Throughline - Before Stonewall

Episode Date: June 27, 2019

Fifty years ago, a gay bar in New York City called The Stonewall Inn was raided by police, and what followed were days of rebellion where protesters and police clashed. Today, that event is seen as the start of the gay civil rights movement, but gay activists and organizations were standing up to harassment and discrimination years before. On this episode, the fight for gay rights before Stonewall.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Before we get started, a quick heads up. This episode contains language that some might find objectionable, including slurs. Okay, on to the show. Homosexuality is an enigma. Even in this era of bold sexual mores, it remains a subject that people find disturbing, embarrassing. There is a growing concern about homosexuals in society,

about their increasing visibility. The Queens were the only ones that ever fought. The Queens were the only ones that made the bars that the rest of us could sneak into. And we could be gay for one night. The dilemma of the homosexual. Told by the medical profession he is sick. By the law that he's a criminal. We're going to do things, demonstrate and carry picket signs and be like Dr. King and

take over. You know, we don't want to sit here in a closet anymore and play bingo. We can go out and do stuff and take over the world and change everything. Shunned by employers, rejected by heterosexual society. I think it takes a lot of courage. And I think a lot of people who do it will suffer because of it but I think any movement needs a certain number of courageous martyrs. At the center of his life he remains anonymous, a displaced person, an outsider.

It was the match that started the renaissance of awakening if you will. We stood up and were counted. Hey, I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Rand Abdel-Fattah. And on this episode of ThruLine from NPR, Before Stonewall. Exactly 50 years ago, on June 28, 1969, a gay bar in New York City called the Stonewall Inn was raided by police. Again. So many aspects of being gay were criminal at the time.

Bars could refuse to serve homosexuals. And a lot of gay bars, including the Stonewall, were run by the mafia, who paid bribes to the police to stay in business. Gay patrons were frequently entrapped by plainclothes police for solicitation. They could be arrested for dressing as, quote, the opposite sex. And all of this led to a climate in which gay people felt hunted by the police. So it was in this climate on June 28th that patrons of the Stonewall decided they'd had enough. They started days of rebellion that captured the attention of the city and the nation's media.

They challenged the taboo of being identified as gay. They physically fought the police, refusing to passively accept their harassment. And today, Stonewall is seen as the start of the gay civil rights movement. But is it? To better understand Stonewall, we wanted to start of the gay civil rights movement. But is it? To better understand Stonewall, we wanted to know what came before it. Who were the people and what were the events that set an example of standing up to the prevailing harassment and discrimination of the time? Answering this question isn't easy.

Gay history is hard to find. Gay rights organizations were often secret. Gay activists used pseudonyms in public. Harassment of gay people rarely made the news, and acts of defiance by members of the gay community made the news even less. But we met Eric Marcus, who offered us a window into that history. Eric runs an organization and podcast called Making Gay History. Back in 1988, Eric was working as a producer for CBS News. What I really wanted was to be on the other side of the camera, out in the field doing stories as

an on-air reporter. And I was told after speaking with an executive that they would never put an openly gay person on camera for CBS National. So I took this opportunity and left CBS and wrote a proposal for making what was then called Making History. In two years, Eric found and interviewed dozens of people. And his book, Making History, was published in 1992. Once done, he gave his audio recordings to be archived at the New York Public Library. Then, more than 20 years later, in between jobs, Eric checked in on the tapes he'd made and found that the New York Public Library had digitized them. And so he set about creating a podcast that would feature the voices of these little or unknown civil rights pioneers.

I hadn't listened to these stories in 30 years. To hear these voices again with these rich accents and language that people don't use anymore. And to hear stories that I'd forgotten and to hear interviews that I'd completely forgotten was thrilling. Making Gay History was born. Eric said that one of his episodes was with a man named Jim Kepner. Kepner was a bit of a hoarder of materials from the early LGBTQ civil rights movement in California. Eric was talking to him about his collection, but was struck by one of Jim's early memories of seeing

a raid on a San Francisco bar in 1943. The late spring of 43. So Jim in 1943 was going to a gay bar, and I think this may have been the first time he was at a gay bar. When I was trying to come out, a friend had told me about the black cat in San Francisco. I was going to join my brothers and sisters for the first time. I was on a cloud of idealism, so high that I was walking on Montgomery, four inches above the sidewalk. I got almost to the door. I think I touched the door. And all of a sudden, a whole bunch of San Francisco policemen burst through the door.

I didn't see them coming. I had by this time read eight or ten novels and had read several accounts of bar raids. So I knew what was happening. I wanted to do something. But instead I hid in the doorway across the street. Feeling cowardly, feeling guilty. And the first view I got of my brothers and sisters was about 12 or 15 drag queens and 12 or 15 men, the kind that would now be called clones, San Francisco clones.

Jim uses an old term here, clone, to refer to men who dressed in stereotypically macho clothes. All of the clones were looking guilty as if they were being led to the fate which they so richly deserved. And all of the queens were struggling and sassing the cops. And it took me about a year and a half to understand why I felt good when I heard one of the queens scream at the policeman who was shoving her, don't shove you bastard or I'll bite your fucking balls off. That queen paid for that. Paid in blood. In blood.

They beat her. And beat two or three of the others. And I was still hiding in the doorway. Wanting to do something, wanting to shout something. I wouldn't have known what to shout. The Queens were the only ones that ever fought. The Queens were the only ones that made the bars that the rest of us could sneak into. And we could be gay for one night.

What we see over and over again, through the early history in particular, is that the people who challenged police oppression were those who had the least to lose. Those were often street kids. Those were teenagers who were thrown out of their homes, who were making their living on the street as best they could. They were people who would call themselves today gender nonconforming, who also had no place in the world. So in those years, and at Stonewall as well, the people who most quickly fought back against the police were gender-not-conforming kids, drag queens, people who dressed in scare drag, those who didn't have regular jobs and regular homes. In this episode, we're going to hear about a few people and moments of resistance that came before Stonewall that aren't as well remembered.

Coming up, how the fight for gay rights went, the gay rights movement, according to Eric, was mostly made up of a group of outsiders with little to lose. But there was also another part of this very fragile movement. People with mainstream jobs from higher social classes with seemingly more to lose. But there was also another part of this very fragile movement. People with mainstream jobs, from higher social classes, with seemingly more to lose. These were people who were fighting for their place in the mainstream culture. And the people in this part of the movement created two of the earliest gay civil rights organizations and social clubs, the Mattachine Society for Gay Men and the Daughters of Belitis for Gay Women. They had many local chapters that were led by people like Barbara Giddings and Frank Kameny.

These are people who, I don't know why, and they couldn't explain it. They simply rejected the prevailing beliefs about gay people. And Frank Kameny is one of my favorites because he was fired from his job in 1957 with the federal government. Eisenhower signed an executive order in 1953 banning homosexuals from government employment. And gay people were hounded out of their jobs, both in the military and in federal employment. During what came to be known as the Lavender Scare, which was concurrent to the Red Scare, Frank was fired in 1957. And he decided that his government had gone to war against him,

and he would go to war against his government. And he led a one-man campaign to get his job back and fought all the way up to the Supreme Court in 1961. They didn't want to hear his case. And so he formed the Manishing Society of Washington, D.C. And I love talking to him because he was so certain of himself that homosexuality wasn't just not immoral, it was decidedly moral. And he had a plan, and he led the first public protests in front of the White House and the State Department. He branded, he was once accused of trying to brand gay people like toothpaste, because he insisted at these protests that people dress appropriately if you

want to have a job, dress like you want a job, and all the signs were coordinated. And to look at the old pictures now of those protests, we think people often look through the contemporary lens and are critical, saying these people were accommodationists or assimilationists. But imagine 1965 when people are saying the most hideous things about homosexuals, that relations between two people of the same sex is illegal, you could be fired from your government job, you are considered mentally ill and sinful. And you go out in public with a sign saying that homosexuals deserve equal rights. Those people were brave. And there was someone in a photo of that protest named Ernestine Eckstein. Yes, Ernestine Eckstein.

Who was she? She was the Holy Grail for me in 1988, 89, when I was researching. Because here was this photograph of a protest in front of the White House and an African-American woman, the only one visible in this photo, and there were only like a dozen people in the protest. And there she is carrying a sign

and she's wearing cat's eye, white framed sunglasses. And I managed to find the name Ernestine Eckstein, which is a pseudonym. That's not her real name. I could not find Ernestine Eckstein, could not find her anywhere. It turns out, and my executive producer found the tape, there was an interview with Ernestine Eckstein and there was an interview with Ernestine Eckstein. And there was her voice. It's a very funny kind of thing, because I always had strong reactions to women. This was a blank that had never been filled in by anything.

Reading, experience, nothing. Through age 22, graduated from college. I'd never known anything about this. And you didn't know there were other people who felt the way you did? No, I didn't. I imagine for someone like her, a black woman in the movement, I mean, she was facing a challenge on multiple fronts. And she had a civil service job.

So if she was recognized, she could lose her job. And she also posed for the cover of The Ladder, which was the magazine of the Daughters of Belitis, a lesbian magazine. So they shot her in a way that she wasn't that easily identifiable, but it was considerable risk for somebody like that. And I cannot begin to imagine what it was like. I was scared when I went on television for the first time for my book. I remember somebody calling in and saying, how can you just go on television and tell people that you're gay? But someone like Ernestine took enormous risks to go out there in public, but she really believed in the importance of being out. I personally consider myself very

average and normal in every sense of the word, not radical. This to me is the way to be. Now, I think compared to other lesbians, my ideas are farther to the left. Most lesbians that I know endorse picketing, but would not themselves picket. Do you believe in forms of civil disobedience for our movement at this time or in the future? Picketing, I regard as very, almost a conservative activity now. Oh, no. I mean, it is. It is, you know, and that kind of thing are the thing.

Yeah. Yeah. And all the educational process of calling attention to the unjustness of the situation, which is the same thing that Negro did. Well, one thing I would like to see is a kind of respect for self-development among all homosexuals,

so that they can date in public, for instance, openly, so they can react, as other people do, to situations publicly, not become professional homosexuals, but feel a kind of freedom within themselves. I think it's a personal thing. I don't think this is part of the movement. I think this is a personal thing. I don't think this is part of the movement. I think this is a personal thing. But do you think it's possible in the present climate of opinion for homosexuals who have self-confidence in themselves to do this openly?

I think it takes a lot of courage. And I think a lot of people who do it will suffer because of it. But I think any movement needs a certain number of courageous martyrs. And there's no getting around it. That's really the only thing that can be done. You have to come out and be strong enough to accept whatever consequences come. So Ernestine set out a challenge for people in the movement in those days, but left the movement because she felt it wasn't moving fast enough. She dropped people in the movement in those days, but left the movement because she felt it wasn't moving fast enough. She dropped out of the movement in the late 60s. I know she was very frustrated from what I've discovered recently. She was very frustrated with the movement, that it was

too tentative. She was young. She was in her mid-20s. She brought all of her experience from the Black Civil Rights Movement with an awareness that the gay movement was nowhere near where the black civil rights movement was. So they couldn't use the exact same tactics, but she really wished that they would be more aggressive. So there have always been visionaries, and they have challenged us to do things that we might not have imagined possible. Basically, what we're trying to impress on people are two very similar things. We are homosexual human beings and homosexual American citizens. Everybody always remembers the first word in both of those phrases, homosexual. This effort by Ernestine Eckstein and Frank Kameny to be visible

was continued with what were called the Reminder Day protests. So the Reminder Day protests were organized by a number of different groups, a number of different gay rights groups. In those days, they were called homophile organizations. They were held every July 4th in Philadelphia in front of Independence Hall to remind the American public that gay people did not have their constitutional rights.

This was at a time when people in my profession were in higher demand than they had been in all of human history. And I could not get a job specifically because... Because they could be fired from their jobs, thrown out of the military. And this was a protest demanding those rights. And you see in the photographs, and there's even some film of these protests,

you can see people marching in a very orderly way with coordinated signs, and the women are in skirts and heels, and the men are in suits and ties. And it was revolutionary. I think everybody has to get, everybody should get a chance to live their life the way they wish.

We are seeking for recognition, equality. We are seeking our human dignity. Something interesting about the Reminder Day march is because people think that the first marches came in 1970 with the first gay pride march in New York, which was called the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade or March in 1970. There were five Reminder Day marches beginning in 65. The last one was just after Stonewall on July 4th, 1969. And then an organization, they voted to move the Reminder Day protests from July 4th to mark Stonewall the last Sunday in June and to do it for every year thereafter.

So what most people don't know, and I only learned this through my research, was that the first Pride March in New York, and there was also one in Chicago and LA, those were the descendants of the Reminder Day protests. The Reminder Day protests were planned and strategic, but Eric said that across the country there were countless people who, finding themselves caught up in some kind of crackdown, just decided to fight back.

Coming up, how a couple of lawyers' lives were changed when they organized a dance and the police showed up. Evander Smith and Herb Donaldson were two San Francisco lawyers who were part of... A 1965 January 1st fundraising ball that was organized by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. I love that. That name, it just sounds so retro. And it was organized to help fund the work of the council, which was formed by a group of progressive ministers in San Francisco. And it was a costume ball. Evander and I were involved in meeting with the police to make sure that there wouldn't be any police interference. Because at that time, the police took the position that the only time you could dress up in drag was on Halloween.

And this was going to be a gala affair in which if you wanted to go in drag, you could. It wasn't Halloween. And then the police went back on their word. But they told us in advance that they had changed their minds. So what actually happened then that night? We were the attorneys there at the door, and we were there to make sure that everything was only up and up so that there couldn't be any reason to make any arrests.

And then they started coming in, making inspections. Everything was only up and up so that there couldn't be any reason to make any arrests. And then they started coming in, making inspections. They were the plainclothes police. They would come in. I remember there was a fire inspection. That's right. We had several. There was a health inspection.

Right. And I think it was about the fourth inspection we just said. Where we said that's enough inspections. We said, no. If you want to come in, either give us your ticket or the search warrant. And it really was completely unplanned. They didn't know what to do, and we didn't know what to do. Were you standing facing each other? Yes.

We were frightened. We were just standing there, and they were standing there, because, you know, they didn't know what to do either. They didn't believe that we would stand them up. They could have gone right past us. Except they didn't know what they were. They were afraid of us, too. Right.

Then all of a sudden, there were a whole bunch of police in uniform came in. I thought that, you know, when police arrested you, they said, you're under arrest. And I just... And they never did tell us that. And they grabbed me, one on each side. And I said, am I under arrest? I mean, what a silly question. Am I under arrest?

And they'd already hauled you out to the paddy wagon. one on each side. And I said, am I under arrest? I mean, what a silly question. Am I under arrest? And they'd already hauled you out to the paddy wagon. And then they put us in jail. They sure as hell did. There was a court case, and it led to dramatic changes in San Francisco. There were new organizations formed. I knew nothing about this ball, and I just love hearing Evander and Herb

talk about this event. They were both young attorneys. One worked for himself. The other worked for a fancy law firm. Sometimes Evander and I will talk, and the kids coming up now, they can't, I tell you, they can't enjoy their freedom as much as we have because they take it for granted that it was always like this, that they could walk arm in arm and kiss on the street and so forth. And I mean, I've represented several couples who were arrested for having a hand on the other's knee in a bar. I mean, something as innocent as that. And I'll tell you, when we went home, Jim and I, we went to bed and I was so touched because he said, oh I'm so proud of you. Because I was really feeling kind of low because I thought,

I mean there goes my legal career. This is Jim, your lover. Yeah. Poor Evander was fired from his job. I got up early the next morning, went down to get the chronicle. And of course they had our names. And there it was on the front page. Names and addresses. And I was just sick and I thought, oh shit. When I went to work after having been arrested, boy, just my own secretary, nobody would have anything to do with me.

I knew something was wrong. then thought, well, there is nothing short of a total earthquake to sink the city that will keep me from being fired. Therefore, you know, I think I'll go out with my self-respect. You know, I can be very effective on my feet, so I took this show away from them. Everybody was frightened. In a courtroom, I'm not frightened, but I was frightened then because... Well, there goes your security. Yeah, I was just going to say my economic security was at stake. Do you have any regrets about that, Dan, about being arrested? None whatsoever. No, it actually was one of the peak experiences. I mean, sometimes peak

experiences, you experience them afterward, but it was. Now, having agreed to that, and I wholeheartedly And that arrest has affected me materially. I've never been one to lead the parade. It exacerbated my feeling of insecurity and being less worthy than I think people should be able to be. Herbert, it was like water off a duck's back for you. Now what was the significance of the dance? The significant boy had galvanized the gay community into action. Absolutely. One of the things that was really humorous is that the police made this estimate there were

70,000 homosexuals in the city. No, there weren't. But when they advertise all over over, I mean, when it's carried on the wire services, there are 70,000. You've got 70,000 others out in the country who want to come and join that 70,000 here. That's what the wire service has carried on the streets? Oh, yes. Yeah, I mean, San Francisco, the police estimate the population was 70,000. Hasn't stopped growing yet. That's right.

There's a consequence. I mean, we're still coming. I honestly think that it was the match that started the renaissance of awakening, if you will. So Stonewall, which happened in New York, really was quite late. It was. Because this was as much a confrontation.

It didn't have some of the violent overtones, but we stood up and were counted. So after they did the ball on January 1st and it changed things in San Francisco, were they remembered for that activism? Did that kind of color their life from that point on? When I interviewed Evander, who was Native American, he talked about how it really changed his life and not in good ways.

It really hurt him. He felt very bad about the arrest. He was fired from his job. He went to work with Herb Donaldson after he was fired, but he kept a low profile. Herb Donaldson, however, went on to become a judge, openly gay, one of the first in California who was openly gay to be made a judge. So he remained very active. So certainly they were known, Herb Donaldson much more than Evander, because Evander kept a low profile after that. At almost the same time that Herb and Evander were getting attention in San Francisco,

new activists were trying to find ways to address problems particular to New York City. Dick Leitch got involved in the Mattachine Society because of a relationship he had with someone who was already a member. Dick and his friends were part of a new guard, and they quickly began to push the organization to be less of a social club and more of an advocacy organization. It was really in transition because half of it was this bunch of old farts. They spent all these years sitting there,

and they had bridge parties, and they had bunco parties, and were looking so desperately for a pat on the head. Who were they looking for? Who do they want the pat on the head. Who were they looking for? Who do they want the pat on the head from and why do they want it? Anybody. Anybody.

Just somebody who says, it's okay to be gay, honey. It's okay to be gay. Sure, you're worthy, honey. You're as good as anybody else. Don't let them knock you down just because you're queer. What characterized the radicals?

What did they want that different? All Julia was up. She was the only politician. I mean, he wanted to build voting blocks and do all this kind of stuff. And Craig and Randy wanted to demonstrate and carry picket signs and be like Dr. King and take over. You know, we're going to do things. I mean, we don't have to sit here in a closet anymore and play bingo.

We can go out and do stuff and take over the world and change everything. And so I kind of hung out with him and I caught it. I caught the fever. We'd always wanted to demonstrate. And these were all farts. Ah, now, now, you'll go to jail. People will throw rocks at you on the street. You'll get beat up.

You'll get bashed. I said, well, everybody else is picketing. Why shouldn't we? This was at a time when everyone else was protesting for civil rights. Yeah, I mean, the blacks were marching all through Selma and all that kind of stuff. And, I mean, everybody was marching and demonstrating. Why the hell shouldn't we be? Oh, no, no, no, people hate fairies.

You know, they throw rocks at you. Did they think it would destroy Mattachine? It would destroy the gay cause? It was going to destroy the gay world. It was going to bring down the wrath of God. Of course, they had a good reason to believe this. You know, because they'd just gotten through the McCarthy years. You know, they had a good reason to believe this.

So they... I should put them down for it because, I mean, they had gone through a very bad time when, you know, as soon as you found out you were gay,

you were fired from your job. You couldn't work. You couldn't work in Hollywood. You know, if you were gay, you were probably a communist and communists couldn't work in Hollywood.

You certainly couldn't work for the government. You couldn't work for anybody who had a government contract. You couldn't work for IBM or somebody like that who wanted to work

for the government, who earned a government contract. And you would get for IBM or somebody like that who wanted to work for the government, who earned a government contract. And you would get fired on the spot. So they had a good reason to be scared. But why weren't you scared? Why wasn't the new crowd scared? I never had a sense to be scared. You know, that's where it comes.

A lot of times people used to say to me, you're very brave. And it's not that I'm very brave. It's just I was too damn dumb to realize I was making a fool of myself. Was it because you were young? I guess it was because I was young and didn't have any sense. They used to have these crackdowns constantly, particularly around Times Square, where they were going to get the homosexuals and derelicts off the streets. Always having these cleanups and these sweeps and these things.

And what they were doing is these cleanup things of using police entrapment. And they make a lot of arrests. They had this vice squad, and they were like traffic cops. They worked on sort of commission. You know, these cops were plainclothes cops. They're out on the streets eight hours a day.

And the only way you could tell these people were working was by the streets eight hours a day. And the only way you could tell these people were working was by the number of arrests they made. And it came to a point where if you wanted a promotion, you better have a lot of arrests. How would they entrap people? What was the... Well, they had a formula that they would have. They were writing in their notebooks.

It's all black leather notebooks cops carry. And when they got to court, no matter what actually happened, they would come up with the formula story because they would arrest, you know, 10 or 20, and they got them all mixed up. I can't remember, Tom from Jim from John. And so they just read this little formula

out of their notebook. Oh, you know, he did approach me and he did touch me upon the genitals and he did invite me to go to his house for sexual purposes. So all it required was just a pickup, and that was... Yeah.

You know, a lot of them were hired for their looks. They were good-looking cops. And they would go to bars and stuff, and they would get picked up, or they said they got picked up, and then they'd arrest you and take you to court and ruin your life. A lot of people got arrested, particularly in the subway tea rooms and in the park,

were like closet queens, priests and doctors and stuff like that who couldn't hang out, you know, like in Julius's or someplace and didn't want to be seen in the gay community and it was at that time that we decided we would have our sip in because the liquor law said that a licensee has the duty to keep his place orderly if he doesn't become disorderly he loses his license and so they would use this disorderly conduct statute and entrap gay people and then use that against the bar owners to close the bar. So we decided that that was a violation of our right to freely assemble.

And we talked to Frank Kameny about it, talked to everybody about it. And the consensus was that yes, we had to do this. And yes, we had to get press coverage, but we couldn't even invite the television people, because the presence of television cameras and all that recording equipment could make a place disorderly. And so we should just stick with the print media. And so we sent telegrams to all the newspapers and magazines saying we were going to do this the next day at noon at a place called the Ukrainian American Village on St. Mark's Place,

because they had a sign on the front door saying, if you're gay, stay away. And a number of places had that for obvious reasons. And so we decided that was the place. So we announced that we were going to do this the next day at noon. Did you tell them you were coming? No. And of course, being gay, we were late. So we got there about quarter past 12. And when we arrived, Ukrainian American village was boarded up with the gates down. And all this press was standing around. I said, I got a great idea. I said, you know that preacher got arrested at Julius's like last week or the week before.

They want service. And so we all went around to Julius's and we walked in. The guy started to make us drink and we handed him a little note. He said, what does it say? I don't have my glasses or I can't read it. So I read the note to him and he covered the glasses with his hand. He said, I can't serve you if you're gay. You know that.

You're with the Mattachine Society. You know it's against the law to serve homosexuals. And we got busted last week. We got cops sitting at the damn door. We got to go to court. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. We can't serve you. And I looked around at all these sissies sitting at the bar and I thought, carry on, girlfriend. So we didn't get served.

And so the press, you know, what's his name, took these pictures and the times to the story and all that. And so we got our coverage and we were very pleased with ourselves. How can you not serve food and liquor to homosexuals? Don't they eat and drink? And people were talking about it. There was all the talk shows. It became kind of an issue. Coming up, how years of struggle built to the Stonewall uprising, and how years of organizing made Stonewall the event we remember today. you know it's interesting hearing all these stories, which are very dramatic. Oh, they're great stories. And some of them did make the headlines.

I'm wondering then why Stonewall? Just a few years after most of these events happened, why did Stonewall become such a turning point for this movement? In part because we look back now and see it as that. Stonewall wasn't Stonewall at the time, although in New York City, people fighting back against the police oppression in those numbers was exceptional. One of my favorite quotes comes from a man named Damian Martin who wound up founding an organization called Hedrick Martin Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth, now known as HMI.org, in the late 70s. He recalled

being in a cab going through the village a day or two after the beginning of the uprisings. And he said the police had a look on their faces as if they'd been bitten by their favorite pets. The police were accustomed to gay people running. Fags didn't fight back against the police, which made it exceptional. So Martin Boyce is one of the people who was at Stonewall, who's my favorite storyteller about Stonewall. He's now 71. And he said the morning after, as he was at the riot, it was in the papers, it was on the radio, his father, who was a cab driver who knew his son was gay and was supportive of him, said, well, it's about time you fags fought back. So that was exceptional. The police weren't accustomed to being chased by young homosexuals.

So that made it exceptional. It was also the moment in time when confrontations with the police were not unusual. There was organizing in the immediate aftermath. And then there were the people who organized the first Pride March, which happened in 1970, in June of 70. And that branded Stonewall as this event to be marked with this Pride March, which was the successor to the Reminder Day protests. And people were told to mark that anniversary every year thereafter. And over time, Stonewall just simply came to represent gay people fighting back or the fight for freedom. It means lots of different things to different people. Many of the organizers had had years of experience in the movement. And if not in the gay

rights movement, they had experience in the black civil rights movement, in the women's movement, in the anti-war movement. I like to say that the organizers will inherit the earth. So if not for the organizers who channeled that rage right after Stonewall and created new organizations that could address the inequities, Stonewall wouldn't be remembered. Do you think that the focus on Stonewall, I mean, as important as you just, it is, and you laid it out, do you think by focusing on it the way that we do that we miss something important about gay civil rights history? Oh, my God, yes. I had such a contentious relationship with Stonewall. I really had to reconcile. And of course, Stonewall for having sucked the air out of the room from the rest of the history and that all of these people who were involved before Stonewall were ignored because of this myth that everything began at Stonewall that in my book, I decided looking at Stonewall through my own lens. It's worth focusing on Stonewall. Stonewall is a great entry point, but it's unfortunate that in the few high school textbooks, history textbooks that say anything about gay people, it mentions Stonewall, Harvey Milk, marriage, AIDS, and that's it. And I think that we should use Stonewall as an entry point to the history and put it in its rightful place in a context.

The Stonewall story is a much bigger story than just a couple of people who we argue over who might have thrown the first rock or the first cocktail glass. We look at the very few pictures that are available and there's no film, just a few pictures. We look at those pictures and they're kids, 17 years old, 16 years old, white, black, mixed race, Hispanic, mostly homeless. And they were the ones who challenged the police and also the ones who died the soonest. They died in the 70s from drug overdoses, from being murdered, and then in the 80s from AIDS. So when people ask why there's so few people alive today to interview, most of them are dead. That was Eric Marcus. His podcast is called Making Gay History.

That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramti Nadablui. I'm Randa De Fattah. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This show was produced by me. And me. And. Jamie York.

Jordana Hochman. Lawrence Wu. Okay, smizing summer. And me. And. Jamie York. Jordana Hochman. Lawrence Wu. Okay, smizing summer. Nigeri Eaton. Original music was produced for this episode by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. Thanks also to Anya Grunman. Greta Pittinger. Sarah Burningham.

And of course, Eric Marcus. If you liked this episode, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Or find us on Twitter at ThruLineNPR. Thanks for listening.