American History Hit - Stonewall

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

What made June 28 1969 a landmark occasion for LGBTQ+ rights?How was Stonewall different from the uprisings that had come before it? And why were the mafia involved?Dr Pip Gordon joins Don today to explore the experiences and activism of LGBTQ+ people in New York and across America before Stonewall, and to take us through this night and its legacy.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Teän Stewart-Murray. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here.This episode contains music and sound from Epidemic Sounds and Pixabay. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's 1 a.m. on June 28, 1969 in the village, Greenwich Village, that is, here in downtown New York City. It is hot, so hot tonight. And we're at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street.

It's packed at the bar and the floor sticks to your feet. Sticky as the drink glasses all washed in tubs of dirty water. There's no working plumbing behind the bar. Lovely. There's also no fire escape anywhere and toilets tend to overflow. And despite the mafioso owners of this so-called bottle club paying off the police, there's a raid about once a month, which seems to be increasing. But no time for that now. It's 1 a.m., it's dark, and the music is pumping. The lights are pulsing.

The company is great. When suddenly it all cuts out. The music, the lights, the atmosphere. It's a raid. Anybody who's been through this before moves automatically for the door. But tonight feels different. hotter somehow. Blocked by the cops, some of the guys refused to show their IDs.

Some of the women refuse the verification of officers. Stonewall is rumbling. Hello, it's Don Wildman, and welcome to American History Yet. We're glad to have you. Imagine a time, or remember it, if you were alive then, it wasn't all that long ago. When gathering in a bar or a cafe in the city, if you were a gay person, a lesbian, transgender, queer, cross-dressing, When any of the identities and behavior we so openly embrace, even celebrate today, would be considered criminal, labeled by authorities as deviant, perverse, dangerous to public morality.

Think of what life would be like in a society where the emotional and sexual needs you are born with automatically placed you into a category of undesirable, unemployable, unacceptable. Such was the case up to and including the 1960s in America, and all around the world for that matter. It is one of the most remarkable social transformations in modern American history, how within a single generation, my generation, in fact, the nation has shifted on its very foundations, in the manner with which it treats its LGBTQ citizens. It's not total or even a complete process.

It's certainly not without controversy these days, but it is undeniable and permanent. And much of this shift has to do with the events of late June and early July, 1969, at the Stonewall Bar in Greenwich Village in downtown New York, where patrons and citizens said enough already, standing their ground against abusive police raids and corruption. It's June, it's Gay Pride Month, and it's only right that we examine the history behind the Stonewall riots.

Joining me today is Dr. Philip Gordon, Associate Professor and Coordinator of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Platville. Hello, welcome. Hello, Don. Nice to be here. May I call you Pip, I know that is your nickname. name. Yes, I go by Pip. Yes, please, by all means. Thank you very much, Pip. This is a very big subject, of course. It's vast material. And I want to be careful to remain focused on the subject at hand,

the Stonewall riots. But let's back up for a moment and talk about what life was like prior to those events in the decades and even a century before in America. How difficult was it to live a normal life as a gay or lesbian person? I think it's important to keep in mind that when we think about LGBTQ history, it's not a linear progression from a time in the distant past when everything was per se terrible to moving forward to things being better endlessly into the future. Rather, there have been times in the past when being a queer person may not have been as terrible as it has at times. But by the mid-19th century, most states had laws on the books that effectively made it illegal to do two things. First off, to have any kind of intimacy with the same-sex

partner, second to cross-dressed in any kind of public way. And so beginning in the middle of the 19th century and moving into the early 20th century, that put a great deal of restrictions on the way in which the community we now call LGBTQ could exist in any kind of public way without facing severe blowback, everything from the possibility of... of being put in jail because you're seen as a cross-dresser walking down the street or are caught in an intimate act with a partner, to simply losing your job, finding yourself unable to find new jobs, finding your sort of name published in a newspaper or so as somebody who was arrested, even if just for a few hours, because you happen to be at the wrong bar or the wrong club on a Saturday night,

and that kind of public shaming that would take place as a means of trying to keep LGBTQ plus people in the closet, as we would generally say, which through the 50s was very much the modus operandi for queer life. What was the main pressure originally from? Was it from evangelical Christians or where did it come from? We inherited some laws against what is called sodomy, which is a very large term to describe sexual acts outside of what's considered normal. But we inherited some of those laws from English common law, and they arrived in the colonial

period. But certainly through the 19th century, we do see a real uptick in a very kind of Christian, Protestant idea of ourselves, a real sense of like family and moral values being centered on these sort of small units of mom, dad, and children. Certainly by the early 20th century, and we think of, you know, the Leave it to Beaver kind of a view of American life, as these are what. ways in which Americans wanted to view ourselves and wanted to think of our culture, in particular after World War II, as we move into kind of the period where what will happen to make Stonewall

possible, we'll start to kind of gain traction. After World War II, there was a very kind of reactionary streak in American culture, part Christianity, maybe, but also kind of anti-communist sentiment that arose in the late 40s and 1950s that wanted to project an image of American life as very much vigorous, masculine, family-centric that became tied to our notions of our sort of kind of global standing as leaders of a free world that did not want to have what were considered deviant or perverted desires and individuals at the forefront of American life. And that tension in particular in the 1950s becomes really kind of paramount. Yeah, it has a lot to do with just the patriarchal society and men's own fears of all the threat of all of this to that whole identity. The 50s also have to

do with the fact that both World War I, really, World War I and two, involve a lot of young men and women going places and doing things they'd never done before or wouldn't have before there was a need for them to take new jobs. I'm thinking of really. Rosie the Riveters and so forth. And then of course, all the young men going overseas and seeing places and ways of life and different cultures that completely open their minds to different behaviors and having experiences, one can assume. All that comes home after World War II, especially in gigantic amounts of people. And that upswell of this alternative cultural experience, I guess, prompts the backlash against it. And that really brings on the 1950s,

along with the Cold War paranoia that you're talking about. Yeah, I was thinking. you just very well summarized one of the most significant historians of sexuality in the United States, a man named John Demilio in a very famous essay of his called capitalism and gay identity. That's his primary argument that World War II caused such a kind of massive shift in American life, large numbers of young people moving from relatively rural environments into a handful of large cities where they were either shipped out to theaters of war or went there to find new work opportunities. our kind of booming war economy. Well, and then the war ends and everyone's supposed to come home and go back to pre-war life, but a lot of those young people didn't want that. They had found new

worlds. They had found people who they related to that they had never encountered in their, say, smaller towns. And at least according to D'Amilio, this leads to kind of the birth of certain communities in places like San Francisco in neighborhoods like the Castro or New York City had long had districts that were relatively queer. Greenwich Village has a history of open gay life that goes back at least to the 19th century. Harlem in the 1920s and 30s was an area where people could go to explore kind of freer senses of expression. But you start to see the birth of gay neighborhoods, the quote-unquote gayberhoods, as they're sometimes called in a lot of major American cities, which as more the baby boomer generation comes of age,

suddenly young people now have places they can go that they see is already established. And so you start having migrations to places like San Francisco and New York and Los Angeles, and you have the birth of these communities that we are now kind of relatively familiar with and think of as having existed for most of American life. Was the consciousness back then,

even somewhat similar today, where there was the acknowledgement that this was a fact of life? this population is here and has always been here and this is the way it goes. The difference is how it was policed specific to the subject today. During this period of time, I'm talking about the 50s especially, were laws changed? Were there specific actions taken by governments to deal with this factor? Or was there really a hope that we could change these people? So in the 1950s, I think probably the most significant change socially has to do not with a gay and lesbian community, but actually more specifically

the trans community. One of the most significant figures in early 1950s, perhaps even more famous for about six months than a young woman named Queen Elizabeth I was Christine Jorgensen, a trans woman, who was featured in a lot of national magazines and got a lot of national press coverage. Seen is this like, this is an American GI who goes to Europe, who surgically transitions and reemerges as this beautiful woman. And in the early 1950s, her story captivates Americans. They're on the one hand just mesmerized by the fact that science can do this, that we can now, thanks to synthetic hormones and surgical procedures, that a person can actually

transition and for all practical purposes appear to, quote, unquote, change sex. On the other hand, there is a big conservative pushback of just kind of terror that science can do this and does this attack on virile masculinity or something like that? Broadly speaking, for trans people in 1950s, in early 60s, you see the increased availability of synthetic hormones. You see the relatively speaking increased access to medical procedures in medical care. That does suggest that in the worlds of medicine and in psychology, a growing realization that these are, if not necessarily desirable, if at least not entirely unprecedented modes of being and

that there's histories. If you have laws against, say, sodomy for gays and lesbians, you also have an ample historical record of people living in small towns who everyone knew they were the town, the town queer. Everyone knew the truth about them. As long as you remember that community and sort of kept things quiet, you didn't necessarily have any kind of problems per se. It's when you tried to march into streets or tried to advocate for rights.

But in terms of the change in laws, it's in the early to mid-1960s that you actually see some states, especially in the Midwest near where I currently live, that begin to start to repeal those anti-sodomy laws. And as with other sort of social movements, if the 40s and 50s see a rise in this sort of, you know, McCarthy era, a reactionary response to change in American society by the 60s, along with other rights movements, African American civil rights, growing rights for women, what we think of as second wave feminism. You also see a relaxing of social standards and social mores concerning LGBTQ life, though hit or miss, you know, there certainly still are a lot of prescriptions relative to our understanding. It's not the best of times, you know.

So the job of that management, of that oppression is going to fall then to the police. It's going to be a much more hands-on, so to speak, job on even the local precinct level to deal with the control of these outlets of this behavior, specifically, especially gay bars or bars where people of LGBTQ identity can gather. That's what happens here in Stonewall, in New York. The gay bar scene, every city had one, depended on the city, how many there were and how out they were. Police typically raided these places. They pressured them to tow the line. They had a lot to do with liquor licenses and health and sanitation inspections. All this is unpleasant negative behavior, this pressure being put upon these places in order to keep up the pressure and show who's boss.

This was sort of how it was as we move into the 1960s, right? Yeah, and it's interesting, especially in New York City, when you start reading histories of Stonewall, you realize that Stonewall is one of many little establishments that pop up and disappear. And one of the problems that the police faced was due to some ways in which liquor licensing worked, it was actually relatively simple to establish what was called a private bottle club and sort of occupy a space for a few months to a few years and then it would disappear. there were certainly more upscale establishments than the Stonewall Inn, which was a relatively divey kind of bar, in all due respect. But a lot of the ways in which bar culture emerged in the 60s, especially for the LGBTQ community, actually harkens back to prohibition and the speakeasies. Bars that existed, the police knew about them.

In theory, they definitely wanted to police them. oftentimes the police would nonetheless engage with bar owners and accept payoffs to let certain bars run for a while, but then they would come and still roused about the place, either to put pressure on the owners to pay more for police protection or to make a show for the newspapers or city hall of policing those activities. We'll translate that 30 years into the future in the 60s. You have a very similar situation for the emerging gay bars in New York City. where some of them are relatively protected by the police,

as long as they're paying off the police. Most of these bars were actually owned by the mob, run by the mob, specifically sort of for the purpose of making a quick buck off of a population that was inherently suspect for the police. So the mob felt they had a little bit more control over the clientele. And especially with gay bars in New York, the idea of raids was nothing new,

but most raids tended to occur in a relatively civil fashion. The police would show up, the lights would go on, there would be token arrest made, usually of the people who worked at the bar, who might spend the night in jail. The people who are more often than not targeted in these as clientele would be, say, gender non-conforming individuals would find themselves more likely than not maybe put into the proverbial paddy wagon and taken downtown. most clientele would be sort of scolded and told, you should go home now. And they would because they

didn't want their names to show up in a police report or something saying that they were at one of these bars because then they might lose their job. That sort of that practice was fairly well established in New York City through the 60s. And most of the queer communities just sort of, even if they are begrudged about it, just sort of understood that was the way of life and accepted it and said, okay, well, our bar got raided tonight. We go home. We go to another bar tomorrow. It was an ongoing system of harassment so that it didn't necessarily get into the courts even. It just became a way of life. You could expect these raids. You could take care of these raids if you're going to pay people off. It was all, it was corruption, you know, on that level. But it was just the way it was. At the same time, again, post-World War II, you have this rise of activism, of gay and lesbian activism especially, but all across the spectrum there. societies are being formed, representative organizations, and different ways of dealing with how to make

this work better. You know, I'm thinking of the assimilation idea and so forth. There were all these different sort of levels of how this was being managed, isn't it? Yeah. And I often, when I teach this material in my classrooms, I try to make sure students pause and step back and think about the activism that they're most familiar with. I mean, from the 1950s to the 60s, we think of that as this kind of very. clear moment of the civil rights movement, which is actually the African-American civil rights movement,

and actually just a small snippet of it. It had certainly extended well into the past and extends even until today. We have the emergence of what we consider sort of, you know, the feminist movement, which is actually second wave feminism, which is organizations like the national organization for women. By the mid-1960s, even within, say, the African-American civil rights movement, you have significant rifts between the non-violent preferences of someone like Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference versus more radical groups of younger people like the Black Panthers who felt that a more militant approach would be necessary. Within feminist movements, you had kind of more conservative notions of just advocating for

opportunities for fair pay and inequality in a workplace to kind of simmering tensions on the edge of those movements about the place of, say, lesbians in a feminist movement. Of course, you also, the Vietnam War is happening in the background of this, and you have a whole generation that is coming of age protesting the draft and wanting to protest our involvement in foreign affairs that a lot of young people felt like were not what they thought the American government should be engaged in. In 1968, the Democratic National Convention becomes a flashpoint in American society

for sort of these tensions of a government that's sort of moving forward from the post-war War II era and the assassination of Kennedy and still trying to maintain a status quo of America's greatness in the world and this underbelly of young people who are very much active against that being the future of American life and trying to take control of where America might go for their emerging generation. And it's very important to put the birth of gay, rights movements into that perspective. But even compared to that, prior to Stonewall, most of the movements for LGBT rights were small and very straight-laced, very nervous to be seen as too radical. I'm thinking particularly of, and he even came up in an episode just a few, few ago, Frank Kameney

and the Matashin Society, right? It's a group that really wants to not make waves, figure out a way for gay and lesbian populations to sort of look the part of regular society while being allowed to live their lives. Yes, and the Manasheen Society, as it gets founded and as people like Frank Kameney, become significant figures who are willing to be much more public in the 60s with their sort of stories of what's occurred with them and how they've maybe lost a job or something. Nonetheless, the Maddochein Society and a similar society, the daughters of Billetis, more lesbian-based organization that was in similar many ways of its structure and ideas to the Matashin Society. They start to plan activism. They start to aim for some public visibility. The most significant

visible activism they engage in becomes what's called the annual reminder. This is an event that takes place every year on July 4th in Philadelphia in front of Independence Hall and the Madachine Society and other folks get together. But they have very strict rules. If you're going to show up to March, you have to wear, for a man, you have to wear a button-up shirt and slacks and nice shoes, and women have to wear dresses that are very conservative, you know, below the knees, per se. And you're not allowed to hold hands with a partner. You're not allowed to make shows of affection. You're supposed to quietly stand in March with a sign arguing for, you know, rights for people like yourselves. I mean, this is an important shift. This is visible LGBTQ activism. It's also,

So it's not really edgy. It's certainly not terribly radical. Well, Frank had lost his job in the government because I guess he had been outed. I don't want to downplay this whole thing. This was a big part of a movement that was trying to understand and grapple with this really tough time to be who you are. And they were brave people at the time for doing what they did. Let's fast forward a bit.

We're in the village. Greenwich Village has always been a hotbed of all kind of bohemianism and activism of all sorts, you know, dating all the way back. And now we're in the 1960s, and this sort of reality has set in here. People are tired. This newer generation, those baby boom generation is coming of age. And it's in the context of, as you framed out, the whole of civil rights and Vietnam going on at the same time. LGBTQ people in the village had their places.

They had a lifestyle. It might have even been fun and enjoyable for many. but it was dependent on some pretty seedy stuff that was going on. The bars, certainly the Stonewall, were owned by the Genovese family, the local crime family there. Much of the village was in those days, for that matter. And that relationship between the mob and the police and the payoffs that were happening and people looking the other way and so forth really informed that community, that whole socialization of that community.

But the police weren't to be trusted. They could be pretty tacky about how they operated. Yeah, and again, it was for queer people, even in Greenwich Village, on a famous Christopher Street where the stonewall is located, they knew what happened when the police arrived. They were aware of this, so much so that most of them were aware that it all involved payoffs. And this is why for most people who were at a bar, if it was rated, they recognized that they were probably going to simply be told to leave and go home. And they would, because if they just played along, then they would not find their name publicized in a court document. They wouldn't find themselves arrested. And as such, they kind of become complicit in their own, in the way in which society is still holding them down. They can have these spaces as long as they accept the fact that, yes, as you said, the

mafia is running these bars and the mafia is not at this time, or anytime really, queer-friendly. And the police are effectively sort of in cahoots with the mob, recognizing that they can get a lot of money out of the mob. So the mob's, of course, charging more and more money for its clientele for watered down drinks and these sort of seedy establishments that sort of pop up in old buildings. Just as a cycle, the Stonewall Inn was built in the 1840s as a livery stable. It's not, it was just not a classy establishment that we might imagine a glitzy bar to be. Nonetheless, this is sort of the way in which life is occurring for people, even in a place, as you said, like Greenwich Village, which does have a long history of a bohemianism of arts

and culture. Egy life. Yeah. Yeah. And I want to remind anybody who's younger than us, these are the bad old days of New York. You know, these are mean street days. Scorsese made a movie about this time. You know, a lot of stuff was happening in a very shady fashion back then.

And this was only one of many aspects of this in New York anyway. But it happened everywhere. I mean, this was happening in San Francisco, in L.A. And I want to point out that there's several levels of corrupt activity that's happening here. It's not just the police getting paid off by the mob. The mob is also blackmailing people who are coming to these spaces, influential people, perhaps, taken aside and threatened. They're serving watered down drinks. They're charging top prices.

It's a big mess in terms of the bar life. But that's the reality that's happening. And in the midst of it, people are just trying to get together and have a good time. Yeah, and then as we move towards what actually is going to happen on this one critical night when this process of the police coming in raiding and extorting money from the mob who was extorting money from their clientele, at least according to sort of the standard histories, one of the issues here is that the police inspector who actually runs the raid on Stonewall on this kind of fateful evening maybe didn't communicate with his higher ups and that the bar that night was maybe not expecting a where usually they would have maybe had some tip-off of some kind. The man's name was Seymour Pine, Chief Inspector Seymour Pine, who has a few of his men undercover men and two women infiltrate the bar early in the evening. They are kind of looking around, watching folks gathering some details, and then a little

after midnight, Seymour Pine shows up with a couple more men, and they run a raid. And the bartenders, people in the bar, again, okay, it's a raid, but they just weren't expecting it and for reasons that remain very unclear, people reacted differently at that one particular moment in history, whereas again, the idea of raids on bars, again, as you said, these corrupt kind of establishments run by the mob, police and gohoots with the mob, and all sorts of levels of corruption. For some reason, on that night, at that particular bar, something different happened, something different worse. I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like us to cover anything specifically. If you have any ideas of subject matter we should be looking at,

send us an email at a.h-h-h-h-h-h-historyhit.com. We'd love to hear from you. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and throughout June on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, I'm marking the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare's first folio. It would be hard to think of Shakespeare without plays like Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Anthony and Cleopatra, Macbeth. As You Like It, and a Winterst tale. But without the first folio, none of these would have survived. This is not a book designed to be carried around. This is a book which establishes itself in the library, in the study, and that physicality tells us something about how the plays are being rebranded, reframed for a new

generation. Throughout this month, I'm delving deep into the first folio, how it was produced, who made it, and to what extent it has ensured Shakespeare's enduring legacy. So do join me on not just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. It was probably really hot. I live in New York. I know how a night in June and July can feel in those particular nights. But I understand what you're saying. You know, there's a really interesting thing that's come up in this reading for me

is that there's a change in that it's a misnomer. To call this a riot is perhaps not fair. It's an uprising. It's the old thing of like you switch the semantics and you get a whole different view of this. To call it the Stonewall riots is to sound like people out of, of control and mayhem in the streets and the whole thing. And there may have been that aspect of it. But it was specifically an uprising against a systematic harassment that had been going on for decades. Perhaps even cross-generationally, people have heard about it. There was a really interesting

fact here. It's 1964, Robert Wagner's the mayor of New York. It's the World's Fair in New York City. You know, a big deal. My parents went to it. I think they may have taken me as a little toddler in a stroller to that thing. Out there in Queens, you still see the evidence of it out there in the park. This was a big showcase for New York in the day, 1964. So he's cleaning up the city as he sees fit. And a lot of this had to do with the raids for any kind of, you know, off-color thing that he wanted to not be on in the show. I've never been in New York City. I live entirely near the Mississippi River. But certainly that idea of mayor coming in and deciding, you know, I am going to crack down harder on what's happening in these places to try to,

Again, I've always read it as the appearance of cleaning up the city that everyone knows still has its sort of seedy underbelly, that certainly starts to, again, bring into focus for these queer populations, sort of how vulnerable they are. And here's where I would again pause to say that by the mid-1960s, laws are changing in many places. And while New York City is actually not the most progressive in terms of the changing of these laws, It still is a place with a very large LGBTQ population. There are bars scattered throughout New York City, a lot of them there in Greenwich Village with a history. But still people on Christopher Street still are aware of the extent to which they are, this vulnerable community that is effectively, if I can use the term, being preyed upon by city authorities, by police, by the mob. and there had been very minor activism before, but as you said it right, on this evening,

which is actually not the only evening of what we consider Stonewall. What breaks out is it's somewhat spontaneous. It is a protest. It's an uprising. Riot has connotations that may not quite fit it. I often try to help students understand what's going on. When you think about the quote-unquote Stonewall riots, it actually occurs over a few evenings, two to four, depending on how you want to measure what was actually occurring. The first

night, the police come in and raid the place and people respond. That was fairly spontaneous by all accounts. The subsequent nights were not as spontaneous. They were planned. There were activists in the area who saw what was happening, who heard about it the next morning and immediately spotted that this could be different. And they began to organize. It. began to turn out leaflets and try to get people to come down to do it again. That's why I mentioned the activism, the rise of the activism. I mean, there was a strategy going on here, just as was happening with feminism, with anti-war, all of these groups were learning from each other how to how to play this game effectively and how to achieve an objective. I am curious eventually what

their objective was at this point. I'm a little unclear about that. But let's go through the play-by-play first of all, June 28th, 1969 is the first of, as you say, three or four nights. The first night is your sort of run-of-the-mill raid that comes in and people are pulled out and lined up. It doesn't go so well for the cops because they get

their kind of signals mixed up, I guess, and the paddy wagon doesn't come. And that's the big trigger, I guess, because there's too long a wait time before they're actually taken away, which would have been in a typical situation done pretty quickly. For all that time, there's a lot of

brewing dissatisfaction going on and people start understanding outside in the street what's happening. Yeah. So what's so fascinating is as that night progresses, the police are telling some people leave and they go outside and they don't leave. More and more people start to see that there's a crowd gathering outside of Stonewall. So while the queer community we think of is inside of the bar and acts up, not quite, many of them do find themselves in the streets and then the crowd starts to grow and the police are vastly outnumbered. They have a handful of people, again, some of the bartenders inside. There's a real question as to what single moment catalyzes everything that occurs. But as more and more people gather outside and anger starts to build, the police do find

themselves, like inside the bar now, begin to sort of barricade themselves inside because they realize this crowd is getting loud and unruly and backup's not there. At some point, people in the crowd begin throwing coins at the police. Those coins may be symbolic of the payoffs the police were supposed to take. At least according to a man named Howard Smith, a journalist who found himself in the bar with the police. One of those coins hits a police officer in such a way that it maybe nicks the skin on his forehead and he starts to bleed. And so he gets very angry. A random passerby named Dave Van Runk, who is not a member of the LGBTQ.

community happens to show up because he hears what's going on down the street. He's standing near the door and the angry police open the door of the stonewall in and pull him in and basically beat him senseless. So he becomes one of the people arrested and most kind of brutalized that night, even though he wasn't at the bar when the raid began. For me, one of the most significant parts of the story focuses on a kind of a masculine presenting lesbian woman who may or may not have been a woman named Stormy De LaGarri, who the Stonewall Inn was not really known as a lesbian bar. It had a few women, a few lesbians who might be there. This woman was maybe kind of masculine or butch presenting. The police did at some point try to arrest her. Most accounts concede that the police was,

when they were not gentle in their attempt to arrest her. They put her in the paddy wagon. When it finally arrived, she somehow escaped. They grab her again and kind of get her back in the patty wagon and as the police are kind of beating her over the head with nightsticks, by many account, she turns to the crowd and screams out, why don't you do something? And then like, just like a shot, just bam. And suddenly the whole place ignites into kind of several brawls occurring in multiple places. And what happens over the subsequent hour or two is I think Martin Duberman, the historian who writes a book on Stonewall, calls it a melee that ensues. And it is a lot of kind of unorganized chaos that nonetheless still manages to kind of keep the police on their toes,

and it takes about two hours plus the arrival of backup to subdue the crowd and clear the streets. Talking about the tactical police force here. I mean, this is serious stuff. Yeah, I think that's some, I think that would be the version of what we consider a SWAT team, if I'm not mistaken in terms of what that is. And they do manage to subdue the crowd, though, at least according to some eyewitnesses, one of the more profound moments. was the tactical police force arrives. They think that they've got sort of their presence and their organization will threaten these people

who are just uprising and maybe without much of a sense of coordination. And apparently, as they round a corner trying to push some of the clientele and people in the streets back off the streets, a line of possibly drag queens and cross-dressers forms and begins doing the can-can kick like the Radio Rockettes and famously sings kind of off-cold. her song about we are the stonewall girls, we wear our hair and curls, and the substance lines

after that become a little bit bawdy. And it's so totally shocks the tactical force that they stop just like, this is happening? What? Which gives time for several other people to escape and then reform. And you have moments like that where just the conflict, the back and forth between the people in the streets who are protesting and uprising and the police always gets right the edge of just extraordinary amounts of kind of police brutality and violence, but then there'll be these little breaks that allow people to escape and reform and go back and forth. And then finally, the police are able to clean the streets off, but only for the first night. Right. And does it build over the next few nights? It becomes more organized, right? It does. And so a lot of credit is

given to a man named Craig Rodwell and a few others, Jim Ferrant and Fred Sargent. And a a few others whose names, I should say, just as, you know, historically important, who had been members of the Matashin Society, but who had grown very discontented with the Madishin Society's quiet and conservative approach to advocating for rights, they wanted to see something more. So, Craig Rodwell owned a bookstore called the Oscar Wild Memorial Bookshop in Greenwich Village. He used his voice and his ability to have this space. He reached out to members of the matishing society and a well-established sort of system of communication within the community there in New York City. And he began to talk up, hey, let's do something. Let's do this again.

Let's come back out tonight. Because the Stonewall Inn was a quote-unquote private bottle club that was really just sort of like a bad bar area set up and the booze was brought in night tonight. They were able to open the next night, even after the riots the night before. and so people showed up to, again, have some kind of visible activism. The police have to come back out and quell the crowds a second time. The third and fourth nights, there's attempts at repeating some of these actions, but apparently it started raining and was hot and pretty miserable and muggy, and that kind of started to diminish the crowds that showed up by around the fourth or fifth night.

Whatever was going on seemed to sort of dissipate. And of course, this is all from June 28th, so the 29th, 30th, and now we're moving into early July. It's all buttressing right up against the Matashin's annual reminder where people are going to get in buses and go down to Philadelphia for that protest. And somewhere in this moment, some of these activists who were there at Stonewall, who had seen what occurred, who were thinking about how to turn this one uprising into something more, sparked the great idea. Next year, let's not do the annual reminder. Next year, let's have a festival honoring what occurred here, the Christopher Street Liberation Day Festival and Parade. And so over the course of the year,

they begin sort of reorganizing and refashioning what it means to be part of an LGBTQ plus movement. They moved from a Matashine society, notably kind of a hard-to-pronounce word that's ambiguous to. They form a new group, the gay liberation front, which explicitly uses the word gay, which is very much more of a radical group that's advocating more forcefully for some kind of rights, though what those rights are precisely, we could debate probably all day long. And they use that gay liberation front and some other subsidiary groups that form around it to start hosting an event over the next few years that will eventually grow nationwide into what we call pride. It's quite literally the first pride parade in New York City there in 19.

1970 to mark that anniversary. Pip, we speak a lot about the gay and lesbian crowd here, but this is a multifaceted movement, obviously, and protest going on there. Tell me about some other people who were involved there. Well, certainly, we think a lot about Stonewall, and we think about the Madachine Society and members of that society who are trying to do more or to be more involved, and we're looking for some kind of activism or protest that would be a little more radical. But what is often missed in these stories is the extent to which, say,

trans people and especially trans women of color were central to Stonewall. And one of the most important people for that is Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha P. Johnson was a black trans woman, sometimes called the mayor of Christopher Street, who was just very loved and welcoming there on Christopher Street. There is a great deal of kind of mythology that's arisen around Johnson's role. A lot of people claim that she was in the bar and that she threw the first brick. First off, she said she was not in the bar. Second, no one threw any bricks. But to that end, what she did do is she showed up later in the evening. She arrived after the crowds had started gathering out on the street. And in the subsequent days of the uprising, she was part of the group that helped plan that. She was actually one of the

founding members of the Gay Liberation Front. But more significantly, she also founded a separate group where she's credited with founding a separate organization called Star, the street transvestite action revolutionaries, which is one of the early organizations dedicated to finding homes for trans youth and helping trans people find some kind of sense of place in an environment that even as gay liberation been forward, trans liberation has often had to trail behind. It's important to recognize that people's efforts to place someone like Marcia P. Johnson in the story are well-intended efforts to remind us that it's not just a story about, say, white, cisgender gay men. Simultaneously, a lot of the stories that have emerged

don't always tell the truth and actually contradict people like Johnson's own story of what her role was in the Stonewall riots. But she's just one of many people, Sylvia Rivera being another, per se, who are also incredibly significant individuals who whatever actually occurred, whoever should get credit for starting stonewall or planning stonewall. We have to make sure we include these people as well. And on the heels of all this very dramatic action, you begin to have the narrative formed. The story is being told by notably the village voice. Sadly, no more of a voice in the village. But those kinds of magazines and certainly the newsletters as you use, but periodicals and newspapers that have never had the word gay in them are suddenly talking openly about it. That's true.

First, the village voice covers it. There's a Howard Smith is inside the bar, Lucius Tru Scots, outside of the bar. There is some other reporting that starts to spread. And then thanks largely to kind of an established system of kind of a gay press and newsletters organized by the Daughters of the Daughter's Abilatishing Society, the story begins to go national. And here I would pause to say that the Stonewall Inn, a man named Dick Leish, who was a gay activist, who was there, wrote an article called the Hairpin Drop Perred Round world, which is his firsthand account of what happened at Stonewall that he witnessed from outside the bar. He claims in that account that this is the first gay rights protest that has occurred in America. That's not even close to true. But some of the previous protest in San Francisco in 1966 at protests called the Compton Cafeteria riots or similar riots at Dewey's Diner, I think in Philadelphia, and Cooper's Donuts in 1959, they weren't covered by the press. They

weren't discussed. Some of these events have had to be reconstructed through oral history accounts, and we don't even know the precise dates on which they occurred. Whereas with Stonewall, thanks very much to activists who had already established networks for communicating with other nascent gay rights groups, they were able to really bring a lot of publicity to Stonewall and capitalize on what happened. And then maybe also just because of the broader, kind of national movement towards accepting different lifestyles and the visibility of civil rights movements and women's movements. Stonewall just somehow kind of captured that, that wind and was able to become this very important symbol for LGBTQ communities that starts to change the way in which

our communities think about how to be visible and activist. You've begun to answer my question, which is where do you see the legacy of this event landing in the history of this country? You know, is it because it was in New York that it was as important as it was? I mean, is that what you're trying to say is that, you know, anything that happens in New York is going to be bigger than it happens in L.A. and San Francisco. But it also did happen there. It was happening all over the country. As someone who grew up in small towns in those flyover states, I'm a little bit remiss to have to give so much credit to New York for this.

But yes, I think that it's possible that because it occurs, in New York, in this established community, where people had gathered, that that has everything to do with why Stonewall becomes important. Stormadil Ivory is a Butch presenting mixed-race lesbian from New Orleans, who years later would claim to have been at the Stonewall riots, and a lot of people have claimed that she wasn't there. My take on it is that in New York City, and then in L.A. and San Francisco, Stonewall very quickly became supremely important, a way of talking about, like, we have a movement. now. Maybe in the rest of the country, it actually took a lot longer for it to settle. In 1973,

in New Orleans, gay bar called the upstairs lounge was burned on a horrible act of arson that was, for many years, one of the most deadly attacks on gay people until I think the pulse shooting in 2016. And in 73, that happened, and the city government effectively tried to bury any reference to it. And it was just last year that the city government had a reckoning down in New Orleans to try to actually talk about what had happened in the way in which it had been mishandled other communities even in large cities like Atlanta and Memphis what is stonewall maybe doesn't trickle down to those anywhere near as quickly as people presume it does it's the 90s or so before you start to i think have a larger national discussion wherein people who live outside of large cities begin to become

aware of stone wall as this touchstone and it's not until i think the early 2000s that stonewall begins to become symbolic of a quote-unquote gay liberation movement, which whatever that was in the 60s and 70s becomes in the early 2000s, say a march towards same-sex marriage and marriage equality, which is one of many important aspects of LGBTQ liberation, but certainly not all of it. Do you agree with my statement at the beginning of this where I said it's an extraordinarily, a extraordinarily swift transformation that has taken place. Is that just a naive, straight guy trying to make sense of this? No, I remember so very well in 2004 watching election results at the 2004 elections come in. In 2004, 13 states had some kind of ballot measure about same-sex marriage, and every

single state basically profoundly voted against any notion of LGBTQ equality. And in the 90s, we had the Defensive Marriage Act, which prevented the federal government from acknowledging same-sex marriages performed in states that allowed it. Don't ask, don't tell. Was maybe a change to the status quo for the military, but actually still led to something like 11,000 people being dishonorably discharged and they were found to be homosexuals. Matthew Shepard was only, you know, his murder was 1998. It still took almost a decade before a hate crimes legislation was finally passed. And all of these are within the time frame of people who would still be teenagers now. If they had And then by 2013, in Barack Obama's second inaugural address as president, he explicitly named Stonewall.

He's talking about a history of activism in the United States. And in his inaugural address, he talks about the self-evident truths that we are all created equal. And he traces those self-evident truths. He specifically lists beautifully alliterative from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall. And by 2013 to have a U.S. president who's just been reelected to a second term, to name drop Stonewall, suddenly Stonewall becomes something that everyone's like, oh, tell me more. And it becomes, again, this this like one central moment in what's been a lot longer and more complex history of advocating for rights. And I really do feel like I went to bed somewhere around 2010 and woke up in 2015 and the world had changed. Pip, I love the village. I'm a big fan in New York. Stonewall Bar is open for business. It's June Pride Month right now.

I need to underscore the fact that June Pride Month is a celebration of the Stonewall Uprising, I'm going to call it from now on. This is a cool place to be, and I encourage you someday to visit it, along with the listeners, for this incredibly important and swift social movement of our times. It gives great hope that we live in a country in a world that can transform as quickly as that inside of lifetimes, and that's pretty rare. Certainly. Thanks for joining us. I really appreciate the story and happy Pride Month to you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it, Don. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit, so glad you could join us.

If you enjoyed this conversation, please let us know. We thrive on your feedback and your reviews, five stars preferably. And check out the ever-growing list of back episodes of more American History Hit. Episodes drop twice weekly, Mondays, and Thursdays. I'm Don Wildman, and I'll see you next time. podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.