Stonewall Uprising (1969)

Sat Jun 28, 1969

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Image: Police force people back outside the Stonewall Inn as tensions escalate the morning of June 28th, 1969. Photo by Joseph Ambrosini [Wikipedia]

On this day in 1969, the Stonewall Uprising began when NYC Police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. As cops arrested homosexuals and drag queens, the crowd fought them, trapping police inside and lighting the Inn on fire.

In the 1960s, New York City Robert Wagner Jr. initiated an anti-gay campaign in preparation for the 1964 World’s Fair. The city revoked the liquor licenses of gay bars and undercover police officers worked to entrap as many homosexual men as possible.

The Stonewall Inn is a prominent gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York City, then owned by the Genovese crime family and lacking a liquor license. The night of the Stonewall Uprising, approximately 200 patrons were in the bar, and four undercover cops were present before the raid was initiated.

As cops shut the bar down and began arresting patrons, a crowd began to gather outside. A scuffle broke out when a butch woman in handcuffs (thought by many to be Stormé DeLarverie but accounts differ) fought with police for ten minutes as they attempted to arrest her.

After she shouted to bystanders “Why don’t you guys do something?”, an officer picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon and the crowd turned violent, attempting to overturn police cars and slashing their tires, and throwing debris at the cops, some of whom became trapped in the Inn.

Some members of the mob lit garbage on fire and stuffed it through the broken windows, setting the bar on fire with police and some detainees inside. A tactical police force was deployed to free the officers, beating the crowd as they mocked police with impromptu kick lines and ironic chants.

When the violence broke out, women and transmasculine people being held down the street at The Women’s House of Detention joined in by chanting, setting fire to their belongings, tossing them into the street below, and chanting “gay rights”.

The uprisings continued for several nights afterward, with thousands showing up outside the bar. Black drag queen and radical queer rights activist Marsha P. Johnson was seen climbing a lamppost and dropping a heavy bag onto the hood of a police car, shattering the windshield.

Members of the Mattachine Society, a gay rights organization which had taken to respectability politics, were embarrassed by the behavior at Stonewall. Randy Wicker, who had marched in the first gay picket lines before the White House in 1965, said “screaming queens forming chorus lines and kicking went against everything that I wanted people to think about homosexuals…that we were a bunch of drag queens in the Village acting disorderly and tacky and cheap.” Others were glad to see the closing of Stonewall Inn, perceived as a “sleaze joint”.

Despite this backlash, some participants of the annual Mattachine Society picket on July 4th were emboldened. Several same-sex couples held hands as they marched despite protests from lead organizers of the picket, generating more press attention for the event than usual.

The Stonewall Uprising was a watershed moment in the history of queer liberation, to the extent that some studies of LGBT history in the U.S. are divided into pre- and post-Stonewall analyses.

“It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience - it wasn’t no damn riot.”

- Stormé DeLarverie