Today In History, 1969: Stonewall

Jim Burroway

June 28th, 2016

Stonewall RebellionI’m not going to go into a blow-by-blow description of what happened that night. You already know what happened, even if the things you know didn’t really happen the way you know they happened.  In some ways, what happened or didn’t happen that night, the things that made it special in ways that weren’t all that special, the “groundbreaking” fight that was far from groundbreaking — those details, details, details — they just don’t matter.

It’s kind of like the story about Paul Revere’s ride and the Battle of Lexington. Or the story of the Mayflower and the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving. Or the story about Christ in the manger or Adam and Even in the Garden. What actually happened that day matters relatively little because Stonewall has gone way beyond all those mundane details. It has become our origin myth. And like all origin myths, it’s all about the idea of what happened when that world began: a police raid on a dingy and not particularly popular mafia-owned gay bar, people who had nothing to lose and who fought back, a community that organized against all odds and marched, and kept marching for more than four decades to bring us where we are today. It all traces back, like a straight line — at least in our imagination — to that hot Friday night on Christopher Street.

Stonewall RebellionMythmaking is not an entirely bad thing. In fact, it’s the most human thing we can do. But it can obscure some actual facts that would otherwise be forgotten. For example, let’s take this myth, which we hear all the time: it was “the first time in history Gay people refused to accept the status quo of oppression and stood up for themselves.” That’s from the Stonewall Inn’s official website. But it simply isn’t true, as regular readers of these Daily Agenda know very well. It wasn’t the first time gay people protested (Sep 19), it wasn’t the first time gay people organized against injustice (Nov 11Dec 10, Apr 25), and it wasn’t the first time patrons fought back physically against a police raid (Jan 1, Aug 21).

But Stonewall gets remembered for all of these things. When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down marriage bans nationwide, the news media went to Stonewall to repeat to America our creation myth and say that this place is where it all started.

But why is that? Why Stonewall? Why not the Black Cat? Or Compton’s Cafeteria or Dewey’s?

Well, like all things in history, it seems to be a matter of two critical elements coming together in a near-perfect fashion. Stonewall 1) happend at the right place, and 2) it happened at the right time.

Stonewall InnThe Stonewall Inn’s location couldn’t have been more perfect for building a legacy. It wasn’t just in a very dense part of America’s largest city and media capital, it was also just a few blocks from the Village Voice. Two Voice reporters just happened to be in the neighborhood when New York Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, commander of Lower Manhattan’s vice squad, decided that the Stonewall needed to be cleared out. Lucian Truscott IV wrote his eyewitness account of what happened from outside the Stonewall, and Howard Smith wrote about how he wound up being trapped inside the Stonewall with the besieged police. Those eyewitness accounts, and numerous articles that followed, meant that the history of Stonewall was being written, however imperfectly, while it happened. Prior confrontations were typically ignored or downplayed by the mainstream press.

The mainstream press would have been content to downplay Stonewall too. They either buried it deep inside their papers or they mocked it, as the New York Daily News did with the headline, “Homo Nest Raided! Queen Bees are stinging mad!” (Jul 6). But the Village Voice, the go-to paper for the city’s radicals, leftists, cultural savants, hippies, and civil rights workers, transmitted those nights’ events to a larger readership that was already primed to usher in sweeping social and political changes. If Stonewall had been located further away from the Voice’s offices, say, across any of the three rivers that separate Manhattan from the rest of America, it’s very likely that the rebellion would have been just one more riot that the media was already tired of counting.

Gay Power, 1970The Voice may have carried the news about Stonewall beyond the boundaries of New York City, but Stonewall’s legacy didn’t begin or end there. Because it happened on the streets of Greenwich Village, in dense neighborhoods filled with young people, news of it spread almost as fast as modern-day tweets. And what happened next leads to the second critical element that made Stonewall what it is today: it happened at the right time, at the tail end of the 1960s.

That was the decade that taught young people what to do when confronted with war, the draft, segregation, assassinations, injustice, and police oppression: they organized. They formed committees, councils, alliances, liberation fronts, and task forces. They held meetings and rallies, rap sessions and zaps. They organized marches and political campaigns. They turned a small movement led by careful but weary strategists doing the best they could with little support into a mass movement propelled by a youthful energy that defied containment. And they did all of this because by 1969 it was in their DNA. They knew no other way. And the fact that Stonewall touched on that other hallmark of the 1960s, the sexual revolution, was just icing on the cake.

The Stonewall Inn wasn’t the only place our origin story could have taken place. There were countless other locations in countless other cities that were just as ripe for starting a revolution. It just happened that the Stonewall Inn was there, and that’s where it happened. It was perfectly placed and perfectly timed to fire our shot heard around the world.

As is true with all origin myths, this one gets recast with each generation’s telling, complete with new heroes. Last summer, the semi-fictionalized Stonewall movie, which bombed at the box office, was criticized for “whitewashing” the rioters and “erasing” other minority communities who were out that night. That criticism was part of a newer re-telling of Stonewall, where some argue that it was a specifically transgender uprising and a specifically people-of-color movement. Gay white men, that argument goes, have stolen the real history of Stonewall.

People who were actually there in 1969, including two leading transgender activists, dispute that. Dana Bryer wrote, “I was there [at the Stonewall Uprising] the second night, too, and the streets were overwhelmingly filled with white men (which included the way I was perceived back then, too).” Lesbian activist Robin Tyler added, “I was there [at the Stonewall Uprising] the second night. The majority of protesters were white gay men.”

But of course, transgender people were there. So were people of color. And women. Some were all three, and more. All of that is true. And it’s also true that history is typically recorded from a white male viewpoint. And so ensuring that history is accurately recorded matters a lot, as does making sure it is comprehensively recorded.

The scene in front of the Stonewall moments after the Supreme Court ruling was announced, June 26, 2015.

The scene in front of the Stonewall moments after the Supreme Court ruling was announced, June 26, 2015.

Yet the arguments over “whitewashing” (or historical revisionisms to accommodate political imperatives, depending on your perspective) miss the far bigger picture. Because Stonewall has become our creation myth, we all have a natural human need to see ourselves, directly, in that story. Just as Ethiopian Orthodox Christians have for millennia painted their icons depicting Jesus, Mary and Joseph as Africans, just as Asian missionaries gave the saints Asian facial features, just as Egyptian Coptics drew the martyrs and prophets (perhaps most accurately) as inhabitants of a harsh Mideast desert, and just as Caucasians around the world turned their prayerful gaze upon a Nordic blue-eyed Jesus, we too, in our rich diversity, also need to see ourselves in our foundational story. Those very parochial responses are powerful illustrations of the truly universal ways those stories speak to us. As I said, no impulse could ever be more human.

Mourners gather at the Stonewall to remember the victims of the Pulse gay night club massacre in Orlando.

Mourners gather at the Stonewall to remember the victims of the Pulse gay night club massacre in Orlando.

Stonewall is as much a real physical place as it is a place of inspiration that we carry in our hearts. It’s where we return to whenever we need to find ourselves. As soon as the news of the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage hit the airwaves, the first instinct for thousands of us was to make a pilgrimage to Stonewall. And when news broke about the horrible massacre in Orlando, Stonewall was one of the first places New Yorkers gathered to remember the dead — not just the dead of Orlando, but all of our dead. And while we mourned the dead, we also renewed our resolve to keep the fight alive. Again and again, we return to Stonewall, because it is our Bethlehem and our Golgotha, and the empty tomb where we refuse to lay down.

Gene in L.A.

June 28th, 2016

The problem with allowing the mythologizing of origin stories is that important aspects can be neglected, as for instance the omission for so many years from our national origin story of the role slavery played in it. In fact, for our understanding of who we are as a result of the origin story, it does matter who was there and who did what. Fortunately, David Brown’s 10 years of research resulted in a book that answers those questions about what happened 47 years ago today. Metaphors are fine, but we have no verifiable evidence that the mythologized events at Bethlehem, Golgotha and that empty tomb ever happened at all. With Stonewall we do, and it’s important information.

Gene in L.A.

June 28th, 2016

Sorry, I should have said:

In fact, for our understanding of who we are as a result of the origin story, and to place it accurately within the larger arc of LGBT history, it does matter who was there and who did what.

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