Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Stonewall Uprising: Liberation & Mafia Exploitation

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

In 1969 America, it was illegal to be gay in 49 out of 50 states. You could be fired from your job and evicted by your landlord if you were found out to be gay. Whilst protests from the gay community and its allies had happened before there, anger against this oppression was reaching boiling point. As we move past the 54th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, we take a look at the significance of this fateful night. The Big Bang moment of a large-scale civil rights movement and what now marks Pride in our calendars each year. Who were the heroes who fought for LGBTQ+ rights in the years prior to what we now know as Stonewall? Why were the mafia so heavily involved the night of the riots? And what’s been the legacy of that courageous stand for civil rights in the years and decades since? Joining Kate today is Ann Bausum, author of Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights, to delve into the details of this pivotal moment in civil rights history. Find out more details here: http://www.annbausum.com/stonewall.htmlThis episode was produced by Stuart Beckwith, and edited by Tom Delargy. The 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 Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. Are you ready? Here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way and you should be an adult too.

So if you hang around and if you happen to be offended by the adult conversation on offer, then you really can't get mad at anybody except yourself because fair do's we did tell you. to the scene betwixters. It's 1 a.m. on a very, very hot and sticky summer's night in New York 1969. You are enjoying a few beverages at a local dive bar with your pals. Music is playing, people are dancing and you're having a right good time when all of a sudden the police raid the premises. Now this would be shocking, unless of course you were part of the LGBTQ plus

community at the time, and you were in one of the few gay-friendly bars in the city, in which case, a police raid, it might not have come as any great surprise to you at all. Police aggression towards this community was horribly commonplace at the time, but on that night, in the Stonewall Inn, the crowd fought back and they made history. The effects of which, thankfully, we still celebrate and build on today. But what were the circumstances that led up to that fatefulness? How were the mafia implicated? What happened in the aftermath? Well, today betwixt the sheets, we are going to find out.

What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, with me, Kate Lister.

As we approached the 54th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and another fabulous Pride month draws to a triumphant close, we thought that it would be interesting to explore the historical events that started Pride, the riots that happened at the Stonewall Inn. It was a big bang moment as far as LGBTQ plus rights are concerned, and yes, we remember it with glittery, and colour and rainbows, but events of that night were violent, dark and necessary. Their story is one of grit, bravery and solidarity.

Today we are joined by Anne Borsom, author of Stonewall Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights, and she's going to tell us not only about the events of that night, but events that were happening before it. Who were the courageous people fighting for LGBT rights before the Stonewall riots? What was their story? and how is the fight for gay rights indebted to what they did? I am ready if you are betwixters. Let's go back to 1969.

Welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. I'm only talking to Anne Borsom. How are you doing? Good and delighted to be with you. I am very, very thrilled that you are here because we're here to talk about your book on the Stonewall riots and on the cultural and historical phenomenon that was Stonewall.

It's a fantastic talk. and it's been a while. I've had to go back and look at the history again, so I'd have my facts straight, but I think I've got them ready for you, and I am so excited. The details that I've unearthed as I've gone back and refreshed my memory, so. Can I ask, what made you want to research Stonewall? I mean, it's fascinating anyway, but what was it that drew you to it? I have been writing primarily for children and teens since the late 1990s, early 2000, mostly books about social justice history. And gay rights history is, of course, a prime example of social justice history. And I knew enough about the Stonewall to know that that was a pivotal moment. And on the other hand,

I didn't feel like it was really my place to write about gay rights history because I'm a straight, middle-aged white woman in middle America. And I wasn't sure that that was my thing to do. But I carried that idea with me for about 10 years, waiting for other people to come forward to write about it. And I was encouraged by other of my peers to take on the topic. And then I was at a book event in South Dakota of all places. And a woman came up to me while I was signing a different book. And she got down on her knees so that we could be eye to eye. And she looked me in the eye. And she said, would you please write something like this about gay rights? And the way she said it and the look in her eyes and I didn't ask, what was the tragedy that brought you to kneel before me to say this?

But it really made an impression on me. And then the next day, the news broke about Tyler Clemente, who was a young man raised on the East Coast, who'd gone to college, was in his freshman year in college, and was so bullied and demoralized that he jumped from the George Washington Bridge. And so those two events happening the same weekend was like, I'm done waiting, I'm doing this. I feel passionately about the cause of social justice and I can bring that to this topic. Wow. That is a really powerful story. And it shows how important history is, doesn't it, in framing current events? It really does. And how cruel it is to, rob us of history because these are the stories that can help to get people like Tyler

through those darker moments and to inspire them to see a future where they fit to. And I really wanted to write a book that would make a difference like that. I actually wrote it in memory of Tyler. That's very, very powerful and moving. For anyone that's listening to this, and I don't know why anyone would be, but just in case anyone's listening to this and thinking, what's Stonewall? What are they talking about? Can you just give us a very quick overview of what that is when people say Stonewall? What are they talking about?

So Stonewall is and was a gay bar in New York City in the West Village, Lower Manhattan. And we can set the context for why it's important in a few minutes. But the essence of Stonewall is that in 1969, if I'm doing my math right, 55 years ago, I'm terrible at math. I'm even worse. Let's just say, yes, 55. Half a century ago. Wow. The police raided this bar. Many people misunderstand why it was rated. And the protests that followed were so monumental that many people say, and this isn't actually accurate,

but they say that it sparked the gay rights movement. There had been a gay rights movement beforehand. But what it did do is that it blew the lid off of that and turned it into a truly monumental force to be reckoned with. that pushed and pushed for gay rights and still does. Wow. The other thing that, again, is not necessarily recognized, but that Stonewall is essential for,

is inspiring those annual pride parades that we have every year. And that's a great story in and of itself, but people may not realize, but when they're marching at the end of June all around the world, they're not just commemorating gay pride. They're commemorating those events that happened in 1969. You mentioned there that it often gets referred to as the start of the LGBTQ plus rights movement. It wasn't.

There were movements and activists beforehand. But can you just set me the scene a little bit of like what was it like in America, and it's 1960s and earlier, to be a gay person? What is the scene there? Well, it's pretty grim. There are 50 states in the United States. In 1969 and before, 49 of them had laws on. the books that said it was illegal to practice sodomy for you to have same sex, even in your own home.

You could be fired from your job if your boss found out you were gay. You could be evicted by your landlord if your landlord discovered you were gay. If you were serving in the military and the military realized you were gay, you would receive a dishonorable discharge, which means you wouldn't get any service member benefits. You know, the police were harassing you all the time, of course, because you were considered a deviant, not just in the eyes of the law, but also in the eyes of the church, there was virtually no acceptance or total denial of any sort of acknowledgement of being homosexual as being something that was accepted in the church. So the church totally rejecting of people as sinners who were not heterosexual. For all of these reasons, families were also

challenged to welcome children as members of their family who outed themselves as being gay, came out of the closet, as it was called. People would get disowned, thrown out of their houses in an effort to discourage someone from being gay. They might literally be physically punished, tortured. There were examples that I read about of people who had literally been branded with irons or scalded with boiling water by family members. who were so concerned that their children were going to be damned forever,

that they would use physical punishment to try to discourage them from having these what were considered to be optional urges. There was no recognition, including in the medical community, that this was a normal expression of human feeling. It was considered a mental illness until after Stonewall to be a homosexual or gay or lesbian, LGBT, what we would call LGBTQ now. So it was grim. The suicide rate was notable, and this underground life existed for almost everyone. There were some careers where it was a little easier to be out and be gay like in theater. And there was a small but very dedicated activist group that started on the West Coast and spread to other cities, these groups that aren't as well known now, the Matashin Society. the daughters of Belitas, that were kind of the leading edge of the gay rights movement.

That was beginning in the 1950s, and that's basically the scene as we get ready for the Stonewall riots. There had been a few protests before that. Some had taken place in the spring of 1965 in Washington, D.C. And men and women, lesbians and gay men had come from mostly East Coast cities to walk picket lines in protest of their... displacement from society. And that same year, they also started what became known as the annual reminder protests, which would take place in Philadelphia on July the 4th, which is American Independence Day. And they would gather in front of Independence Hall and walk with picket signs, you know, very properly dressed in suits and skirts and so forth, silently carrying picket signs,

which was kind of a tactic in the 1960s, these nonviolent picket. just advocating for, you know, I'm not a deviant. I'm a human being just like you. And that tradition, that annual reminder protest, was the idea of someone that I had never heard of before, but I became very familiar with as I worked on this book named Craig Rodwell, who was born in 1940 in Chicago, knew from an early age that he was gay, and did not grow up with quite as much stigma, as some people did from that generation, relocated to the East Coast and settled in New York City by the late 1950s, and had already been involved in those early activist movements. And when he'd gone down to Washington, D.C. in 1965, he had gotten such a charge out of these

protests that he was like, well, we can't just stop. What are we going to do? And he said, I'm going to create a gay holiday. And his idea was this annual reminder. And so just keep that in mind as we talk about Stonewall because it all connects. Wow. Just listening to you talk there. I'm just struck by the bravery of these people. They're throwing people in jail. Right.

I'm not sure what the laws were in the US, but certainly in the UK, you could just get arrested for indecency, which was just anything related to being gay, basically. And you could get thrown in jail for it. I'm not sure if they would pull in similar stunts in the US, but you could be sent to conversion. You could be beaten, you could be arrested. And there are people fighting against this. The bravery of that is really astonishing to me. It is.

And someone like Craig had, you know, again, as a sign of his commitment, he had the ability to do this because he owned his own business. And the business he owned, he had started actually even after that. So I have forgotten how he supported himself during those earlier years. But in 1967, he started. a bookshop called the Oscar Wild Memorial Bookshop. It was in Greenwich Village and it was the first bookstore in the United States devoted to gay literature. Literature by and about gays and lesbians. And he was living and breathing this stuff clearly. I've never heard his name before.

That's incredible. Craig Rodwell. Yeah. I wish more people were writing biographies of him because I think he deserves one. I think so. So there's a huge amount of social. stigma around anything to do with LGBTQ. And the police are raiding establishments and bars, aren't they, that they suspect of being places where gay people gather? Well, they are, but by 1969, they're not supposed to anymore. Because by 1969, at least in New York City, you can drink if you're 18, you can drink if you're a homosexual. It used to be illegal. If you can believe it. That sounds so stupid. I mean, how do you know? Sorry, I can't have a drink. I'm gay. Yeah, exactly. I'm insane. The liquor authority had admitted in 1967 that that was kind of a stupid idea.

And then in 1968, a state judge had said that it was also ridiculous that it was illegal for people to dance together if they were of the same sex. So by 1969, three of the four things that could have gotten you arrested were okay, you could drink, you could dance, you know, you could drink if you were 18. And the one thing that was still illegal is maybe what you're describing too. It was called masquerading, at least in the U.S., and that was essentially cross-dressing. That was legal on Halloween, but that was the only day of the year. So anybody who was dressing up in gender inappropriate clothing. And it was literally defined, you had to prove that you had three gender appropriate articles of clothing on your body, or you could get arrested.

Oh, my God. And there's this great quote from one veteran of that era named Martin Boyce who said, mind you socks didn't count. So it was underwear and undershirt. Now, the next thing was going to ruin the outfit. And so this was what people were dealing with. I'm just thinking about what I'm wearing now. If I got arrested in 1960s, New York, would I have enough gender-affirming clothing on to pass this ridiculous test?

Well, this was a real problem, actually, because if you are familiar with your 1960s women's history, and I'm sure you are with this podcast, bras were going in the burn pit in the 1960s. So there went one of the chief forms of gender, you know, appropriate clothing. So lesbians in particular were in a real bind if they were dressing in a more masculine style. When you start to look into the laws around this, it just gets more and more ridiculous, doesn't it? And it's easy to laugh at it. But people were really being punished for this nonsense. I just can't imagine police officers dragging someone in off the streets and then demanding that they show them their gender-affirming clothes. It's just so bizarre.

So this is the situation. So, and it's very confusing, but tell me about Stonewall. Where was it and what was going on in this pub or bar, I should say? So Stonewall, it opened on March 18th, 1967. It was a mafia run bar. Mafia run? As in like the Italian mafia. Like the Italian mafia.

Yeah, the New York Mafia. Oh. The guy who started it was named Tony Lauria. His nickname was Fat Tony. Three of his partners were nicknamed Zuki, Tony the Sniff, and Joe. and then the local mafia neighborhood boss was Maddie the horse. So those were the proprietors who put this thing together on a wing and a prayer. It had been a burned out restaurant and their solution for dealing with that was to just paint all the walls black because that was the easiest way

to mask the fact that it had been fire damaged. And so they opened it in March of 1967. coincidentally, the same month that the state liquor authority has said it was okay to serve gay people booze, but they didn't know that that was going to be the case. So Fat Tony had applied for a liquor license for a type of establishment known as a bottle club, which technically was a private club that was a member's only thing. And it had a looser set of regulations. And the mafia, I thought it would be easier to get away with serving gay people. And it turned out they didn't need to open it as a bottle club, but by then they had. And so they just kept running it as a bottle club.

And they made regular payoffs to the police to allow the masquerading and, you know, any other illegal drug selling and consuming that was going on inside. And it was an extremely profitable business. They were making upwards of $40,000 a night on a weekend. in current, you know, if you inflate it for current times. And so it was a dark and grungy place. There literally was a bouncer with a door that had a slit in it that would slide back and forth.

And if you knocked on the door to get in, you know, the bouncer would slide the door open, give you a look. And if you looked like you belonged, you would come in. And you'd go through these sort of fake steps of signing a book like you were a club member. And there were bottles behind the bar that. had names on them as if they belonged to the patrons. There was very poor sanitation. There wasn't even a sink at this bar. So haven't helped. It's a real dive. It was a real dive. But it had an amazing attraction and that was it had music. And because it became legal to dance with same-sex

partners, this was a huge draw. And so it was a haven, even with all the grunge, even with the filthy bathrooms, even with the poor ventilation and the wet and the cologne and the smokiness and everything else. And it didn't just have one dance floor, it had two. And each one had its own jukebox. Each jukebox was kind of attuned to a different style of popular music. The front dance floor was more pop tunes, the back dance floor was more rhythm and blues and so forth. And it was 10 cents a song, three for a quarter. You'd pay it $3 to get it on a weekend. And, and And so you get two drinks as part of your admission. And by 1969, this had become such a trendy place that it even had on either end of the bar.

There were these, I think they were golden-colored cages that had scantily clad go-go boys in them who would dance along to the tunes. So that's what it looked like. And the people who went there were younger people, as tends to be the case with bars or pubs. At least, I think that's still true. I'm older and I haven't been to one in a long time. $3. That must have been quite a lot to pay to get in in 1969. I think that would have been quite a lot, actually.

It was a dollar on a weeknight, but $3 on a weekend. So were they quite rich the clientele? Oh, no, not so much. So this was probably your big splurge of the week. Some of them were. Some of them were closeted males who worked on Wall Street. And this was one of the few places they could go and be safe because they couldn't be gay at work or they'd get fired. But they could at the stone wall.

So that was certainly not a big setback for them. A lot of them were runaways, runaway youths who had come to New York from other cities. Many of them were sleeping on the streets. They were homeless. How did they afford the $3? Panhandling. I don't know how they did it. Turning tricks.

Wow. The commitment to it was that important to go. Hustling. just to be able to go. This was where cross-dressers would go, even though that was illegal. This was a place once they got inside. They were safe. And I'm using terms that relate to that era because the term transgender is a much more recent term. Transvestite cross-dressers, those were the terms that they were applying to themselves at that time. Drag queens, artists, performers, some lesbians, these were the sorts of people that went. You know, married men who were.

married to women, but because that was who they could be married to, they would go to the Stonewall. I'll be back with Anne after the short break. Join me, Alice Campbell, on Patented, a podcast by History Hit, where we bring you the fascinating histories of the world's most impactful inventions. We uncover the exceptional stories behind everyday objects. Snakes and Ladders is really a game about a karmic journey through stages of existence towards liberation.

Look back in time to understand technologies of the future. One of the really interesting things about it is that it showed just how hard AI in the real world really is. And we examine unexpected origins. Who or what invented sex? Yeah, fish. Fish for the ones that invented copulation and made sex intimate for the first time. For the answer to those questions and a whole lot more, subscribe to patented on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Join me for new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. Any chance that the mafia were running it because they were really invested in supporting the LGBT. You're so sweet.

The look on your face. Right, okay, I think I know the answer to that one then. That's a nice thought. The gay mafia. You know, those those ones that really wanted to help. No, right. No, I don't think so. There was money.

It was all about the. It's just money. Yeah. So they targeted the gay community because they knew they could exploit them to make money, really. Well, yes. And so this leads to the raid because by 1969, you know, the bar was increasingly legal, but being gay was still not. And so what the bar proprietors started to do was to blackmail some of the more affluent

people who were coming to the bar, especially those fellows working. working down on Wall Street. And in order to pay their blackmail, they started... Fat Tony. Fat Tony. Yeah. So just put all those benevolent thoughts out of your mind. Gone.

Okay? Gone, gone. Right. And so these men, in order to save their careers, were stealing negotiable bonds and selling them. And these bonds were showing up in Europe. And the authorities in Europe got in touch with New York and said, hey, there's this illegal bond trading going on. And before long, they traced it

back to the gay bars, not just the Stonewall, but this was a big thing. So that brings us to Seymour Pine. Seymour Pine was a deputy inspector for the New York Police Department. Get this, public morals section. I just love that we had a public morals section. The guy's called Seymour Pine. Seymour Pine. And he was a World War II. two veteran, and he was ordered to shut down the stonewall because of this blackmailing that was going on there. And blackmailing can be kind of hard to prove, but having the wrong liquor license is quite easy to prove.

And so that bottle club license was the reason that they raided the stonewall. They were going to prove that it wasn't a bottle club and that they were operating illegally. They were operating a gay bar illegally. And so he's ordered to shut it down and he makes his first raid to the Stonewall on Tuesday night, June the 24th, 1969. And it's a weeknight. It's a relatively quiet night at the bar. People have been in bar raids for decades by then. And so they're not totally shocked by this fact. And they're grumbly, but oh, well, whatever. And I don't know. that you could call it a mistake, but what turns out to not be such a good idea is to go back three days later on Friday, June the 27th for his next raid to gather more evidence. And he decides to wait until after midnight because he wants to be there when the bar is

fully pumping, you know, the most possible illegal activity going on. So Seymour Pine is, as I said, in the public morals section of the police department. He has nothing to do with the sixth precinct. The sixth precinct is the precinct that's in charge of the Stonewall. And these are cops who've been on the take from Fat Tony for years just to make their cut on what a gravy boat over there at the Stonewall. And so he doesn't want the sixth precinct knowing about this at all. And he puts together a small team, four undercover officers, two who come from the public morals section that are men. He recruits two undercover women from other precincts that aren't in the sixth precinct. And then there are three additional people

from public morals. And he's got a couple of other people on tap to join him, someone who works for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, who's tasked with double checking the quality of the alcohol. Because one of the things these bars were famous for was for watering down the booze. So that's his job. And then someone from the city's consumer affairs department and his job is to, you know, the bathroom's filthy. There's no sanitation or whatever. So they're going after them for like every kind of little misdemeanorie thing. Exactly. Okay. And they feel like they got a good plan after they get in, then they're going to notify the sixth precinct and get some help to come and piece of cake. It's not going to be a problem. I don't think Seymour Pines plan is, I'm seeing some

flaws in it here. Keep going. Tell us what happens. So he knocks on the door of the Stonewall at 120 in the morning. You can argue about, well, when did Stonewall happen? Was it the 27th or the 28th? But the riot and all begins on the 28th of June, the culmination of the night of the 27th. So 120 in the morning, he knocks on the door, you know, the slot opens, police raid, they got to let him in. So they do, but they flashed. the lights just enough so that everybody's like, holy cow, we're about to get raided. And think about it. It's 120 in the morning. It's packed. There are hundreds of people in a small space. You know, they've been drinking. They've been having fun for hours. Maybe they've been taking drugs, whatever.

Not a particularly happy crowd. They're already a bit grumpy about the earlier raid. So you can already, in hindsight, we can see this is not so good. But he manages to begin to get things organized in side that because they're the two rooms, he uses the back room, puts all the employees back there, sends the cross-drexers back there, and then has everybody else come to the front room where they're all going to have their ID screened and anybody who has a legal ID gets to leave. You know, think about this. This is 1969. So nobody has a smartphone.

Nobody has a cell phone. They have a two-way radio that they can't make work to let the sixth precinct know that they've got this raid going on. One of the officers actually has to leave and go to one of those old call boxes. Maybe you're too young. You don't remember those. That would be on the street corners. I remember.

And call in this raid. And you can imagine that maybe those sixth precinct officers aren't so happy about the fact that this has happened on their turf without their knowledge. But they do begin to make their way there on foot and in three squad cars. and slowly the people inside the bar are getting released outside the bar and they don't leave, which is kind of unusual. In, you know, past bar raids, you were glad to get away. And so you would just sort of melt away. But at this point, it's like, I have done nothing wrong.

You are in my bar. What the heck, people? And so they start watching. And they're worried because they have friends inside. And so they want to make sure their friends get up. okay. And so this evening goes through this emotional transformation from shock to sort of wonderment. And for a while, just sort of exuberance. You know, and this is New York City, mind you, you've basically got a little theater set up on the street. There happens to be a park right

across from the bar. So there's some open space. It's not, you're not just jammed up in this tiny little tight street, which is the way most of that neighborhood is. And the door opens every so often and somebody comes out. And pretty soon they're like, ta-da, you know, I'm here throwing their arms up in the air. The crowd is clapping and cheering. You've got a lot of performative people here. And who doesn't love a crowd? And so they're playing it up and coming out.

And then a paddy wagon shows up. Well, a paddy wagon, maybe your listeners know, a paddy wagon is the thing that looks like a package delivery vehicle, except it's designed to deliver people to the police station. And so that's grim because that means people are going to get arrested. And so then it's like, well, are my friends going to get arrested? I need to wait and see that. And it's, you know, after midnight in Greenwich Village, which is this center of activity. In New York City is famously known as the city that never sleeps like all big cities.

And so their passerby is coming by. And one of them is Craig Rodwell. Remember Craig? I do remember Craig, yes. And so he stays, just like so many of the other of these passers by, and he's witnessing this too. And Craig is like, hmm, there's an energy here. Something is going to happen.

And other people are feeling like that too. And this is a chaotic scene. And like any moment in history, it can be hard to have a linear account of what happened because you have, you know, competing eyewitness views that saw this and didn't see that. Other people saw this. But there tends to be almost uniform agreement that the thing that really sparked the crowd was when they began arresting the lesbians or people who appeared to be lesbians, one of them in particular who put up quite a fight,

refusing to cooperate with getting put into a squad car. The paddy wagon was full at that point. You know, she was put into a squad car and got out of it more than once and a police put her back in. And at one point, this person who most historians think was a woman, a lesbian, turns to the crowd and says, why don't you guys do something? And that's it. And so they do. And they start by throwing pennies at the cops. You know, pennies in America are made out of copper.

So this was like copper for the cops. And so they're throwing pennies. then they're throwing larger pieces of change, nickels and quarters. And then again, this is 1969. So any liquid is coming in a glass bottle. We don't have plastic water bottles. And most of them are returnable. So you've got glass wine bottles, glass beer bottles, glass soft drink bottles.

They start getting pitched too, very handy weapons. Just grab the neck and toss. And so glass starts shattering. So people are like, holy shit, I'm going to call my friends. Okay, don't have cell phones, but they do have pay phones. That costs a dime too. And they're pay phones everywhere. This is a very busy hub in lower Manhattan. So they're calling their friends. Get down here. Get down to the stone hall. So the crowd keeps growing. And as the paddy wagon begins to depart and those squad cars, things have escalated to the point where people are throwing cobblestones. They're pulling cobblestones out of the sidewalks. They found a pile of bricks at a construction site. And they're heat. those at the facade of the stonewall. At the police. They're not, I don't think, targeting individual police officers,

but squad cars were getting hit with bricks, et cetera. I'll just say remarkably, no one was seriously injured in all of the events that are happening and are to follow. By the time those paddy wagons and squad cars disperse, and, you know, Seymour Pines largely been inside, and he's outside seeing them drive away, and he's like, holy shit too. This is terrifying. It's big.

It's big. And he's told the sixth precinct guys, go drop those people off and get your butts back here immediately. He looks to these, you know, handful of people that were with him originally in the raid. That's about all he's got left with. Fewer than 10 people. Maybe there's one police officer. And he says, let's go inside. I think we'll be safer there.

So they go inside. They closed the door. This was actually a pretty secure door. I think there was a bar that they could lower. cross it. And that really pisses people off because now the police are occupying the stonewall. And so all hell breaks loose. And amazingly, a group of hunky men collaborate, they rip a parking meter out of the ground and they turn it into a battering ram and start trying, you know, bam, bam, against the door trying to break it in. And people are,

looking for anything that they can throw at the scene. The city had these metal wire mesh garbage cans and emptying those, throwing that at the door. Eventually, they get to the point where they're lighting the trash on fire and trying to set fire to the windows. There's a fury here, just an amazing fury. And it's not just a fury at the night. It's a fury at all those things we talked about before, Kate, that you'd lose your job. You'd kicked out by your family. you're homeless on the streets, and by God, you can't even go dance to the Supremes at your favorite gay bar, and you've had it. So the door finally gives way, and Seymour Pine reaches out and grabs someone from the mob and brings him in. And amazingly, the person who gets drug inside

is this guy named Dave Van Runk, who was a folk singer at the time. And any of your listeners who know the movie Inside Llewellyn Davis, that's actually... actually based on Dave Van Rock, whose non-musical claim to fame was that he got drug inside the Stonewall, beaten up and handcuffed to a radiator for just wandering by. He had been eating at a restaurant. He's like, huh, what's going on, man? And shows up and pretty soon he's chained to a radiator inside the Stonewall. Was he gay? Or was he just just just walk past? Oh, my God. Not that that would have been okay if he was, but just he was just literally walking past and got grabbed. Well, he's stuck around to watch, but yeah. Still. Yes, still. And so by now, Kate,

they're like 2,000 people. Wow. This crowd has grown. More than 30 minutes go by. Those 6% people aren't hustling back to the stonewall. And the people inside are truly beginning to fear for their lives. There is no credible exit from the building besides that front door. At one point, they find a little air vent. I think it's in the bathroom. And the smallest, skinniest, of the two female officers is just able to sneak through it and get out onto the roof. And is she sent to go, go get help. And Seymour Pine is coaching everybody inside. He sizes up the situation. And of course, the police officers, it's the U.S. They have guns. But he's like, this doesn't make sense. We can't start using our weapons. That doesn't fit the crime that we came

here. And anyway, we're so terribly outnumbered. And if one person starts shooting, everybody will start shooting. It's going to be horrible. And so he's literally going from man to man, woman to woman. Anybody who's left with a gun puts their hands on their shoulder. He had trained people in World War II. And he had learned that if he did that and just talked one on one, he could usually calm somebody down. And finally, it takes 45 minutes, but the forces arrive. So we're now well after two in the morning. And you've got 2,000 angry people outside. you've got these people trapped inside. Mind you, you still have people trapped inside

who are part of the gay community too, who couldn't fit in the last paddy wagon. And you would think, oh, okay, well, that does it. But that doesn't do it. Things go on until about four in the morning. And one of the more remarkable things is that among the people who show up, we got firefighters, we got police officers

from multiple precincts, and then there are these officers in, New York had called the Tactical Patrol Force. And if you've seen old pictures from the 60s, these are the guys with the shields and the billy clubs, et cetera, who were designed to deal with riots. These were the riot police, basically. They show up, and their job is to clear the streets. It's like, get these folks out of here. We're done with this nonsense. And most of them came from other parts of New York. They had not been in this neighborhood before. And Greenwich Village If you took your hands and you laced your fingers together, that's about what the map looks like.

Wow. At an angle. There's no north-south. It's just crazy. And lots of streets that are very short, streets that are one way in one direction, one way in another direction, streets that bend in goofy ways. And the crowd knew that area perfectly. The tactical patrol force, the TPF, they didn't have a clue. And so their techniques did not work there, particularly with this crowd.

One of the things I admire the most is this tenacity of these young people, especially, members of what we would now call the trans community, the most marginalized people, the ones who were street savvy, they taunted those police officers and outsmarted them because they knew that while the police were pushing in one direction down a street with a crowd, this group of young people could run around the block and then come behind them. You know, they're having to turn around, go back, other way and it's sort of like a comic book or something. You're not making any headway at all. These kids, you know, they had their own slang. They even had their own song.

There's a Stonewall song? Well, it was a gay kids song and they started taunting the police with it. I am not a singer, but if you would like me too, I will sing you. Oh God, yes. This song and just imagine while they're singing it, they're doing a can can. Okay, so they've locked arms and they're doing a can-can. We are the village queens. We always wear blue jeans. We wear our hair and curls because we think we're girls. I love it.

They're in their uniforms. You know, they're shales, the toughest guys in the world. And these queer folks are doing the can-can taunting them. And this is 1969. We've had the race riots. We've had fire hosing of children in Birmingham. We've had the Democratic National Convention in 1968 where protesters are beaten by the police.

And the police always won, at least on the battlefield. And they're not this time. The gay people have outsmarted them. And eventually, they just sort of got bored. And they went home. And, you know, about four in the morning, they melted in to the neighborhood. And the riot ended.

Wow. So it was kind of a draw at that point. A draw, I love that. I think maybe upper hand to the Stonewall crowd. Oh, my God. Let me ask you a really important question. It's much contested. Who threw the first punch?

Who threw the first punch? I don't think I could answer that. I think we'll ever know. And were there punches? I think there were more objects than punches thrown. I don't know that it turned into literally a fistfight brawl kind of a thing. but you know who threw the first punch Seymour Pine knocking on that door

because I've heard that it was Marsha P. Johnson I've heard that it was her and I've heard that it was Stormy de Lavier as well all claiming to have been the ones that kind of started actually I think Marsha P. Johnson later said that they weren't there for the actual start of it but yeah there's all this kind of mystique

isn't there about who was it who started it? Yeah exactly you know I was thinking about this and the example that came to my mind is is it 1964 when the Beal came to the U.S. and they were on the Ed Sullivan show. Well, I honestly cannot remember if I saw them on the Ed Sullivan show, I would have been a kid, but I've seen that clip so many times that I feel like I saw them on the Ed Sullivan show. And I couldn't give you an honest answer

of whether or not I saw it or not. And I think there was this sort of aspirational aspect to Stonewall. You know, they'd heard about it so long. You might not even be able to sort out where your participation sort of virtually became physically. And also, the Stonewall riots didn't just end that day. There was continuing disruption for several days afterwards. Wow. So people who might not have been there the first day may well have been back one of those subsequent days. It wasn't until the final sort of punctuation of violence was on the next Wednesday. So it took quite some time to kind of put out all the fires, so to speak. So this was more, it's like mobilized action throughout New York of people rioting and throwing things and burning things.

No, back down at the stonewall. Just the next morning, people wanted to see it. It's like they'd heard about it. They'd missed it. They came down, you know, just broken glass everywhere. The police showed up to keep order. And that just pissed people off. There was taunting tension, et cetera.

And so it took some time for that to kind of dissipate. And as I said, it wasn't until the following Wednesday. day that the final conflicts happened that were directly an aftershock of that initial raid or that big Friday raid. When did the bar open again? Did it open again? I mean, I know that it's still there. Yeah, good question. So actually, one of the objectives that Seymour Pine had had going to the bar was to destroy it. So he had brought equipment to saw the bar up, the physical bar, to destroy the chute boxes. There are pictures afterwards that show them they look like they'd been bashed in with baseball bats or something and to haul the pieces of the bar out of the

facility. And amazingly, that Tony, very resourceful, managed to open it again the next day. And he brought in a portable sound system and he only served soft drinks. And he was quoted as saying, you know, we run a legitimate joint here or something like that. The bar didn't last for long. It did close. I think it was later that year and it's opened and closed since, but it is currently open. Well, maybe not now. I'm not sure it's bar time, but it will be. And do you have just been spellbinding to listen to? You really have. And my final questions, I was going to ask, what's the legacy of Stonewall? But we can see the legacy of it all around us. So my final question would be, what did Stonewall change? Because as you said, there'd been movements before. They'd been protests before. But

Stonewall did something? What was it about those events that, what did it change? I think what it changed was that you were able to take a bar full of people and the fact that they reacted with anger communally helped to unite them for a common purpose in a way that just being gay perhaps had not. They hadn't realized that they had an actual community. You know, everybody was as angry as they were and that if they put that feeling together, they could really change something. If they could stop the police in New York City of all places in the 1960s, think of the power that they had. And, you know, I'm going back to Craig Rodwell again. And remember, we talked about how he wanted to found a gay holiday. Well,

he was there. And by the next day, he knew he'd found his holiday. And so it was his idea to have that gay pride parade on the one-year anniversary. Wow. And for years, he helped to coordinate that not only in New York, but through the network that was building not just across the country, but around the world. And the original one was called the Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day. It wasn't a parade about the bar. He didn't even like the bar. He hated the fact that the mafia was exploiting gay people. But that was Christopher Street.

That was the liberation spot for the movement. And you still have, I think especially in Europe, they're often called Christopher Street parades. Do I have that right? I think there is. I've not heard the expression before, but I trust your research on that. Maybe in Germany at least. I feel like I've seen that, that that's a pretty common way to tag those parades, the Christopher Street. So, you know, and of course the site was made a historic landmark by Barack Obama before the end of his presidency.

So it is worth a visit if you can ever come to New York. Oh, when I come to New York, it'll be one, absolutely one of the places that I want to visit. And you have been amazing to talk to you about this. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Are you on social media at all? I stay so busy writing books. I'm terrible at social media. But I do have a great website.

It's just my name, Annbossom.com. So go visit the Stonewall page. I also wrote a book about HIV AIDS. So you can... Give us the title. Viral. The Fight Against AIDS. in America. Amazing.

Anne, thank you so much for joining me today. You've been an absolute treat. Well, you've been a good listener. I feel like I've cut you off and interrupted you endlessly, but you hit my button. It was the day. I was there. I was in the zone with you, Anne. Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you, Kate.

Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Anne for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want us to explore a subject, or we just want to say hi, guys. please email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We have got episodes on everything from Warrior Women

to the trans trailblazer April Ashley, all coming your way. This podcast was produced by Stuart Beckworth, edited by Tom Delagie, and the senior producer with Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.