06/19/2018
Remember: “Know History, Know Self. No History, No Self.” -Jose Rizal
_
The “Stonewall Riots” have been mythologized as the origin of the gay liberation movement, and there is a great deal of truth in that characterization, but gay, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people had been engaging in militant protest and collective actions against social oppression for at least a decade by that time.
The Stonewall Inn was a small, shabby, Mafia-run bar. It drew a racially mixed crowd and was popular mainly for its location on Christopher Street near Sheridan Square, where many gay men “cruised” for casual s*x, and because it featured go-go boys, cheap beer, a good jukebox, and a crowded dance floor.
Then as now, there was a lively street scene in that bar’s vicinity, one that drew young and racially mixed q***r folk from through the region most weekend nights. Police raids were relatively frequent and relatively routine and uneventful. But on Saturday, June 28, 1969, events departed from the familiar script when the squad pulled up outside the Stonewall Inn.
A large crowd of people gathered on the street as police began arresting workers and patrons and escorting them out of the bar and into the waiting police wagons. Eyewitness accounts of what happened next differ in their particulars, but some witnesses claim a trans masculine person resisted police attempts to put them in the police wagon, while other noted that African American and Puerto Rican members of the crowd - many of them street queens, feminine gay men, transgender women, or gender-nonconforming youth- grew increasingly angry as they watched their “sisters” being arrested and escalated the level of opposition to the police. Both stories might be true.
Sylvia Rivera, a transgender women, who came to play an important role in subsequent transgender political history, long maintained that, after she was jabbed by a police baton, she threw the beer bottle that tipped the crowd’s mood from mockery to collective resistance.
Bottles, rocks, and other heavy objects were soon being hurled at the police, who, in retaliation, began grabbing people from the crowd and beating them. Weekend partiers and residents in the heavily gay neighborhood quickly swelled the ranks of the crowd to more than two thousand people, and the outnumbered police barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall Inn and called for reinforcements.
Outside, rioters used an uprooted parking meter as a battering ram to try to break down the bar’s doors, while other members of the crowd attempted to throw a Molotov cocktail inside to drive the police back into the streets. Tactical Patrol Force officers arrived on the scene in an attempt to contain the growing disturbance, which nevertheless continued for hours until dissipating before dawn.
That night thousands of people regrouped at the Stonewall Inn to protest. When the police arrived to break up the assembled crowd, street fighting even more violently than that of the night before ensued. One particularly memorable sight amid the melee was a line of drag queens, arms linked, dancing a can-can and singing campy, improvised songs that mocked the police and their inability to regain control of the situation.
Minor skirmishes and protest rallies continued throughout the next few days before finally dying down. By that time, however, untold thousands of people had been galvanized into political action.
_
STRYKER, SUSAN. TRANSGENDER HISTORY. SEAL, 2017.
Image source: histoycollection.co | britannica.com
