Stonewall Inn Quotes

[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?

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.

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.

The freedom that so many LGBT people now enjoy is based on centuries of sacrifice and success. Enlightenment thinkers questioned why leaders criminalised sexual identity. Some psychologists fought to define homosexuality as a normal part of life rather than a mental illness. Activists, artists and politicians spoke out, even when faced with the risk of humiliation and violence. David Hockney treated homosexuality expressly in his paintings, and James Baldwin bravely shared the isolation of being gay in a heterosexual world. Drag queens at the Stonewall Inn said they would not accept oppression any longer, and defied policemen who carried clubs and guns. Harvey Milk campaigned for gay rights in San Francisco, and was murdered. Each of these people has honoured the memory of the LGBT people who came before them, usually in a world that was harsher and less accepting of difference. From the gay men burned at the stake during the Middle Ages to those eliminated by the Nazis and to the LGBT men and women living in oppression in parts of the world today, progress is never even or permanent.

Passing by the Stonewall Inn—a bar he despised, insistent it was a haven for marauding chicken hawks—Jim noticed a cluster of cops in front of the bar, looking as if they were about to enter. He shrugged it off as just another routine raid, and even found himself hoping that this time (Stonewall had been raided just two weeks before) the police would succeed in closing the joint. But as Jim got closer, he could see that a small group of onlookers had gathered. That was somewhat surprising, since the first sign of a raid usually led to an immediate scattering; typically, gays fled rather than loitered, and fled as quietly and as quickly as possible, grateful not to be implicated at the scene of the “crime.” Jim spotted Craig Rodwell at the top of the row of steps leading up to a brownstone adjacent to the Stonewall Inn. Craig looked agitated, expectant. Something was decidedly in the air.

Indeed, the Stonewall Inn, at 53 Christopher Street, epitomized for Craig everything that was wrong with the bar scene. When a hepatitis epidemic broke out among gay men early in 1969, Craig printed an angry article in his newsletter, New York Hymnal, blaming the epidemic on the unsterile drinking glasses at the Stonewall Inn. And he was probably right.

Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves.

In the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science.

WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams, I fear those realities are to melt from under your feet and hands; Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you, Your true soul and body appear before me, They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, farms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, begetting, dying, They receive these in their places, they find these or the like of these, eternal, for reasons, They find themselves eternal, they do not find that the water and soil tend to endure forever — and they not endure. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem, I whisper with my lips close to your ear, — Walt Whitman, “Poem of You, Whoever You Are,” Selected Poems 1855-1892 (Stonewall Inn Editions September 20, 2000) First published October 1, 1980.