My Country by Marr David;

Author:Marr, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty, Limited

Though the papers had made fun of blokes in frocks and assaults with beaded bags, Roxon noted: “Those lithe figures in the sequined sheaths and the feather boas also happened to be in very fine physical nick. ‘If the queens of America ever get together,’ said one redhead, aiming ‘her’ stiletto with vicious precision, ‘it’s the end, baby. We’ve had enough.’”

This was a time of marches in the United States, of huge crowds supporting civil rights and protesting against the Vietnam War. Stonewall was turned into myth by a group of astute gay politicians who worked to commemorate the first anniversary of the riot with a parade of gay men and women through New York in broad daylight. The march stretched fifteen blocks. “It is often assumed that Stonewall is commemorated because of its impact on the movement,” wrote sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Suzanna Crage a couple of years ago. “In fact, Stonewall made its impact on the gay movement through its commemoration. The first commemoration of Stonewall was gay liberation’s biggest and most successful protest event.”

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Stonewall was not an early rallying cry in Australia. The fledgling movement was still taking its cues from England, where a highly respectable, not-necessarily-gay civil liberties movement had won fundamental law reform in 1967. The early gay magazine Camp Ink warned Australian campaigners in 1970 not to follow the example set in New York. “The influence of Stonewall on the Australian scene in those early years was very indirect,” says Ken Davis, a veteran and historian of the movement. “It filtered slowly over here. Back then it took longer for these things to cross the world. What mattered was not so much the riot and its commemoration but the feel of the times. It was about a mood change from homophile reform to a young rebellion-based gay politics.”

But it was also about fun. Gary Wotherspoon, another of the historians of the gay movement, sees Stonewall as the moment when “Australian queens began to turn from British to American gay life as the beacon on the hill. Prior to Stonewall all the queens would go to London. From the ’70s on, they went to Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. It was a real turning point. Let me tell you, London in 1970 was boring as shit compared to LA in ’73.”

Nine years passed before Australians formally commemorated Stonewall but the impulse behind the Sydney march in 1978 had little to do with the riots in New York. Though branded as a Stonewall celebration, it was actually held at the request of Harvey Milk’s people in San Francisco who were seeking international support to prevent gay teachers and all teachers sympathetic to the gay movement being expelled from the Californian education system. Though tenuous going into the event, the link with Stonewall was profound by the time the night was over. Just as in New York in 1969, a mighty impetus to change was given by police going too far in pursuit of an old morals agenda at a time when public opinion had undergone a radical shift.

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