The Stonewall Riots, The Stonewall Uprising, The Stonewall Rebellion, or Simply, Stonewall
The Stonewall Riots were a series of protests born out of repeated abuse, discrimination, exploitation, and oppression by the police of New York City against the LGBTQ community. Stonewall Inn (a local gay bar) in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan was in part controlled by the mafia, whose members would blackmail wealthy patrons who came to the bar. They threatened to expose them as gay if they didn't pay large sums of money. These patrons paid the gang members of the mafia in order to avoid being fired and disowned by their families. The NYPD and its gang members also harassed and blackmailed individuals who came to Stonewall. The police took their money, beat them up, and took them to jail. The New York City police arrested people dressed in drag claiming they were breaking the 19th-century masquerade law. The masquerade law (aka anti-masking law) was established in New York in 1845. The law stated that it was a crime for a person to have their face painted, discolored, covered, or concealed on a road or public highway. The repeated police brutality against the patrons of the Stonewall Inn is what led to the violent revolt and protests. It should be noted that pacifism is the way as violence never solves anything. However, in the face of constant abuse there has to come to a point where individuals must fight back or die. Patrons of Stonewall, based on previous abuses, had the right to fight back in order to protect themselves.
The order to raid the Stonewall Inn on this evening came from the chief of police, James P. O'Neill. A majority of the 205 patrons at the Stonewall Inn that evening fought back as this was nowhere near the first time police had raided and abused patrons of the Stonewall Inn. The result of the police raid of Stonewall was protests for gay liberation and LGBTQ rights in the United States. The marches and demonstrations lasted from June 28th to July 3rd. The protests that came after the raid on June 28th mark a moment in history where progress was made in the fight for equal rights for LGBTQ. This very event transformed the Gay Liberation Movement, which fought for equal rights for the LGBTQ community. It's important to recognize that this was the first major protest in history for equal rights for LGBTQ. According to the New York Times, "Several days of riots in June 1969 following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar, have become a symbol for the initiation of the contemporary Gay Rights Movement" (Duberman). A journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking says, "To queer folks in the United States and beyond, 1969 is the year that the Stonewall Riots transformed the landscape of LGBTIQ movements worldwide" (Huang pg.69). In addition to this, The American Sociological Review says, "The Stonewall Riots were remembered because they were the first to meet two conditions: activists considered the event commemorable and had the mnemonic capacity to create a commemorative vehicle" (Armstrong pg. 724). Stonewall was a step in the right direction in the fight for equality and is the reason we celebrate Gay Pride on June 28th every year.
Works Cited
Davies, Diana. "Gay Liberation Front (GLF): Come Out!: A New Generation of Activists." The New York Public Library Online Archive Exhibition,
Digital ID: 1582230, June 1969. http://web-static.nypl.org/exhibitions/1969/liberation.html
Duberman, Martin. "They Came Out Fighting." The New York Times, June 30, 1969.
Huang, Shuzhen. "Fifty Years Since Stonewall: Beyond the Borders of the United States." A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, Vol.6, No.2, June 1,
Armstrong, Elizabeth A. Crage, Suzanna M. "Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth." American Sociological Review, Vol.71
No. 5, pp. 724-751, October 2006. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25472425?searchText=1969%20Stonewall%20Riots&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D1969%2BStonewall%2BRiots%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A6f1f50e020f77cda2c14c7135d9c9518