The Stonewall Riots by Gayle E. Pitman

Author:Gayle E. Pitman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams Books
Published: 2019-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

OBJECT #27

PHOTOGRAPH, PROTESTORS OUTSIDE THE STONEWALL INN

This is one of the most iconic photos of the Stonewall Riots. It was taken by Village Voice photographer Fred McDarrah on the second night of the riots. McDarrah and his colleague Lucian Truscott IV rounded up some of the street kids who hung out in Sheridan Square and Christopher Street Park and posed them in front of the Stonewall Inn. The kid on the right, wearing the dark striped shirt, is Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, who was twenty-one at the time the photo was taken. He is one of the few participants in the riots who is still alive as this book goes to press.

Born in 1948, Thomas grew up poor in Linden, New Jersey. Thomas worked odd jobs to help support his family while attending St. Elizabeth School, where he was constantly bullied by his peers. After finishing high school, he briefly attended the Pratt Institute to study art, then applied to Cooper Union—which promptly rejected his application. “They said something about how they just want you to be you when you wrote it—that you should write about who you are,” Thomas said in an interview. “But they didn’t want me for being me, which was a gay person.” To add insult to injury, the admissions office informed Thomas’s father about why his son wasn’t accepted. “My father ended up going into their office—maybe because they asked for a permanent address in my application materials—and knew about my rejection and why before I did. [It] was extra-horrible for him because he lived in a world where things like [being gay] didn’t exist and were terrible. So he basically told me that he knew about my being gay and told me, ‘Never tell your mother or your sisters that you’re like that.”’ From that point forward, Thomas lived on the streets of New York City.

Thomas was a semi-regular at the Stonewall Inn. “The place wasn’t glamorous,” he said in an interview. “The inside was mostly plywood and dark. The best thing in there was the jukebox. The walls were wet in there because the air conditioning didn’t work too well. And the place had a kind of stale beer smell going through it.” The Friday night before the raid, Thomas had tried to get into the Stonewall Inn, but the guy working the door wouldn’t let him. Later, when the raid and subsequent rebellion was underway, Thomas came back to see what was going on—and promptly got into the action. On Saturday night, he and a group of street kids returned and participated in the second night of the uprising—and that’s what Fred McDarrah’s photo captured.

After the Stonewall Riots, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt became a successful artist, crafting works out of found and discarded materials. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and his art pieces are represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. He is an instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

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