Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman

Author:Lillian Faderman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary Criticism/Gay and Lesbian
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-09-09T20:00:00+00:00

The Gay Revolution: Explosion

On June 28, 1969, in the midst of a New York mayoral campaign—a time when the incumbent often sicced the police on homosexuals to bolster his record as a vice fighter—police officers descended on the Stonewall Inn. The Stonewall was a gay bar in Greenwich Village that called itself a private club, open to members only. The police came with a search warrant, authorizing them to investigate reports that liquor was being sold there without a license. The raid had been the third staged by police on Greenwich Village gay bars in recent nights, but this time the response was different. Instead of scampering off in relief when the police booted them out on the street after questioning them, the two hundred working-class patrons—drag queens, third world gay men, and a handful of butch lesbians—congregated in front of the Stonewall and, as blacks and other oppressed groups had done before them in the course of the decade, commenced to stage a riot. Their numbers quickly doubled, and soon—according to some sources—increased tenfold. Before the night was over four policemen were hurt as rioters bombarded them with cobblestone bricks from the Village streets, as well as bottles, garbage, pennies, and an uprooted parking meter.

The riots continued the following night. Fires were started all over the neighborhood, condemnations of the police were read aloud and graffiti appeared on the boarded up windows of the Stonewall Inn exhorting everyone to “support gay power” and to “legalize gay bars.” These occurences, which came to be known as the Stonewall Rebellion, marked the first gay riots in history. While the establishment media generally missed their significance—the New York Times relegated the story to five inches on page 33, with the obtuse heading, “Four Policemen Hurt in Village Raid”—to many homosexuals, male and female alike, the Stonewall Rebellion was the shot heard round the world.11

The complaints of blacks, students, and poor people, which had been raging through much of the 1960s, had finally ignited masses of homosexuals to articulate their own complaints. It is unlikely that a gay and lesbian riot could have occurred at any previous time in history. But if by some chance it had occurred earlier, it is unlikely that it would have come to have as much significance as it did in 1969. The gay liberation movement was an idea whose time had come. The Stonewall Rebellion was crucial because it sounded the rally for that movement. It became an emblem of gay and lesbian power. By calling on the dramatic tactic of violent protest that was being used by other oppressed groups, the events at the Stonewall implied that homosexuals had as much reason to be disaffected as they. It reminded homosexuals at just the right moment, during this era of general rebellion, that now their voices might be heard among the cries for liberation.

Although violent protest had been unimaginable to the largely conservative middle-class men and women who made up the homosexual movement during the two preceding

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