other
draconian “therapies” on LGBTQ people
● In order to escape the hatred, fear, ignorance, and rejection of the general public,
many LGBTQ people escaped to bars in order to not only have fun but also too
build community.
○ Still provided another outlet for harassment by authorities
● The involvement of LGBTQ youth in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam, and women’s
movements paved the way for the gay liberation movement that was to follow

Prior to the gay liberation movement, LGBT people were treated as people with a
contagious disease, and that’s how the issue was approached. Additionally, the lack
LGBTQ role models made it difficult for young people to come to terms with their
sexuality within society.
Individual Repression
The societal pressure to pass as heterosexual "often prevent homosexuals from developing lasting relationships, for such relationships
threaten them with discovery.”
● Relationships were often sexual and brief to limit the threat of exposure
● Led to an “internalization” of homosexuality

Internalization was partly a cause of the gay resistance to a gay liberation movement.
● Threatens stability of everyday life when “passing” still allowed for a mostly free life
● Early gay liberation movements found it difficult to attract supporters
● “Gay organizations were an antithesis to those who felt ashamed of their sexual inclinations and threatened those who were
comfortable leading a double life by raising the issue for public debate.”
 Frequent Police Raids
“Standard procedure”

● Release those of legal age with ID

● Arrested bartenders and employees
● Cross-dressers examined to verify that they were men

---

“Usually when there was a raid, the police would be outside the place hitting the [door] with their sticks. You would hear that and know to
move away from another person if you were too close”

“Back then, raids were common. You could get arrested for dancing. If you stood on the corner with another man for more than five minutes,
you’d get hit in the leg...or you’d get arrested for congregating”

“If the raid went according to the usual pattern, the only people who would be arrested would be those without IDs, those dressed in clothes of
the opposite gender, and some or all of the employees”
The Riot
After the usual arrests and expelling of patrons, the crowd outside become
angry
● Rumor ⇒ resistance was a result of several cops brutalizing a lesbian
woman
● Patrons and protesters pelted police with coins, rocks, bottles, and
bricks
● Police retreated into the bar
---
“Right away we knew they weren’t being dociley rounded up as usual. They
were fighting and screaming...we got there in time to see some guys trying to
tip over a Volkswagen”

“Coming out...two hours or so after the riot had happened, the bartender and I
thought we were hallucinating. Sheridan Square was transformed and almost
unrecognizable...You couldn't see the Stonewall at all...The place was filled
with policemen and firemen in full gear....There was a Volkswagen knocked
over onto its back. A taxicab was halfway up a fire [hydrant]. It had knocked
the cap off and water was gushing twenty feet into the air….It was like a
meteorite had hit or something equally catastrophic.”
 Subsequent Days
The second night of rioting was both more antic and more purposeful than the
spontaneous outburst of the night before.
● More tangles between officers and gay people
● Resulted in more violence and greater bloodshed.
● Led to incidents of individual and organized acting-out that filtered
into the surrounding neighborhood and continued until June 29

Heavy police presence kept agitators in check for the remainder of Sunday

Rain discouraged visitors from congregating in Sheridan Square on Monday

and Tuesday evenings.

Wednesday, July 2 ⇒ the most destructive rioting on Christopher Street

● At one point there were blazing fires in all of the steel trash containers
that lined its sidewalks
---
“It started as a disorganized rebellion against oppression, but it triggered a
chain reaction of community-building and political organizing that was
emulated across the country and publicized throughout the world. Overnight
this unprecedented surge of organizing transformed what had been a largely
underground vanguard movement into a highly public mass movement for gay
pride, power, and community”
 Panel with Inspector Seymour Pine
Eric Marcus, the evening's moderator: "What did police think of homosexuals in 1969?"
● "Prejudice...No idea, no knowledge. To this day, I have no idea how to identity a
homosexual”
● “When clubs opened and were controlled by the Mafia, the Mafia was the focus."
○ Core contention of Carter's book ⇒ Stonewall was controlled by the Mafia
○ LGBTQs and the Mafia fell into the same criminal swatch
● "During my two years in Manhattan, raids were common...laws that pertain to clubs and
bars were in line with what they were looking for."
○ Gay bars offered an easy route for police to meet their required quotas.
■ "Man was measured by his arrests. He earned his clothes by arrests."
○ Pine (while laughing): "The people were easy and quiet."

Audience member: "Why did the raid take place after midnight?"
● "That wasn't late. You have to understand that the gay population doesn't come out until
after midnight...I would have loved to have gone to bed by 10 p.m."
 ● Discuss differences and
similarities in rhetoric utilized in
the articles?
● What could have been the impact
Class Exercise of these articles on public
perception about the riots and
Discussing the two articles those involved?
written soon after the riots
● How do you perceive the authors
and their credibility in reporting
on the riots?
Aftermath of the Stonewall Riots
● Gay Liberation Front protest in 1969 ->

● Organizations created after the Stonewall riots: The Lesbian Alliance in St. Louis, Missouri; and the

Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA)

● June 28, 1970: the first Gay Pride parade

● 1973: the APA removed homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses

● 1986: the Supreme Court upheld state sodomy laws, while New York and Vermont extended health and

dental insurance to the gay and lesbian domestic partners of public employees.

● Several municipalities and states, including Colorado, responded to these initiatives by passing

referenda prohibiting government from extending special rights to homosexuals.

● 1993: Bill Clinton proposed a policy to allow gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military. The

policy that eventually emerged--nicknamed "don't ask, don't tell".

Gay Liberation Movement - Challenges
● The Splits in the movement: Men/feminist lesbian women, Generational differences

● Activists came from all races and classes (1976 West Coast Conference on Faggots and Class Struggle in

Wolf Creek, Oregon, and Dynamics of Color lesbian conference in San Francisco in 1989)

● 1975 hundreds of women attended Michigan Womyn's Music Festival.

● In 1987 the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) formed to fight for destigmatization of the AIDS

virus
Why do we remember Stonewall?
● New Year’s Ball Raid, San Francisco - 1965, no attempt of commemoration?

● Compton Cafeteria Riots - 1966

● Julius “Sip In”

● Storme De Larverie: “Why don’t you guys do something?”

● Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Bloomington University: “Stonewall Riots met two conditions: activists considered the

events memorable and they had the mnemonic capacity to create a commemorable vehicle”

● “The brutality was intolerable anymore”

● “The activists were ready and they had had enough”

Discussion Questions
● What makes the Stonewall Riots, in particular, stand out in the Gay Liberation Movement? Why

is Stonewall so memorable?

● How does the Gay Liberation Movement compare to the other movements that we have studied

in this unit? How are the techniques used and their effectiveness similar and different?

● How can the results of the Gay Liberation Movement be seen in American society today? In

your opinion, how effective were the Stonewall Riots and the Gay Liberation Movement in

improving the status of LGBTQ people?

 Works Cited
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724-51. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25472425.
Brass, Perry. "Correcting History." Lambda Book Report 13, no. 3 (October 2004): 5. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed March 26, 2018).
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"The Stonewall Riot and Its Aftermath." Stonewall 25: Cases 1-2. Accessed April 03, 2018.
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