American History Tellers - Stonewall | Eric Marcus Remembers the Voices of Stonewall | 5

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

When the events of Stonewall happened in 1969, Eric Marcus was just a boy away at a New Jersey summer camp. Nearly 20 years later, he would document the voices of revolutionary LGBTQ activists like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and Frank Kameny for his book, “Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights.” While his work started out as a printed oral history, Marcus knew that taping those interviews would “one day have value beyond my book.” And he was right. Many of those interviews can be heard on the Making Gay History podcast, which he founded and hosts. Today, Marcus talks about his conversations with people who shaped the early LGBTQ movement. He’ll also share what people who were patrons of the Stonewall Inn told him about their time there. Listen ad-free on Wondery+ hereSupport us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's spring, 1974, but it's still cold and dreary in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. You're a local merchant who's come to a very unorthodox neighborhood meeting. You're in the back room of a pizza parlor just around the corner from the Castro Theater. They're still busy doling out pepperoni pies up front, and you're just finishing up a slice yourself as a man named Harvey Milk calls the meeting to order. All right, is everyone here? Let me see. It's 10, 11, 12. More than I expected. I am happy to see all of your smiling faces.

Harvey owns a camera shop just around the corner. He's got large ears and an infectious laugh. Not the kind of guy you peg as a budding politician, especially because he's openly gay, just like you are, just like everyone in this room is. Now, we're all here because as gay businessmen, we need to stick together, right? The room nods its assent, and that's when Harvey nods at you. Now, if I remember right, your antique store was recently threatened. Could you tell us a little bit about that? You clear your throat. Yeah.

My partner and I opened up an antique shop, and apparently we were too close to the store where they sell Catholic school uniforms to children. Ah, yes, part of your nefarious plan to corrupt Castro youth. Yeah, that's what the Eureka Valley Association thought. They called the cops on us. They threatened to take our resale license away. We're an antique store, for God's sake.

Our customers are not exactly young. Harvey grins at you and then addresses the rest of the room. Just a few years ago, this neighborhood wasn't doing very well. Storefronts were boarded up, and then gay people like us moved in. Gay-run businesses. Yeah, but people are afraid of us. I know. We're making this community better, and yet people are still afraid of us. That's just my point. We don't need to be afraid either.

Business is booming, and it's because of us. Now what we need to do is stick together. Money is the root of change. Gay men like yourselves should buy gas from gay businesses. Others will follow. So you're asking us to vote with our wallets? That's an excellent way of putting it, yes. And furthermore, I'd like to ask all of you to join the Castro Valley Association.

Your ears perk up at this. Ever since Harvey first mentioned it, you've thought of it as a good idea. A gay-oriented merchants association to directly oppose others that are trying to shutter gay businesses. Well, you've got my vote, Harvey. I'm glad to hear it. But what about the rest of you? One by one, every other hand in the room goes up. Well, it looks like the ayes have it.

A feeling of excitement wells in your chest. So this is what organizing feels like. You'd never given the matter much thought, but now it starts to make sense. A gay-centric business association would be an opportunity to confront discrimination head-on. This might be one small step, but it's one you're proud to take. Inspiring entrepreneurs get 90 seconds to pitch to an audience of potential customers. If the audience liked the product, it gets them in front of our panel of experts.

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The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, intimate moments, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. The meeting at the back of a pizza parlor was the first of its kind in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. In the early 70s, the neighborhood began attracting LGBTQ residents and businesses, but some in the community pushed back, using merchants' associations to try and drive away these storefronts. Into the fray stepped Harvey Milk, who saw that a large LGBTQ constituency was forming and sought to harness the gay vote. Milk would form the Castro Valley Association

and would help LGBTQ businessmen like himself retain a foothold in the neighborhood. In 1977, Harvey Milk was elected to the position of city supervisor and became the first openly gay politician. He served for 11 months before he was assassinated, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, on November 27, 1978. In his short time in office, Milk helped sponsor a citywide bill banning discriminatory practices on the basis of sexual orientation. His legacy as a political pioneer continues to this day. The election of Harvey Milk was just one of the many milestones in the LGBTQ movement in the decades following the uprising at the Stonewall Inn. But like the events at Stonewall, Milk's election built on a

foundation laid over two decades by earlier activists. Today, we'll hear from someone who has spent much of his career documenting the contributions of those activists. Our guest is Eric Marcus, a journalist and author of the book Making Gay History, The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights. He's also the founder and host of the Making Gay History podcast, and founder and chair of the Stonewall 50 Consortium, an organization that brings together non-profit institutions and organizations that support LGBTQ history and culture. Eric Marcus, welcome to American History Tellers.

Thanks, Lindsay. I'm delighted to be on your show. So, while Stonewall is the most well-known event of the early gay rights movement, it's certainly not the first. The events in June and July of 1969 only galvanized an earlier movement already in motion. But why don't most people know about the gay rights movement's origins? Well, I can tell you when I started my work in 1988, when I was commissioned to write an oral history of what was then called the gay and lesbian civil rights movement, I didn't know that there was any history before 1969. Obviously, they didn't hire an academic because this was not my area of expertise. I was an urban studies major as an undergraduate, so I came to this as a citizen historian. It's not taught. That's why people don't know it.

Simple as that. If you look at high school textbooks or 8th and 11th grade American history textbooks, if there's any mention, even today, you might get a mention of Stonewall, Harvey Milk, AIDS, marriage equality, and that's about it. But even if people know about the history before Stonewall, they might go as far back as the early 60s, certainly not as far back as 1950, and they would not know anything about the founding of the first gay rights organization in 1897, which took place in Berlin in Germany. So your podcast, Making Gay History, investigates the entirety of the gay rights movement and includes interviews from people who were part of the early gay rights movement of the 60s and 70s. Activist Frank Kameny, Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay,

and Daughters of Bilitis co-founder Del Martin are just a few of the people who you featured on your show. What was your intent in producing this, what has become an oral history of the movement? Well, it started out as a printed oral history of the movement. I was commissioned to write it. I would never have chosen to write something that was as ambitious as this, but I decided to take on the challenge. So what I'm grateful to my 30-year-old self for was recognizing that at the time that I was doing this work in the late 1980s, was that these stories would one day have value to somebody beyond my book. So I used broadcast quality equipment. I was working at CBS News at the time, and I asked my boss, Jay Kurnis, who had been one

of the creators of Morning Edition and Weekend Edition for NPR, what his colleagues at NPR used. So he put me in touch with one of his colleagues, and I bought exactly what they were using in 1988 and recorded the interviews as if I was recording for posterity. I had the privilege of interviewing people whose stories dated as far back as 1920, and several of the people who founded the first sustained gay rights organization in the U.S., which was founded in 1950, which was called the Mattachine Society,

and then the Daughters of Belitis, which was founded in 1955. So I was shocked to find that the dinosaurs still walk the earth, that these people who were there at the very beginning of the movement in the U.S. were still alive. The podcast came much later. I had turned over my entire collection of audio and video as well to the New York Public Library in 2008, thinking that my gay work was done. And I have my own internalized homophobia,

and I didn't think of my gay work as good as or as important as mainstream journalism. In part because when I was doing my work, the LGBTQ story, the story of that civil rights movement really wasn't part of the American history story. That's one of the reasons it wasn't taught. It was something outside of the mainstream. People didn't recognize that it was threaded throughout our history. And then in 2015, when I was trying to figure out what to do next after I was fired from my job at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which is a story unto itself, I had to look at what I had as far as my assets.

I was in my mid-50s. I knew I'd never find another job, job, job, a staff job, because of the way the world works now, and especially in journalism. So I knew I had this archive, and the New York Public Library had just digitized the collection. And through a series of conversations, I got a grant to develop my archive into an education project, and the education project morphed into a podcast. And the education project actually continued. I work with an organization called History Unerased

to develop LGBTQ inclusive American history content for 8th and 11th grade curricula. And we use short excerpts of the podcast now to anchor lesson plans. So it really was very serendipitous. This was not the plan from the beginning. I've had a very accidental, although rewarding, rewarding career nonetheless. So you've investigated this material twice, in its origins and then in a repackaging, if you will. How have your ideas of this history changed? How have your appreciation for the past and the present changed since you originally recorded some of this material? That's a really good question. I recall when I was recording this material and thinking about who to include in the book, that there were stories I left out. I did a lot more interviews

than I included in the book because the stories were so well known at the time. For example, I didn't include the stories of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who were among the founders of Daughters of Belitis because they were fairly well known and their story had been told many times. But in doing the podcast, they were pretty much long forgotten by most people. And then I came to realize that virtually none of these people and none of these stories are known to people today. Also, I came to appreciate some of the people who I had a bit of contempt for when I first interviewed them.

Dick Leitch, for example, who led the organizing for a protest called the Sip-In in 1966 in New York City. I didn't like Dick at all. He struck me as sort of I first interviewed him and came to appreciate his landmark who started the movement and looked at them as what might call accommodationists or assimilationists without appreciating the challenging worlds in which these people lived and how radical they were for their time. Not radical in our eyes, at least not in the 1980s, but radical in perspective. So I had the chance to look back 30 years farther. And also, I'm now the age that many of the people I interviewed were at the time. So I'm one of the dinosaurs walking the earth. So I have a very different, I have a lifetime perspective on the movement now,

rather than the perspective of a 30-year-old person. Another important and radical figure in the gay rights movement was Sylvia Rivera. You had the chance to interview Rivera and Johnson, her partner Marsha P. Johnson, in the 1980s. Starting with Sylvia Rivera, what do you remember most about your conversation with her? Well, what I remember most about the conversation with Sylvia initially anyway was that she scared me. I had never met anybody who looked like Sylvia. I led a rather sheltered life. And Sylvia was unlike anyone I'd ever met before. She was dressed in scare drag at the time I met her. I'd never met somebody who identified as trans. And I don't even recall whether she identified as trans necessarily when I interviewed her.

The term that she used most often was drag queen. And at the time I interviewed Sylvia, Sylvia said, you know, call me Ray, which was Sylvia's given name or birth name, I should say, or call me Sylvia. The times were much more different. People were more fluid at the time about identity in some ways. What I remember most really is Sylvia's humanity, that once I got past my shock and discomfort over what Sylvia looked like and Sylvia's life, was that Sylvia was like everybody else, really wanted to love and be loved and had a great appreciation for the challenges she faced, but also an understanding for why it was so difficult for Sylvia to be integrated into the early post-Stonewall movement. Why the activists who were organizing then in what was still a fragile movement and at a time when

gay and lesbian people weren't so, certainly not so well accepted, and the movement was not an LGBTQ movement at the time. It was an LNG movement and barely LNG. It was mostly G. It was easy for me to understand why there were such challenges. I mean, we look back now, and people are highly critical about why the movement wasn't more unified, but it was a completely different time. And identities have shifted so dramatically over time that it's very hard, especially for young people today

who didn't live through those times, to understand what that era was like, and also to have compassion for all the people involved, including for Marsha, as well as the activists at the time, who struggled to deal with Sylvia, who was a very complicated person, and understandably complicated because of the life she lived and was forced to live on the streets of New York as a child.

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Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid and Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the summer of 1969 at the Stonewall. Before the events happened, what was a typical night there like? I interviewed a number of people who had been at the Stonewall, and one thing to know about the Stonewall was that it was a rather balkanized space, that different types of people occupied different parts of the bar.

So you had everyone from the drag queens in the back, self-described drag queens in the back with one of the jukeboxes, they control the jukebox. Up toward the front, you had guys in khakis and button-down shirts. Then you had guys in jeans and flannel shirts, very few lesbians. And so it was a real mix and people didn't necessarily mix together, but they occupied the same space and often danced on the same dance floor. The place was described many times to me as a dump or a dive, and people now say, well, Stonewall actually isn't such a dump. Well, the place that's there now, the bar that occupies the space, or at least half the space of the original Stonewall,

there's no resemblance at all to the original Stonewall. The original Stonewall Inn bar closed two weeks after the Stonewall uprising and didn't reopen as a bar until years later. In between it was a Chinese restaurant, a nail salon, a bagel shop. So it wasn't the kind of place that you would go for. It wasn't a club as we think of the Copacabana or one of the more elegant clubs of the era. It was a dive. But it was a place where gay people, principally gay men, could dance. And even if the drinks were terrible, it was a place where people could be together.

And it was mostly young people. And among the young people were self-described street kids from across the racial spectrum and ethnic spectrum, 16, 17, 18, 19-year-old kids, many of whom were homeless. And so the Stonewall was something of a refuge. But also the doorman kept very tight control on who got into the Stonewall. So there wouldn't be a tipping point. There was never a majority of any one group. So it was a real mix. And it also shifted over time from when it first opened in 1967 to a much more mixed crowd by the time, by 1969. And at first they didn't let drag queens in at all. In fact, I can't remember now if it was Marsha B. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera said that they were the first, I think it was Marsha who said

she was the first drag queen to be let into the Stonewall. So it wasn't a drag queen bar. Sylvia Rivera made very clear to me that that was another bar down the street. The Stonewall was also run by the mob, which left many people attending in a bit of a tough position because, in a way, the mob provided security from the police, but the customers were also at the mercy of the mob. Can you elaborate about the risks that patrons took when they went to the Stonewall? Well, the risk from, well, there were all kinds

of risks for people in that era. If you were in a bar raid, if the police raided the bar and you were arrested, you could wind up with your name in the newspaper. And it wasn't just New York City. It was all over the country. And there were places where your name would be printed in the paper along with your address and your employer. And if you were married and had children and a job, you could easily lose your job. So there was always the risk of being caught up in a bar raid and having your life ruined. Also, the police had undercover cops who would go in and try to engage with customers to get them to solicit them in some way, like, would you like to go out for a walk? Or do you want to go home with

me? And they'd be arrested. And if you were in a profession where you had a license, if you were a teacher, a hairdresser, a lawyer, a doctor, you could lose your license if you were arrested for solicitation. It could be a terrible nightmare. Also, there was the potential of blackmail. But there wasn't the option of going to a bar that wasn't in some way controlled by the mafia, whether it was owned by the mafia or controlled by the mafia. In those years, that's who controlled the bars, given what the state regulations were, at least in New York, about who you could serve and who you couldn't serve. So gay bars and clubs were left to the mafia to own and run. So it's so different from how it is now. It's a little hard to imagine what it was like then, but it was, bars were among the few spaces that people had,

that LGBTQ people had, to gather. There were also beaches, famously in New York, Reese Park, which my parents took us to as kids. I didn't know it was a gay beach. And also parks, like Central Park, that were cruising places. But they were also dangerous because they could often be police who were trying to entrap a gay man in particular, and then arrest them. In the six days of uprising at Stonewall in 1969, something was clearly different. We talked earlier about the decades of activism before this moment and the trajectory of the movement, but what was it about Stonewall that made it a coalescing moment? You know, I've been thinking about the way in which the Stonewall uprising was a coalescing

moment, because we've had that moment recently, famously with the murder of George Floyd, and how that's erupted into not just a national, but an international movement for Black Lives Matter. It was the moment. I mean, it could have happened at any other point. There were other incidents and conflicts with the police, but the moment happened to have been ripe. The location was right. It was New York City in 1969 at a time when there was a lot of tension between protesters and the police over the anti-war movement, the women's movement, the black civil rights movement. So in some ways, it's not at all surprising that this happened. What's striking to me is how Stonewall has grown as an event in retrospect. Because in some ways, given what was going on in the era, it was a rather small uprising.

It's grown in how it's been described, that there were Molotov cocktails and firebombs. And actually, it turns out there was a little lighter fluid sprayed into one of the windows, and that was the extent of the fire. And various people have been elevated in ways that, in terms of their participation, who weren't even there at the time. What is striking about Stonewall is the impact it had in the aftermath, how the people who organized in the immediate aftermath of Stonewall built on the existing infrastructure of the movement, which had already existed for 19 years at that point, to build what became a mass movement and ultimately an international movement. But it didn't happen by itself. It wasn't just, you light the match and it happens.

I often say the organizers will inherit the earth. And in this case, the organizers were ready for what came after. There was an enormous eruption of anger, a wish for a new generation of young people to take control of the movement and did what often happens in these kinds of movements. They pushed aside most of the older people and brought their own methods and their own views toward what had been a rather conservative and small movement to create a mass movement led principally by young people, but also informed by some of the older activists like Frank Kameny and Barbara Giddings and Kayla Husen, who survived from the earlier, what was called the homophile movement in the 1960s into the 1970s and the more radical movement.

Let's talk about this change, this splintering of gay rights activism at the time of the Stonewall Uprising. As you mentioned, the existing infrastructure was there, but it was a rather conservative state approach of assimilation. Where did that change, especially in terms of racial and socioeconomic groups during the late 60s? Well, things had already begun changing before Stonewall. The first of the more radical organizations was founded actually in 1961 when Frank Kameny founded what was an independent chapter of the Mattachine Society in Washington, D.C., where he came up with the idea of protesting in public, which was a radical move in those

years. I wouldn't call the early movement assimilationists. They were responding to the era in which they lived. They were trying to form an identity and figure out a way to live in the world that they were presented with. And the word assimilation to me seems is too pejorative for what they were. They were actually, they were radicals in their time, but the world was shifting very quickly. And you can see the difference in just images from the annual reminder protests from 1965 to 1969 in Philadelphia at Independence Hall that was held every July 4th by a group of gay and lesbian people. You see pictures of that and how uniformly people are dressed. And for the most part, it's all white, not entirely, because there's a famous person named

Ernestine Eckstein, who you can see in some of those photographs, an African-American woman wearing white-framed cat's-eye sunglasses, but it was predominantly a white movement. And what you see happening toward the late 60s is an influx of younger people and a big mix of identities in terms of race and ethnicity, and many more women. So if you look at the first Pride March in New York City in 1970, and you look at the photographs, it is stunningly mixed, stunningly diverse. It fits with the era. Young people were very involved in the anti-war movement and the black civil rights movement and the women's movement. So the gay rights movement tracked along with those movements as well and drew in large numbers of people in a diverse range. But

it was also 1970 or 1969, and there was still misogyny to deal with and racism to deal with. So it was a complicated time. And very quickly after the initial organizations were formed, the new organizations that were formed right after Stonewall, they started to splinter as different groups found their voice and found their energy and decided they wanted to go their own way, like the radical lesbians and people of color. It was just, it was a complicated stew that led to a lot of creativity, but also an enormous amount of conflict within the movement right after Stonewall. Also right after Stonewall, Alfredo Diego Vinales, a young gay man who was grievously injured trying to escape a police station, fearing he might be deported became the center of an enormous media attention. The picture that ran in the daily news was gruesome and it suited that tabloid salacious taste. But I was wondering if there isn't something more than just tabloid interest that drove the media. Was there a sort of awakening to gay rights issues after Stonewall in the broader media? There was, because suddenly there were a lot of people. Before the Stonewall uprising,

the protests were small. And suddenly, with the Pride March itself in June of 1970, you had thousands of gay people in the street. And even before that, right after, within weeks after the Stonewall uprising, there was a protest march of hundreds of gay people, and no one had seen this before. So it was of interest to the mediawall uprising, there was a protest march of hundreds of gay people, and no one had seen this before. So it was of interest to the media. Suddenly, who are these people and what are they doing? And then with the Diego Vinales incident, where he jumped out the window of a police station after a bar raid, more than 170 people were arrested. The same exact inspector, Seymour Pine, led that raid at an after-hours club in a basement called the Snake Pit in the village. The pictures were of Diego Vinales impaled on a fence, and that is dramatic.

And that led to a very quickly organized protest of hundreds of gay people who marched to the police precinct that had led the raid of the Snake Pit. So yes, there was absolutely more interest by the media because suddenly there was this group of people, and not just in New York City, who were literally on the march. They couldn't be ignored anymore. So looking at the change in the way the media dealt with gay people before and after Stonewall

is very interesting to see. And when there were incidents of the press covering gay people in the ways that gay people didn't like, like the Village Voice used language in the immediate aftermath of Stonewall, and the Village Voice was an alternative newspaper that had an office right at the corner near Stonewall, people protested that immediately. So young gay people in particular weren't going to take it anymore, and they weren't going to put up with the press calling them names either.

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So you discussed the mythology of stonewall and how it has grown as an incident in lore even in our own series we may have fallen prey to that lore by overstating the the firebombs as you indicate where did this exaggeration come from and And what is the truer story? Well, it's challenging to find the truer story of what happened in Stonewall, because it's not as if there were six different newspapers covering the event. There are almost no, there are five extant photographs of the initial nights, and then some other photos from the New York Times from one of the later nights. There's no film footage at all. So it's a little hard to say exactly.

So we depend upon the accounts of people who were there. And the account that seems most true, and David Carter, who wrote a book on Stonewall, did an enormous amount of research on this. The account that sounds most true is that at one point, somebody got some lighter fluid and squirted it in through an opening at the base of the window that had been broken, that had been covered by plywood, but the plywood was still in place. But there was a little bit of space and they sprayed lighter fluid in and then someone lit the match. That was the extent of the fire. And there was a fire hose inside the bar,

from what I understand, and they sprayed and put the little fire out. But the fire. And there was a fire hose inside the bar, from what I understand, and they sprayed and put the little fire out. But the fire department was called in the interim. It makes sense that there's mythology around Stonewall. There's mythology around anything. And some of the myths are better than what happened. So, for example, one of the myths, which was promoted in the early days by the Daily News, and they're reporting about the Stonewall. They referred to a kick line of drag queens in high heels and I think bouffant hairdos singing the song that you had talked about in your episode, which actually was a song people sang,

although I've heard various lyrics, different kinds of lyrics. I asked one of the people who was there that night, Martin Boyce, about the high heels. He said, we weren't wearing high heels. He said, you couldn't run from the cops wearing high heels. We always wore flats. And it was people who were dressed in a mix of ways, from scare drag, which was just partial drag with your hair down and with makeup and some

female attire on the guys. But it was for the most part street kids who were in a kick line taunting the police. So what's a better myth or what's a better image? A kick line of people in flats and a mix of clothing and some makeup, some not? Or a kick line of drag queens in full regalia with bouffant hairdos kicking up high heels against the police? So I think what happens is that the stories that sound better often wind up being the ones that are remembered and embellished. And also there are people who wish to center certain individuals as having had a larger role, and perhaps they actually had, at Stonewall. I like to let the people I interview speak for themselves, like Marsha B. Johnson, who says in her interview with me, she didn't get there until two in the morning and most of it was over by then. But one of the popular myths is that Marsha B. Johnson threw the first brick. Marsha B. Johnson had a very important role, especially in the post-Stonewall era, in terms of her activism,

and also was at the Stonewall uprising and participated, but did not throw the first brick. No one knows who threw the first brick or rock. Each person at that particular riot, and for anyone who's been in a conflict with the police, knows where you're standing is the perspective you have, and it differs from someone who might be standing six feet away from you. I love some of the myths. They just happen to be myths. And the most definitive account really is in David Carter's book. And the account, in some ways, is not very interesting. What's more interesting to me is the story of what came before and what came after, and how Stonewall wound up being a pivotal moment in the movement. It's often the case in history that the pivotal moments are somehow mundane,

but it's undeniable also that Stonewall changed the gay rights movement. Yes, Stonewall exploded the movement and the raid of the snake pit as well in March of 1970. Those two events drew all kinds of people into the movement who hadn't been involved before. So you see a movement of maybe 40 to 60 organizations prior to Stonewall grow to up to 1,500 organizations across the U.S. in that first year. But what really cemented Stonewall in our memories was the first Pride March, one year, on the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which was an organized event.

Planning took months. And the people who organized it very clearly let other organizations know, other homophile organizations know, about this anniversary march and said they should hold an anniversary protest march as well and do it every year thereafter. So in a way, they branded Stonewall

and cemented Stonewall in memory. And I also think that the name helps. If the uprising had occurred at the Snake Pit or the Ramrod or some other gay bar, I don't think it would have had quite as great a branding power as the Stonewall did. But if you look back at the history and see what that first march was called, this is the one on June 28th, 1970 in New York City. And it was not actually the first march. The first march was in Chicago the day before. But in New York, it was called the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. They wanted the focus to be on the liberation of the streets and not on a mafia-owned bar that had already closed. So we have come to put the focus on Stonewall for a variety of reasons. And Stonewall is now shorthand for fighting

oppression. And it was absolutely a pivotal moment. But in that moment, did most people know that it was going to be a pivotal moment? Not right away. It's become such a pivotal moment now that we look back at it and don't even question. We assume that everyone knew at the time what had happened and what it would become. And I sometimes question some of the people who interviewed 30 years later say, I knew then X, Y, Z, or I knew it was going to be different. And it was different for some people because it gave voice to all of their rage. It was a chance for gay people to chase the police for a change rather than the police chasing gay people. Of course, the Stonewall Inn still stands, as you mentioned. It has become a sort of living monument. Recently, went through some fundraising to stay open during the COVID-19 crisis. But from your experience in reporting on this,

what have you heard about today's generation of LGBTQ millennials and their opinions of the building's significance? Well, Stonewall has become a really important symbol for people all over the world. I spent a lot of time down at the Stonewall, if not at the inn, at Christopher Park, which is right across the street. And Christopher Park is now a national monument. It's the Stonewall National Monument. The bar itself is not the national monument. It's the park across the street and the surrounding streets. It has over the decades become a symbol so that when happy events occur, like the passage of marriage equality or sad tragic events like the mass murders at the Pulse Bar in Orlando, Florida, people gather at the Stonewall Inn. It's become, as a symbol, it's become very important.

The bar itself, less so to my mind because it's not actually the bar that was there at the time. But symbolically, I see young people flocking there for all of these special, important occasions. And I think it will remain such forever after because it is now a national monument. President Obama declared it a national monument in 2016. So it is a little odd in some ways that a bar has become this symbol, but it is a very important symbol.

And among young people, no less important, perhaps even more important. It's people make a pilgrimage to that bar. I think of Corey Johnson, who is a city councilman in New York, who's the speaker of the city council, which is the second most powerful position in the city. He's openly gay, came to New York as a teenager

and the first place he went to when he came to New York from suburban Boston or from a small town outside Boston was the Stonewall Inn. For me, it doesn't have quite the same symbolism. New York as a teenager in the first place he went to when he came to New York from suburban Boston, or from a small town outside Boston, was the Stonewall Inn. For me, it doesn't have quite the same symbolism. In fact, because it is such a powerful symbol, I always felt that Stonewall set the life out of the room. It was like the person who goes to a party and there's no room for anybody else. So in some ways, in my own book, when I did my history book, I played down Stonewall, and I think I played it down too much. I think it actually is more important than the way in which I presented it in my book. In our series, we covered the gay rights movements from the 50s through the mid-70s. Since then, of course, the movement has grown, evolved,

faced the AIDS crisis in the 80s, fought for marriage equality, non-discrimination on many fronts, and now turns to embrace the trans community and queer people of color. Where is the movement now, and where do you think it's going? That's an excellent question, and I really look forward to answering it in 20 years, if I live so long. I don't know. It was really interesting to see the queer liberation march in New York City this year. The usual Pride March, which is sponsored by an organization called Heritage of Pride, was canceled. But this other protest march, which was held first last year, and the second annual march was held this year, was a march very much in the spirit of the views taken by the first organization formed after the Stonewall uprising in New York called the Gay Liberation Front,

which was an intersectional organization that really took the view that none of us is free until we're all free. So we see intersectionality at work in how the movement is evolving, that it's not just LGBTQ rights, it's the rights of all people, and certainly the rights of African-Americans and other people of color. So I think there'll be more of that. I don't know. We live in such a fluid moment. But what is clear to me is that there's no going back, that we've reached it. We've since passed a tipping point where LGBTQ people are willing to either go back in the closet or take second-class citizen status.

So I think we'll find out in the years to come. At this stage of my career, what I really enjoy doing is sharing this history with the younger generation to let them know that they have ancestors, they have a proud history, and that they don't have to reinvent the wheel, that a lot of these battles have been fought in the past using tactics that are just as valid today, and that they can take pride in who they are because those who came before us changed the world at a time when no one would have believed that the world could be changed in the ways that the world was changed. So what I hear from young people now who listen to my podcast and hear these stories and the voices of the people who live this history is they say, I didn't know I had ancestors. I didn't know

that I had grandparents. I feel such a sense of pride now, and I feel like I have a community. And it's not just for LGBTQ people. I think that all young people need to know the full breadth of our history, and it makes it so much more interesting. LGBTQ people are threaded throughout American history. It's just that we don't know it. Eric Marcus, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Lindsay, it was a delight, and I'm so impressed with the story you have told and the way you have told it about our history. It's an impressive effort, and thank you so much. That was my conversation with Eric Marcus,

journalist, author, and podcaster behind Making Gay History. Next on American History Tellers, the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 ushered in a new, more optimistic era following four brutal years of civil war. But as technological innovation and population growth soared, so too did government corruption. Millionaires flaunted their wealth, while the working class eked out a living in grinding poverty, and violent labor conflicts and explosive racial turmoil swept the nation. Join us next week for the first episode of our series on the Gilded Age.

From Wondery, this is Episode 5 of Stonewall from American History Tellers. On our next new series, the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 ushered in a new, more optimistic era following years of civil war. But as technological innovation and population growth soared, so too did government corruption. While millionaires flaunted their wealth, grinding poverty, violent labor conflicts, and explosive racial turmoil swept the nation. Join us for the first episode of our series on the Gilded Age. a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This episode was produced by Audrey Ngo. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marshall Louis, created by Hernan Lopez for

Wondering. I'm Tristan Redman, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. But when I discovered that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom. When I tried to find out more, I discovered that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into the murder in my wife's family, and I unearthed family secrets nobody could have imagined. Ghost Story won Best Documentary Podcast at the 2024 Amby's and is a Best True Crime Nominee at the British Podcast Awards 2024. Ghost Story is now the first ever Apple Podcast Series Essential. Each month,

Apple Podcast editors spotlight one series that has captivated listeners with masterful storytelling, creative excellence, and a unique creative voice and vision. To recognize Ghost Story being chosen as the first series essential, Wondery has made it ad-free for a limited time only on Apple Podcasts. If you haven't listened yet, head over to Apple Podcasts to hear for yourself.