Stonewall Inn Quotes

They’re past one watering hole, Kettle of Fish, and close to the Stonewall Inn, when a bus comes to a stop near the Waverly Place Station

People are beginning to realise,” the doorman of the Stonewall Inn observed a few days after the riot, “that no matter how ‘nelly’ or how ‘fem’ a homosexual is, you can only push them so far.

[on Stonewall Inn] And while I acknowledge the absurdity of claiming a connection to that mythologized flashpoint...might not a lingering vibration, a quantum of rebellion, still have hung in the humectant air?

This week I was watching the Rachel Maddow Show (you'd love her: she's funny and brilliant and just happens to be a stunning butch), and she was interviewing the outgoing attorney general, Loretta Lynch, about the country's post election future. The entire show was like a burst of hope so bright I almost had to put on sunglasses. The African American attorney general, prim and plump, sat perched on a barstool talking to a white butch lesbian who has her own national television news show! The event was being recorded in the Stonewall Inn, the site of one of the first places where queer people fought back against police violence! (I was so nervous about being a lesbian in 1969, I hid the tiny newspaper clipping from you.) Simply that the interview was happening made me remember that there are people in the world who are not such egotistical, political careerists as to believe that human rights don't matter. Then, as if just showing up wasn't enough, Attorney General Lynch spoke a truth that is hard to remember from our short-lived perspective: "History is bigger than one turn of the electoral wheel." During your eighty-eight years on this plane, you saw numerous turns of the wheel, and many of them did not land on a prize. Still, toward the end of your life, you took me in and bestowed not just a roof and clothes and food but the gift of your history and the knowledge that we find hope inside ourselves.

Even the police and other straights were having epiphanies. “People are beginning to realize,” the doorman of the Stonewall Inn observed a few days after the riot, “that no matter how ‘nelly’ or how ‘fem’ a homosexual is, you can only push them so far.