Stonewall Riot Quotes

You know, the guys there were so beautiful—they've lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.

The Stonewall riot may have been the start of a civil rights movement, but it was not the beginning of our history.

The queens took the lead in the Stonewall Riots. They walked around in semi-drag with teased hair and false eyelashes on and they didn’t give a shit what anybody thought about them. What did they have to lose? Absolutely fucking nothing.

Defend the fairies!

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.

No, this wasn’t a 1960s student riot. Out there were the streets. There were no nice dorms for sleeping. No school cafeteria for certain food. No affluent parents to send us checks. There was a ghetto riot on home turf. We already had our war wounds. So this was just another battle. Nobody thought of it as history, herstory, my-story, your-story, or our-story. We were being denied a place to dance together. That’s all. The total charisma of a revolution in our CONSCIOUSNESS rising from the gutter to the gut to the heart and the mind was here. Non-existence (or part existence) was coming into being, and being into becoming. Our Mother Stonewall was giving birth to a new era and we were the midwives.

When complaining among ourselves, someone invariably cites the contrast between the movement’s recent “assimilationist” agenda—marriage rights and “permission” to serve openly in the armed forces—with the far broader agenda that had characterized the Gay Liberation Front at its inception following the 1969 Stonewall riots. GLF had called for a fierce, full-scale assault on sexual and gender norms, on imperialistic wars and capitalistic greed, and on the shameful mistreatment of racial and ethnic minorities. Or had it? Were we mythologizing the early years of the movement, exaggerating its scope in order to substantiate our discontent with what we viewed as the shriveled posture of the movement in its present guise?

Laws are just tools that allow whoever holds power to reward behavior they like and punish behavior they dislike—and they’re always applied selectively, punishing and controlling those without power while rich men like Donald Trump can flout them openly and suffer no consequence. Many of the greatest social movements in American history involved civil disobedience and illegal acts: think of Rosa Parks at the front of the bus, or the Stonewall riots, or the Flint sit-down strike of the 1930s. Unjust laws have to be defied, not followed. (This principle applies when Democrats are in power, too. I still maintain that the railway workers in 2022 should have gone on strike even after Joe Biden signed a law ordering them not to.) currentaffairs(dot)org/news/america-needs-resistance-not-resistance

Some say that Stonewall was the first time LGBTQ people fought back, which is also not true. Stonewall was preceded by earlier queer revolts such as the Cooper Do-nuts Riot in Los Angeles in 1959, the Dewey’s restaurant sit-in in Philadelphia in 1965, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco in 1966, and the protests against the raid of the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles in 1967, among many others. Scholars, participants, and the interested public also debate how many days the uprising lasted and who threw the first brick, the first bottle, or the first punch. And more, beyond any of these questions we wonder what these events that transpired fifty years ago mean to us today.

Perhaps nothing would have happened were it not the pit of summer, with a month and a half ahead. There is no air-conditioning in the apartment, and this year - the summer of 1969 - it seems something is happening to everyone but them. People are getting wasted at Woodstock and singing 'Pinball Wizard' and watching Midnight Cowboy, which none of the Gold children are allowed to see. They're rioting outside Stonewall, ramming the doors with uprooted parking meters, smashing windows and jukeboxes. They're being murdered in the most gruesome way imaginable, with chemical explosives and guns that can fire five hundred and fifty bullets in succession, their faces transmitted with horrifying immediacy to the television in the Gold's kitchen. 'They're walking on the motherf***ing moon,' said Daniel, who has begun to use this sort of language, but only at a safe remove from their mother. James Earl Ray is sentenced, and so is Sirhan Sirhan, and all the while the Golds play jacks or darts or rescue Zoya from an open pipe behind the oven, which she seems convinced is her rightful home. But something else created the atmosphere required for this pilgrimage: they are siblings, this summer, in a way they will never be again. Next year, Varya will go to the Catskills with her friend Aviva. Daniel will be immersed in the private rituals of the neighborhood boys, leaving Klara and Simon to their own devices. In 1969, though, they are still a unit, yoked as if it isn't possible to be anything but.

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.

It is as if on the morning of June 28, 1969, America symbolically got back the anger she had created by her neglect of her most despised children: the fairies, queens, and nelly boys she had so utterly abandoned, saying she did not want them.

If I had taken the initiative to seek out information about the LGBT rights movement, I would have found that it was a Black trans woman, Marsha P. Johnson, a Latinx trans woman, Sylvia Rivera, and a butch lesbian, Stormé DeLarverie, who were the catalysts of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City, which led to the first ever Pride march, which birthed the Gay Rights Movement, which became the LGBT movement. But I didn’t, largely because I assumed that, much like the majority of the history that we are taught in the British academic syllabus, it was cisgender, white, gay men that initiated that movement.

One police officer tried to pick a fight with passing gay men by repeatedly challenging them, saying, “Start something, faggot; just start something. I’d like to break your ass wide open.” When one man finally turned and said, “What a Freudian comment, Officer!” the cop attacked the man and arrested him, placing him in a patrol wagon to be taken to jail.

One [cop] said he’d enjoyed the fracas. “Them queers have a good sense of humor and really had a good time,” he said. His “buddy” protested: “Aw, they’re sick. I like nigger riots better because there’s more action, but you can’t beat up a fairy. They ain’t mean like blacks, they’re sick. But you can’t hit a sick man.

Gay history?” “That’s why,” Doug laughed. “Your question alone would have set him off. HIV, darling. The Stonewall riots. Gay rights, gay adoption, gay marriage.

Changing the social order in one fell swoop, Henry Gerber wrote in 1940, is “like trying to push over a big stone wall with your skull.” It can’t be done. But “we can undermine the wall by little individual blasts and it will topple down by-and-by.” Or, as Del Shearer said in 1965, social revolution required at least “a century of subtle attack” on the dominant culture. As riots engulfed the United States in 1968, Frank Kameny saw similarities between homophiles and those Black Americans taking to the streets to express centuries of anger. “BUT,” Kameny said, “the Negro has truly explored and exhausted well-neigh, if not actually all, other avenues, and has gotten to the firm, unyielding stone wall of prejudice which blocks them. WE have run into this, but have not yet reached the end of all avenues.” Queer people soon hit the end of all avenues, crashing into an unyielding stone wall.

All of these frameworks help us to understand why the Stonewall Riots occurred when and where they did. Some aspects of the uprising were spontaneous and unprecedented. The homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s and its radicalization in the second half of the 1960s created the preconditions for revolt. The long history of bar-based resistance practices created a repertoire of rebellious responses. Other social movements provided revolutionary inspiration and influence. And the combination of heightened expectations and dashed hopes that many felt as the country transitioned from a period of liberal reform to one of conservative backlash—and that LGBT people experienced in the context of a new wave of police raids, violent killings, and local vigilantism—created an explosive situation that erupted on 28 June.

The men who trusted Kinsey—a hard-won trust that he achieved only because one man vouched for him to another, who did the same to someone else, who followed suit—unwittingly became part of a movement that was only just beginning, one that was little more than a hope for some, such as Henry Gerber two decades earlier, but a seeming impossibility to most. However small and obscure it was in the beginning, it would help to stoke the fires of the sexual revolution that would explode in New York in 1969 in what has been called the Stonewall riots and in the gay liberation movement that the riots spawned. It would be too late for Raymond Carlson and hundreds of other men like him who, caught up in the insidiousness of the time, took control of their destiny in the only way available to them. It also would be too late for those who, like Ralph Wright, charged into marriage to hide their sexuality. Others, like the men of the Rush Street boardinghouse, would make due, devise strategies that would allow them to survive the very real threats that surrounded them—threats not only to their bodies but also to their sense of self—while keeping what we think of as their sexual identity intact. Chicago was full of such men, all heroes and virtually all forgotten now or, if remembered at all, relegated to a footnote to the narrative of the period in which they lived and loved and over which, in time, they triumphed.

1) “How did I end up down this rabbit hole of being obsessed with men on the DL (down-low)? Why did I prefer playing more in the straight arena with the closet cases (as they were called in my day) and the bisexual men over the gay ones?” 2) “We didn’t identify in my day; you were either gay, bisexual, or straight. People will always label others or pigeonhole them without even knowing for sure who they really are. They presumably stereotype and judge just by your outward appearance.” 3) “It wasn't until the seventh grade that Sister Gloria would be my social studies teacher, and I began leaning more towards being an extrovert than the anxious introvert that I was. All the accolades go to her. She lit the flame under my ass that would be the catalyst for my advocacy. Her podium, located front and center of the classroom, became ground zero for me and where I found my voice.” 4) “Their taunting was my kryptonite. My peers hated me for no other reason than the fact that they thought I was gay. I was only thirteen and often wondered how they knew who I was before I did.” 5) “Evangelical Christian Anita Bryant (First Lady of Religious Bigotry), along with her minions, led a crusade against the LGBTQ community back in 1977 and said we were trying to recruit children and that ‘Homosexuals are human garbage.’ My first thoughts were, how unchristian and deplorable of her to even say something like that, not to mention, to make it her life’s mission promoting hate.” 6) “Are there any more Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. kind of Christians in this country today? Dr. King knew about his friend’s homosexuality and arrest. Being a religious man and a pastor, Dr. King could have cast judgment and shunned Bayard Rustin like so many other religious leaders did at the time. But he didn’t. That, to me, is the true meaning of being a Christian. He loved Bayard unconditionally and was unbiased towards his sexual orientation. Dr. King was not a counterfeit Christian and practiced what he preached—and that, along with remembering what Jesus had said, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ is the bottom line to Christianity and all faiths.” 7) “We are all God’s children! That is what I was taught in Catholic school. God doesn’t make mistakes—it’s as simple as that. Love is love—period! I don’t need anyone’s validation or approval, I define myself.” 8) “You will bake our cakes, you will provide us our due healthcare, you will do our joint tax returns, and yes, you will bless our unions, too. Otherwise, you cannot call yourselves Christians or even Americans, for that matter.” 9) “The torch has been passed. But we must never forget the LGBT pioneers that have come before and how they fought in the streets for our lives. Never forget the Stonewall riots of 1969 nor the social stigma put upon us during the HIV/AIDS epidemic from its onset in the early 1980s. Remember how many died alone because nobody cared. Finally, keep in mind how we were all pathologized and labeled in the medical books until 1973.

The Stonewall riots had refocused their energies on gay liberation, yet in shifting priorities they’d maintained their prior concerns with racism, sexism, and imperialism.

This change from secret to public began after the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK in 1967 and the liberation politics that followed the Stonewall riots of late June 1969. It was the structural change of the former and the utopian energy of the latter that prompted an ambitious pop singer called David Bowie to be honest about the whole topic, declaring in the now famous interview with Melody Maker on 22 January 1972 that ‘I’m gay, and always have been.’ In turn, his success and obvious influence upon a generation of British teens gave extra confidence to the still embryonic British gay media and subculture. Bowie thus stands at the pivot point of this book.

But not all gays were pleased about the eruption at Stonewall. Those satisfied by, or at least habituated to, the status quo preferred to minimize or dismiss what was happening. Many wealthier gays, sunning at Fire Island or in the Hamptons for the weekend, either heard about the rioting and ignored it (as one of them later put it: “No one [at Fire Island Pines] mentioned Stonewall”), or caught up with the news belatedly. When they did, they tended to characterize the events at Stonewall as “regrettable,” as the demented carryings-on of “stoned, tacky queens”—precisely those elements in the gay world from whom they had long since dissociated themselves. Coming back into the city on Sunday night, the beach set might have hastened off to see the nude stage show Oh, Calcutta! or the film Midnight Cowboy (in which Jon Voight played a Forty-second Street hustler)—titillated by such mainstream daring, while oblivious or scornful of the real-life counterparts being acted out before their averted eyes.59

But if the Stonewall riots did not begin the gay revolution (as East Coasters, younger gays, and the national media have been wont to claim), it remains true that those riots became a symbolic event of international importance—a symbol of such potency as to serve, ever since 1969, as a motivating force and rallying cry. There was enough glory for both coasts, the hinterland, and several generations—though not many could see it in 1969. But

The main focus of Burroughs' Wild Boys tetralogy is an apocalyptic world in which the social order is disrupted enough to allow gay men the possibility of forming seperate communities. The eponymous characters of The Wild Boys band together in the deserts of North Africa to create an alternative to heterosexual society and simultaneously wage war on an intolerant, heterosexual social order that refuses them independence. Burroughs repeatedly links the boys with the youth movements of the late 1960's. He cites Genet's belief that 'it is time for writers to support the rebellion of youth not only with their words but with their presence as well.' The Wild Boys can thus be read as a progression from the riots of Chicago and Stonewall in that they are a radical group of youthful, queer, multiracial revolutionaries who echo Burroughs' own belief that non-violent action is not enough.

After the Stonewall riots the gay activists had their idealistic hearts in the right place but it turned out they had underestimated the realpolitik of organized crime. Indeed, as gay liberation blossomed in the wild 1970s the bars and bathhouses became increasingly lucrative enterprises, and the Mafia had no intention of abandoning a racket it had controlled for decades. The Mafia families maintained their control by exercising the proverbial carrot and stick. The wise guys seemingly embraced the gay rights movement and cut more so-called Auntie Gays into the action as their fronts, and resorted to violent threats and sometimes murder against others who refused to play ball with the crime families. There were few legitimate businessmen in gay nightlife of the 1970s.