You're Wrong About - The Stonewall Uprising

Episode Date: June 27, 2019

“Humans aren’t good at remembering what got us where we are.” Mike tells Sarah how a turning point in the gay rights movement became an immediate controversy, a lasting inspiration and a never-ending debate. Digressions include “Newsies” (of course), “True Romance” and “Norma Rae.” Mike's creaking chair and Sarah's rustling blanket-fort are heard throughout. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

Also, the fact that people are whipping pennies that people suggest to me that there are more Philadelphians in this crowd. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show, oh my god, I have nothing. I thought something would come to me, but it's just not there. Huh. Oh, no, I remember it. Okay. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we celebrate pride without corporate sponsorship.

Oh, that's pretty good, actually. No absolute vikads in this show. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the satanic panic. And if you want to support the show, we're on Patreon at Patreon.com slash You're Wrong About.

And if you prefer to send us good vibes, we accept those also. Oh, yes. And today we're talking about Stonewall, which we're both pretty anxious about. So anxious. Oh my god, all week. Tell me about your anxiety. Ah. This, I mean, this is a part of my own history in this weird, incoate sense.

It's a history that people feel a huge sense of ownership over. And there's a way in which everything in gay history, all of the debates in the gay rights movement for 50 years have been shoved into this one event in June of 1969. And so a lot of the debates over Stonewall are much larger debates about the direction of the gay rights movement, the legacy of the gay rights movement. I might have gone a little bit overboard for this episode. I've read two books. I interviewed four historians.

I talked to someone who was there. I have like really, really, really tried to get this one right. You put more effort into doing an episode of this show than some people do when they write entire books. You've read the I Read Two Books books. I know I have. A lot of them are on sociology. I also know, because the history is so contested, that there will be many people who will listen

to this episode, and there is a detail of the night of Stonewall that is really important to them, and I'm not going to include it. Just because there's so many details, there's so many sources, the details of the event change so much over time, I am more nervous for this episode that I'm really going to hurt somebody's feelings and not include something that makes people's hearts full, and I'm worried about that. You know what? We're all going to be okay.

I think this really speaks to the problem with creating works of history in American culture, which is that we really are enamored of the idea of one person is going to do the complete story, the complete version, and individuals can't do that work, which is why we have to work collaboratively. Once again, I've looped this all back to socialism, so this is one people onto something that is bigger than all of us. One of the historians that I interviewed, Eric Gonzaba, said something really interesting that basically one of the reasons why Stonewall gets so contested is because it's the only

event that straight people kind of recognized for decades, right? It was the only piece of gay history that anybody showed any interest in, and so there's always been this movement to sort of anything you wanted to see in the gay rights movement, you would put it into Stonewall because otherwise nobody would notice it, nobody would talk about it. Because people in dominant American culture like to finish early when it comes to the histories of any populations but themselves, so we're like, gay history, Stonewall, civil rights, Rosa Parks, and we're done.

It's one of those things that any marginalized population is going to have trouble telling its own history because it is like you're fighting for recognition from the dominant culture, and then of course there's going to be infighting within your own coalition of like, well, what do we want the dominant culture to know about us? What do we want to have recognized? Right. And we know that we only have one shot because they're lazy, so how do we make it count? One of the things that the other historian said too was that Stonewall has become almost

this credential, right, that you're like, I was there at Stonewall. It's like how the number of people who almost got on the Titanic was mathematically impossible. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because we cast Stonewall as sort of like the big bang before there was nothing and afterwards there was the gay rights movement, it's almost like things aren't important unless they happened at Stonewall and if they happened at Stonewall, they were important. When like some of the historians I talked to were like, dude, some people had food poisoning that weekend and they weren't there.

And also there were people that did stuff and things that happened at Stonewall that kind of weren't all that important in the long run or sort of threads that never really got pulled and that's fine too. There's the Stonewall event and then there's the gay rights movement and they overlap but they're also distinct things and like we're kind of finally at the point of history where we can say that's okay. Another thing Gonzaba said was that it was a turning point in the gay rights movement but it was a turning point, right?

We can't talk about it as like these perfect little milestones every couple of years. It's like there were lots of turning points. Any movement for social rights is going to have a lot of milestones, a lot of things that are overlooked and we're now finally looking back, kind of circling back to these things and finding not only the interesting elements of Stonewall that we haven't looked at before but also events that aren't in the history books, right? Like there's a lot of stuff that happened in early gay rights movement that have never gotten any attention and so it's now sort of letting Stonewall be Stonewall but also

adding other events to the narrative of Stonewall to take away from this big bang nothing and then everything style narrative. Yeah. God that's a really long preamble. I'm really sorry. No, that was, don't apologize. This entire episode is going to be about me feeling weird about doing it. It's a good look on you.

It's fine. I think that this is important though because we're looking at the story of an event but we're also looking at the story of how do communities get to tell their own histories and what kind of history will be listened to. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, where do we begin? So I think the best way to do this is just to walk through the event and then we can

get into all of the Hobbesian nightmarish I feel weird about it stuff afterwards. All of the like layer tiramisu debunking that is going to come after like immediately after. I mean one of the one of the revelations of this is that people have been fighting about Stonewall and the legacy of Stonewall since literally the day after it happened. Sounds about right. So like me feeling weird about Stonewall is like a Stonewall tradition. Yeah, you're linking hands with a vast community of ancestors and family who also feel weird.

Yes. So do you want to tell me your description of the night? What do you know about what actually happened on June 27th, 1969? I mean my sense and I feel like the sort of sidebar and straight history textbooks version that I know is that the police raided the Stonewall Inn which was in Greenwich Village and in the same way that I was taught in the seventh grade that Rosa Parks didn't move to the back of the bus that day because she just didn't feel like it, which is absolutely not true.

I have what I feel is probably an erroneous sense that like this was the night that people fought back against the cops and someone threw a prick and a riot and a mass protest ensued and like you said that this is my vague knowledge of it is that it was this big bang moment where suddenly resistance like appeared and in the way that we seem to like doing we as mainstream straight Americans have told a story where like gay rights just happened just one day it was too much and they happened and no one consciously thought about it or had a plan or had been doing anything before. My guess is that what I know is untrue along those lines.

That was actually a pretty good overview Sarah. I mean it's like there's this thing where it's like nothing, nothing, nothing, Stonewall, Stonewall, Stonewall and then we fast forward and then it's like and then there was pride as if like there was this big riot and then the mayor of New York was always like we should have a pride parade okay. Like the end of newsies when like all the newsies and the other kid workers show up and protest and Pulitzer is like well there's a lot of kids yelling I have to just give them what they want which gave all of us very inaccurate ideas about how protesting works.

Yes the actual event itself is extremely important but then also of course like all the tedious stuff that they did afterwards like printing out leaflets, getting donations all that stuff is also extremely important. Labor is erased from these histories I feel like. Always yeah yeah totally yeah but I think we should start with the actual bar and just sort of what was going on in New York in 1969. So I know you researched this for the Kitty Genevies episode so you know about the context of the raids and about the lack of liquor licenses so do you want to walk us through

that a little bit? Yeah I mean my understanding from that is that essentially if you ran a queer establishment then you were vulnerable to police shakedowns at any given moment you know and that essentially people could not meet each other spend time with each other in public or you know really in private to a great extent without the sense of you know any second now the cops are gonna come. Yeah and also I mean it also there's all these different layers of shittiness going on that in New York the state liquor control board wouldn't give liquor licenses to gay establishments because they just figured gayness is illegal because sodomy is illegal so if you're catering

to a gay clientele you shouldn't be allowed to have a liquor license. You're like aiding and abetting a crime you're guilty of conspiracy. Exactly and so the only people that would create bars and sort of fill this market niche were the mafia who were running illegal bars anyway. Good ol' mafia. And so one of the things that I think is so interesting is a lot of the anger at Stonewall one of the reasons why the riot exploded that night wasn't just anger at the cops although it obviously was anger at the cops too but it was also anger at like why do we have to drink in

these establishments that hate us? Why do we have to eat at places that show active contempt for us when ten of us go to a restaurant they ask us to leave because they don't want to lose their liquor license? Yeah. We're not doing anything particularly controversial we just want to hang out and do what everybody else is doing but they're turning us into criminals. Yeah and then if you get treated as a criminal then like it's very hard not to see yourself the way the world sees you. Yeah. Yeah and I learned when I was doing my Kitty Genevies research that there was a sip in bars

in New York City in the mid-60s where men from the Mattachine Society would go and say hello we're gay, serve us drinks. Yeah. And that this was this radical act at the time. Yeah. It's just it's awful and amazing. It's totally unfathomable to us. I mean this is a theme that runs throughout the story of that there's so many things that are considered so radical at the time that to us are just like what? And it's the Mattachine Society essentially like the first or one of the first gay rights organizations in the United States.

I believe it's the first I think it was founded in either depending on what you read either 1950 or 1951. Wow. And there's also the lesbian counterpart is called the Daughters of Bilitis or the Daughters of Bilitis I've heard it both ways and that's founded in 1955 so very early on although the gay rights movement is sort of I mean that's almost an oxymoron at this time because it's so small. They do a couple of protests but it appears the protests are getting maybe 15, 55 people around that like it's very small protests and the whole debate at the time is about the respectability that the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis both insist

on everybody in the protests has to dress nicely so the men are wearing suits and hats, the women are wearing dresses and heels their whole thing is trying to dispel the notion that like we're weirdos or we're sex workers they're trying to just get hey some of us are respectable into the public realm and that at the time is actually really radical. That feels to me like a beaten wife like cooking a really nice dinner for her abusive husband and being like can you just be nice to me like please just stop beating me for a night like look at all this nice stuff I can do for you and of course the answer was no and so people had to do other stuff. It's also I mean to me reading back through all these old documents what's so interesting is that

gayness structurally makes it very difficult to build a movement because it's a trait that crosses racial boundaries, religious boundaries, wealth boundaries and so you've got a political movement made up of people that are like literally homeless 15 year olds and like corporate hedge fund managers and there's this one little thing that's linking them together but other than that they have nothing in common and so a coalition like that is just always going to have more infighting more debates about tactics and strategy than a group that is more homogenous in the things that it's asking for. It's like this logical paradox where like society is so cruel to you that you cannot imagine announcing yourself as yourself. It's so hard for me to

imagine coming out at this time and you have to come out to demand rights but the world has to be less horrible to you before you can come out for your rights. You know just that like you have to make yourself vulnerable in a way that your life might depend on avoiding in order to try and make the world less awful. Oh totally and one of the things I didn't know until I started researching this was that in the Madison society in their meetings nobody used their real names. Oh my god. So even within the activists you didn't want your real life and your gay activism intersecting at all and it was a huge deal when this activist Craig Rodwell who we will meet later used his real name at the meetings of the Madison society. It was like holy shit what is this guy doing?

Yeah like if you're living your life in such secrecy that even the people that you were organizing with have to be in the dark about who you are. It's rough. Yeah. I mean another source of gay anger especially in the 60s as there starts to be more gay establishments is that because they're all run by the mafia most of them are kind of shitholes. So one of the things that people say about the Stonewall is that because it's kind of in a gray legal zone anyway there's no reason to have any like sanitation standards or like fire exits so the Stonewall didn't have any running water. What? Yeah it had like a bucket behind the bar that like they would wash the glasses in this like bucket of water. Oh no. They would just sort of rinse the glass and dry it off and

then give it to the next person. So like you're getting beaten by the police or you're getting food poisoning. Yeah the other thing is the Stonewall when they when this slot bucket would get so dirty that they had to replace it they would just pour it out in the toilets because they didn't have a drain they didn't have any system of drainage and then the toilets would overflow and so the bathroom would have like an inch of water throughout. That's so gross. Yes. And you know I've been to the Stonewall Inn and it is hella bougie today. Oh I know yeah. There should really be some sort of metal crown. I know. There's also this thing this weird ridiculous legal fiction where because it's illegal to have a gay bar and they don't have a liquor license the

Stonewall had to run on this fiction that it was a members only club. There was like a fortified door with like a little slit in it and when you came up there was a doorman that would ask you you know who are you kind of basically to make sure you weren't an undercover cop so he would ask you to describe the inside of the bar. Wow. They would always hire gay people as bouncers because oftentimes when the cops came they would arrest the people working there so the owners of the bar would never actually be there and they would hire gay employees to make sure that they would have some like patsies that they could just let them get arrested and then replace them with another bouncer another bartender the next week. Wow. Yeah and it's funny because I think my overly

simplistic just assumed version of all this was like the Stonewall Inn was a perfectly nice gay bar and everyone was having a nice time and then the police showed up and it's like no everything was terrible in different ways. A lot of the people that worked at the bars would also when the raids started they would jump to the other side of the bar and pretend to be patrons so that the cops wouldn't be able to arrest them for being responsible for the bar and some of them would like steal money because they just kept money in a cigar box because they didn't want to pay for cash register so at times like the drag queens that worked there would just steal the cigar box full of money and be like oh the cops got it I'm so sorry and then make out like 1500 bucks so there's also

a lot of creativity within it and also from all accounts Stonewall was super fun like it sounds like an actual blast so it was a dive bar and it was pretty awesome. I mean one of the other debates that is still going on now is basically like what kind of clientele did the Stonewall serve like who was there that night and based on both of the books that I read you know there's various academic articles the dude that I spoke to who was there it sounds like it was mostly cis white dudes but what's really interesting about it is one of the main reasons why those were the people in the bar is because the bouncer was also doing door checks for people of color people who were gender non-conforming younger people for people they just didn't want in there because they didn't have the

right look huh there's debate on how much this took place one of the historians I talked to says that everyone he talked to that went to the Stonewall was like people of color ran the jukebox there were some queens who knew the managers of the bar and were able to get in and then there were also men that got in at the door and then they would go to the bathroom and then they would like put on a wig put on makeup sort of become gender non-conforming once they got into the bar so we also have that thing that happens in any marginalized community where there's the self policing oh totally yeah people talked about how the Stonewall was less shitty on that score than other bars around like some of the other bars were just like full-on like whites only types of

policies but the Stonewall was more inclusive but it still wasn't completely inclusive and so that was also a disincentive for people of color poor people to even go to Greenwich Village at all because they knew that most of the bars down there wouldn't let them in so they just did other stuff and so I mean this was another thing that I learned researching this was the extent to which these divisions within the gay community and the exclusion in the gay community that we still have now was also there from day one yeah and that we always see in these movements where you know there's factions at war within between we need to curry favor with the dominant culture like don't make us look bad and then the people who are able to think this way or are forced to think this way

because passing is never going to be an option of just like no fuck you like I'm not going to try to blend in or try to behave the way that I'm being asked to behave yeah that just seems eternal yeah this is a quote from Sylvia Rivera who becomes important later she is what we would now consider a trans woman but that word transgender wasn't actually coined I believe until the early 90s and so a lot of the trans women at the time would have called themselves queens or transvestites those were like the terms that people used to identify themselves and so what she says in an interview later she says I am the straight person's stereotype of the gay community they don't want their children to be exposed to someone like me even my own community

the gay community doesn't want to be bothered with people like me you get beaten up by your own and that hurts we're the low trash of life so this sucks like this is already this double victimization yeah so this is a excerpt from martin duberman's stone wall which is a book that's published in 1993 the queen's considered stone wall and washington square the most congenial downtown bars if they passed muster at the stone wall door they could buy or cajole drinks exchange cosmetics and perfumes admire or deplore somebody's latest wig make fun of six foot transsexual linds size 12 women's shoes move constantly in and out of the ladies room and dance in a feverish sweat till closing time at 4 a.m. the feverish sweat part sounds nice so there are people in the bar

that are various categories of queens that the term queen meant people that we would consider now to be trans women people that were living as women and people that dressed up as women for the night for fun and men who acted extremely effeminately there's also something called scare queens like one of the historians i interviewed said he talked to a lot of folks that would have identified this way back then they would say like we would put on just enough makeup to freak people out and then go to the museum because it's not clear if those people are necessarily identifying as trans or just like trying to fuck with their parents generation and like freak people out right so it's difficult reading these old accounts because when they say queens they could mean any one of

those categories or all three are there any lesbians at stone wall like that night or in general it seems like very few every once in a while like straight cis women will get in with their gay male friend or like there are some sort of drag king lesbians that do get in because they know the owner it seems like but most of the sources say that it's like 95 98 percent men isn't it amazing how much our concept of what gender can be and how it can be described changes every 45 minutes yeah it's i mean all this stuff is fascinating we were at a time when the the best words that we had for gender 9 conformity were based not on how you felt but on what you were wearing yeah yeah yeah so now we get to june 27th which is really june 28th because it's after midnight so it's saturday

morning slash friday night of 1969 so the cop that carries out the raid is named seymour pine he's a former world war two soldier that was actually at the battle of the bulge which is nuts what's different about the raid the night of stone wall and one of the reasons why it becomes a riot when raids before hadn't is typically bar raids were really carried out to get a handout they weren't really done to shut down the bars what pine says is they had a monthly quota of arrests to fill and gay people were really easy because gay people didn't put up a fight and so you could get like three or four arrests so it's just like easy pickings for like money and quotas yes and typically they did it also at like 9 8 9 10 p.m. at night early before people were too drunk before the bar was

too crowded they would go in they'd give some tickets they ticket some people they'd let other people go they would check everybody's id and just sort of leave before the bar really started making any real money and the bar would just continue operating that night so it had achieved this kind of etiquette yeah it's like hello just so you know you're living under a reign of terror well by yeah and they've gone back and and looked at the books and it turns out the stone wall was paying inflation adjusted $10,000 a month to the local precinct for sort of this deal it's about once a month you come you arrest a couple people we have a red light that flashes in the dance floor to tell people to calm down so you're paying protection so that you get shaken

down nicely yeah and so they don't actually shut you down right so that they come in and then they maybe they'll put a padlock on the door for the night but then the next day you can just open as normal so it's not really it's like it's just the cost of doing business basically this is why there needs to be a gay rights godfather too i know i've talked about this before but like if anyone out there is listening you know free idea yeah it also seems that the stone wall was running a blackmail ring out of the second floor it's a two-story building and it seems like they would have prostitutes on the second floor and then when wall street guys or rich guys would go up there and use prostitutes they would steal their wallets check their id's and then if they seemed wealthy

they would then start threatening them with blackmail and then get income streams that way so they're running a gay sex work and extortion ring yes like it's literally run by a guy named fat tony but so the rate that happens the night of the stone wall riots is different in that first of all it's much later it doesn't happen until 1 20 a.m when everybody's already drunk and sort of having a good time and in the middle of it they also they intend to shut down the bar so he is in a morals squad like a separate thing that the precinct is starting to do where they actually want to get rid of vice in Greenwich Village so he is part of a new effort by the cops to get rid of the mafia oh he died in 2010 but he gave a lot of interviews after this

happened where he talks about how his views on gay rights have changed and he is sorry that he was homophobic at the time he's sorry for the language that he used and he talks about look for me as a cop i was told we had to crack down on the mafia i considered it a mafia raid not necessarily homosexual raid and like to be fair they were running a prostitution and extortion ring off the second floor so like and it was both you know if you see the act of existing as a gay person as a criminal act which it was at the time then like gayness can become a function of organized crime in that worldview i can see that well that's a thing it's like i mean i don't necessarily believe him that the raids were not motivated by homophobia i think that a lot of

red conning goes on when social change happens of like i never felt that way but i also think like it's all mixed in together right it's like an easy target it's like the gays who you know aren't gonna fight back it's the mafia who everybody hates anyway and it's a way to sort of appeal to the mayor and saying like we're cracking down on vice bottom line i think is that people in positions of power or complicit with systems of power just don't think that hard about the communities that they're dehumanizing you know if you're retconning and being like i was thinking of it as as a mafia establishment it's like probably you just weren't even thinking about it at all you were like told to go do your job and like you don't sit around thinking about

the humanity of the people that you are raiding and extorting and beating like you just accept that they're somehow less than human and you don't give it that much more thought that's what makes these behaviors so sustainable what's so interesting about a lot of the news coverage after the stonewall riots from you know establishment pretty homophobic press at the time is sort of a both sides narrative where it's like well the gays were breaking the law so it makes sense for the cops to go in well yeah they were breaking the law by existing so that sure fine i mean that's the thing is it becomes this justification for almost anything once you've made it illegal for people to gather yeah then you can say oh well you were gathering

and you should have thought about that before you break the law so it's actually okay for us to do anything basically yeah and this becomes like the establishment narrative of stonewall afterwards of like well you know we can't have people breaking laws yeah never mind that all of us break the law every single day by like texting while driving or smoking weed or jaywalking or whatever but like i think it's just such a part of our national belief system that if a person who means from american society has it out for anyway and would like to see as less than human anyway then you can find some law that they're breaking or invent a law for them to break and then you can do whatever you want to them and you can have this nation of citizens just being like

well i was raised to believe that law breaking means that you deserve whatever you get and the system that is hurting these people is also keeping me safe because of my alleged law abiding this so this all seems fine like it's a it's a very dangerous legal faith that we've invented yeah but one thing that's really weird about this raid is that before they raid at 120 a.m. they send in four undercover cops to sort of case the joint two men and two women really which is a very weird strategic choice yeah so he sends two men in and two women the two men come out like an hour later and they're like yep they're serving alcohol and it took me an hour to figure that out yeah exactly i had to get three hand jobs and then i don't really understand why but the women don't

come out pying on the other four male cops are waiting outside and then they decide well whatever it's 120 let's let's just go in huh and so what happens is they do the thing they knock on the door police blah blah blah the bar flashes the red light they turn on the lights on the dance floor they turn off the music everyone just sort of like uncouples from whatever they were doing and it just like stands around and like they're already kind of pissed because they're like we're in the middle of this this isn't 9 p.m. this isn't how it's supposed to be done we had a deal yeah about how we consent to be terrorized and this is breaks that so then what happens and i feel like this totally has been edited out of the stonewall narrative so the way that these raids work

is typically the cops officially want the employees of the bar and the owners of the bar so usually when they do any bar raid they come in they check everybody's id and they basically let everybody go they're not trying to arrest every single person who's drinking there but this process is super discriminatory because people of color are less likely to have ids and trans women often have ids that show them as male and so the cops use this as a pretext to bust them for female impersonation which is a crime at the time oh my god so there's this weird informal standard that the cops use that you have to be wearing at least three articles of clothing that match your gender oh my god and obviously the police should be in charge of making that distinction which is

very like cut and dry and clear what yeah and so i mean in the raid of stonewall they do this they come in it's really crowded there's something like 200 people inside they start checking everybody's id and immediately and this is something that pine doesn't apologize for later he immediately targets the trans women and pulls them aside and basically says we know your sex workers get in the bathroom so they're applying the most force to the most vulnerable population i mean this is the thing i think i mean one of the big debates within the gay rights movement during this time after this time is sort of where to put gender identity and where to put issues like race and wealth and age and all these other sort of interacting discriminations and the argument that the gay

rights movement makes at the time is that we are the gay movement we should be looking at sexual orientation we should be looking at gayness as one variable only and what's really interesting is when you look over these old accounts of bar raids and legal discrimination like there was never a time when it was only about gayness yeah isn't it interesting how people who don't experience intersectionality are the ones who think that it shouldn't be a factor and how a movement functions yes and one of the things that's really interesting is i mean the amount of abuse that people of color trans women homeless people sex workers i mean it was on a completely different scale that oftentimes cops would look around bars and if you looked like an upstanding citizen

we both know what they mean by that they would kind of let you go you know you're fine go back to your wife whatever but i mean trans women talk later about how they're arrested by the cops on suspicion of sex work with no evidence just because they exist and then they'll take them to jail they'll shave their heads if they have long hair oh my god they would force them to give oral sex oh my god they were often raped yeah if they were put in jail with men they would often be raped in jail and the cops would not stop it yeah even you know men acting effeminately that's a group that is that gets it much worse than quote-unquote straight acting gay men those people were discriminated against not because of who they were having sex with

they were discriminated against because people find it very threatening when men act in a way that's coded as women and so really i mean there really was never a time when these extra dimensions were irrelevant no and so all the cops go through the crowd they're checking everybody's IDs basically they decide we're gonna keep these trans women and then we're gonna let everybody else go because most of them have IDs they're just like we don't really care so on the way out they start like checking people like they start checking people's ID and like looking up their information and like looking through their wallets and so people start getting let out of the bar slowly like one every minute or so there's like a single file line sort of coming out of the bar

the cops are expecting everyone to just slink home like what usually happens in these things is they're like break it up you fairies and then everyone just puts their hat on looks down and then just like walks to the nearest bus stop but what happens with this one is partly because it's later at night partly because people want to wait outside for their friends to come out partly because it's on christopher street which is just a bustling street at this time of the night when people come out they just wait right outside huh and also because presumably like you would have people in there who you wanted to see if they got out too and we're okay and if the cops are gonna pull any other random maneuvers that they've never tried before like we can get used to a lot of harassment

if we feel that there are understandable rules and like things that you can and can't do and everyone knows how it works but like once it gets unpredictable that sense of complacency can go away yeah I mean also like there's the political aspect and then there's the logistical aspect so politically they're like well this is bullshit but then logistically they're like I think the bar is gonna reopen in like 30 minutes I just want to go on and keep dancing so there's like there's go things going on yeah like I want to protect my friends and or I need another fucking drink tonight so as this crowd starts forming outside of course the other people walking up and down christopher street also start saying like well what's going on there's now cops outside with

lights flashing so there starts to be like a hubbub outside and the crowd outside starts getting bigger and people in the neighborhood can tell that something weird is going on and they're kind of congregating yeah and one of my favorite things of this is that there's this crowd waiting outside and people are still trickling out one by one and so as people come out the crowd starts clapping for them and is like hey welcome back and so eventually as people start exiting the bar they start like striking poses and doing like voguing and like blue steel as they're coming out of the bar oh yeah sashay away yes there's also this is also very like drag queenie that as people come out they start saying things so one of them says she like walks out and she like puts her hand to

her head like she's looking at something on the horizon and she says have you seen maxine where's my wife I told her not to go far it just so campy and wonderful well I'm just like I don't know just like that you have to show that your spirit is not broken thank you very much so then what happens is a patty wagon arrives it's like a van where they can put everybody in that they're resting so this all sort of adds to the hubbub right there's just something going on outside of this bar and so this starts to attract more and more people but then what's interesting about this stage of the evening is that it's all kind of fun people are like singing everybody's super drunk they're chatting with their friends nobody sees this as this huge injustice yet

they're just kind of making the best of it yeah I guess like finding a way to have the upper hand by laughing about it and by you know showing some dignity yeah like you you fall down the stairs and then you take a bow yeah and there's also this this guy Craig Rodwell who's an early gay activist it appears that it was his idea to have the annual reminder marches on independence day every year in Philadelphia he just says they're like a reminder that gay people don't have rights I love that Philly was one of the first places where that was happening god bless Philly beautiful gritty city of contrarians and he's somebody who is in the Mattachine society and annoyed that they're not more radical yeah that sounds like a guy from Philly but he's walking home from playing

bridge he sees this crowd growing outside of stone wall and he's with his partner or friend at the time and he's like this might be a thing so there's like a lot of people who are just like have a sense that like this is something they need to keep an eye on yes he at some point during this sort of jubilant stage yells gay power but like nobody really starts the chant that's not really the vibe at that time so what's just happening now is Pine starts boxing up all the liquor in the stone wall he starts bringing out all the employees that he can find and a lot of these trans women like in handcuffs and so he starts perp walking all of these people that are being arrested outside into the patty wagons and like the crowd is like 500 people at this point like it is a big crowd and

so he is looking at this like uh this doesn't look great I feel kind of outnumbered yeah his big thing and what he says later is like he's never seen them stay before huh he's like this isn't how it works like you're supposed to go home and feel ashamed you're not supposed to still be here you're supposed to go cry in a shower yeah so he starts walking people out and starts putting them in this patty wagon and this is where the crowd starts to get pissed off one of the people that he walks out is a middle-aged straight black dude who's the bathroom attendant and this guy's getting arrested because he works there of course of course of course and I mean this is when we start to get to a much more tense vibe in the crowd huh as some of the trans women are being

marched out of stonewall one of them hits the cop with her purse and it's like be fucking polite to me that doesn't spark anything but it just sort of plants the seed that like this is an option so the tensions start rising like the cops start to notice this is getting more tense and so this I sort of hate this part this is where we get to the question of who threw the first brick at stonewall is this like one of those moments that we are putting too much pressure on today because we have constructed a narrative where like this is the little act of fission that starts the big bang and it's like it doesn't really boil down to this brick it doesn't matter as much as we want it to matter who threw the first brick because it matters that everyone who was there did what they

did and had been moving toward this for years and that it's bigger than a brick but we put too much pressure on the brick by wanting it to be about a brick this is like a that was just a huge spoiler sarah that's basically what we're going to conclude I'm sorry that I've learned about history because I mean one of the main candidates is a woman named Sylvia Rivera who's a trans woman who's extremely important in the gay liberation front and all of the activism that happens in the years after stonewall in 2001 she says I didn't throw the first Molotov cocktail at stonewall I threw the second Molotov cocktail at stonewall and so this sort of becomes part of the narrative that this woman who is extremely important she was her mother committed suicide when she was four

she went to live with her grandmother she got kicked out of the house at 11 because she was dressing in women's clothes oh my god she ended up doing it appears sex work as young as 13 she was 17 at the time of stonewall oh my god and she didn't have an ID according to her friends so there's debates about whether or not she was in stonewall it doesn't seem like she was and david carter who wrote the book called stonewall in 2004 says that nobody reports seeing her at the stonewall riots and marsha p johnson who we will get to in a second says that she was asleep during the early parts of the riots and that she wasn't there that night but it's also it feels like something where if we create a narrative where you had to be literally there to be one of

the mothers or the fathers or the what have views of gay liberation then like you had to be literally at that spot and if you weren't then you're not part of that and if we create that binary then even if you weren't there literally you were there figuratively if you were one of one of the mothers one of the parents of the movement and i mean you see the same thing with marsha p johnson who is now getting a much deserved rediscovery as a really important figure in the early gay rights movement there was a story that marsha p johnson was inside the bar and as the raid started she picked up a shot glass and threw it against the mirror and broke the mirror and was like fuck this and that sort of started this revolutionary spirit it's not clear where that story came from

she herself says that she didn't get to the riots until at least 2 a.m so after everybody was already being let out of the bar she's also someone who is wildly important to the movement she was also a sex worker she was 23 at the time which i just marvel at how young all these kids were she took her last name from the howard johnson on 42nd street that she used to hang out at and the p in her name she would say pay it no mind when people would ask her what gender she was she was there for the gay liberation front she was there for every single gay riot after stonewall she was someone that really pushed the movement to accept gender diversity and like gender identity as a huge part of the lgbt community and so she is like a towering figure

in the gay rights movement in the 1970s but like there isn't really any evidence that she threw the first brick you know it's like when we say through the first brick or like was it stonewall then that's like that's what the language of history allows us to conceptualize as being at the start of a movement so it makes sense that we that that feels like the most legitimizing way to acknowledge her oh totally and yeah and i think a lot of this comes from a very real sense of frustration of how her and sylvia and thousands of nameless trans women have been completely erased from this story that i one of the historical records points out that they built a monument to stonewall in i forget when it was i think in the 1990s and it's like two white dudes

and two like thin attractive lesbians right and they're george seagull statues so they're like really white yeah right they're like all white and you know the guy his name is mark seagull he's now the editor of the philly gay news who was there that night and he was a friend of marshes says that like the people who were rioting that night like there's the rioters and there's the onlookers right so if you say there's around a thousand people total only a hundred 200 people were actually like doing stuff like throwing things shouting breaking windows a lot of the rest were just sort of there and were onlookers or were shouting but weren't really participating and what he said was look who are the people who are doing the actual uprising it's people with nothing

to lose it's people 17 it's people who are trans women who are living on the streets and have nowhere to go and are getting the worst forms of police abuse like the most anger at the police and who have no rights for society to revoke as it is exactly and so i think a lot of this putting sylia and marsha back into the stonewall narrative is completely understandable because it's like they are much more representative of stonewall than the hot white two percent body fat people that have typically been celebrated for this kind of event right the place that i sort of came down and that you know the insight that i stole from the historians i interviewed was that like it can be true that somebody wasn't there at stonewall or wasn't integral to the events of stonewall

and they were integral to the gay rights movement like those two things can both be true yes as the historians that i interviewed said the goal now is sort of not necessarily putting trans women into these historical events that are already celebrated it's finding events that were led by trans women other marginalized groups that aren't even in the history books at all right like there's this actually extremely charming uprising that happens at this place called compton's cafeteria in san francisco in 1966 where it's another cafe that hates their gay clientele they constantly call the cops on their gay clientele cops come in one night it's all trans women of color it's all sex workers that's like the denny's where they go after they're done working like day of night cops come in

start harassing them one of them stands up throws coffee in the cops face and then they talk about it like this explosion that like everyone else in there in unison is just like yep picks up like sugar shakers and like throws them out the window and just starts like like it's an actual like street brawl with the cops they set a shack on fire across the street it's a food fight too yeah this is something that is sort of in the gay lore of san francisco but isn't as well known nationally and so the move now is to be like there's a lot of these kinds of events that like we can shine a much brighter spotlight on right it's like yeah this idea that we need to legitimize the work and the struggle of trans women and women of color and trans women of color

and sex workers historically by making places for them in the narratives that we already acknowledge by you know being like oh look there's a there's a spot for you over here it's like yes that's important but yeah we can also go there we can go to them yeah yeah I mean one thing that I can't get over and I still find really haunting is that after all this despite how important they were sylvia and marcia started a trans rights NGO that basically saved street kids like trans street kids and gave them a place to live like they were extremely important in this like more revolutionary turn in the early 1970s they both died destitute yeah you see as a movement forms there start to be NGOs there starts to be this institutionalization where you start to get funding you start to get

more of an infrastructure and that infrastructure was non-existent for the gay rights movement for years so I don't want to act like everyone got super rich off of this right look at somebody like Craig Rodwell who you know white young conventionally attractive he starts a bookstore he ends up basically living a middle-class life and then sylvia she works in food service her whole life she ends up in 1994 she's homeless for another 18 months and marcia is bouncing in and out of homelessness she's got severe mental illness that's part of their legacy as well is that like there was never any infrastructure to reward them for what they did yes so I think there's also something that happens where if you live in a marginalized group then you get used to a sense of scarcity

that scarcity mentality means that you replicate the ways that you have been abused by those in power and and turn that on people who are less powerful than you and it's like one of the greatest and most insidious tools right of any mainstream society that is is is abusing and keeping people down who don't fit with its demands right and also I mean I've read some really interesting work by Susan Stryker who's a trans historian who wrote this really good book called Transgender History and she talks about also that like we want to be true to the people who were there we don't want to take away from people who really were there and really did cool stuff so the closest thing to a first brick that we have is a woman who everyone refers to as the butch lesbian

so she's like the man with no name like just she showed up long enough to throw a brick and then disappeared into the desert yes I mean this woman has will get into it but like this woman has never been identified wow nearly everybody who was front row in the crowd describes this scene so this is something that people are pretty agreed on that there's a woman who this is how she's described in David Carter's book tall and stout with a short man-ish haircut she was wearing pants and what one witness described as fancy go-to-bar drag for a butch dyke oh I like to think that there is a mysterious butch lesbian who's traveling through time setting history right in a like a butch lesbian quantum leap and so apparently they're they're bringing her out and

like you know that scene in Norma Ray where they're trying to get Sally Field into the car and she's like struggling yes like a gymnast just like completely twisting and kicking it sounds like that's what's happening and this it appears is the thing that really kicks up the crowd that they're seeing how hard she's struggling like it's super bullshit that she's being put in the van and that like it sort of opens up the option like oh wait we can fight back too and so to the extent that there's a first brick it appears to be this butch lesbian who interestingly has never been identified there's some talk that it's a woman called Stormé de laverie which I'm probably mispronouncing who is relatively famous in the gay rights movement at the time such as it exists

that she's an activist but it's not clear that it was her because she's so well known that it's weird that people would just call her the butch lesbian rather than Stormé because everyone sort of knew her and she says for decades that it wasn't her and then in 2008 she says that it was her. It feels like history is communicating something to us with the fact that the insider of this night turning has not been identified or is fundamentally unidentifiable that it's like that tells us that you know trying to name the one person is somewhat missing the point. Oh totally and also I mean I was at the WTO riots in 1999 and like if you're in a big crowd there's lots of things happening at once and you can only look at one of them at a time and so if

we're talking about a crowd of a thousand people I don't think more than I don't know 60 would have been able to see the lesbian being put in the van right and there were probably other things happening in the crowd too. They're narrow streets right so like there's not a lot of places where you would have a good viewpoint of what's going on and a lot of people would be like physically far away from the bar itself like if that many if it's a thousand people by then. Yeah and there's also the line between a crowd and a riot is very porous right it's not like this binary switch that flips. Yes that's why I never go to Black Friday sales. So there's I mean there's also reports that it's mostly like street kids like really angry like 17 year olds who just hate

the cops start throwing pennies and throwing coins at the cops while this is happening because it's like take your payout like you're here for the handout aren't you? Little punks before there were words for punks. One thing Craig Rodwell says later is a number of incidents were happening simultaneously there was no one thing that happened or one person there was just a flash of mass anger. Like this is the most convincing thing that I hear that like the lesbian thing did happen the kids throwing coins did happen maybe Marsha or Sylvia did throw a bottle. There were a million things happening and so however it gets triggered this becomes basically a riot. Yeah no matter who made the spark the tinder was ready like it was inside everyone to do that.

Yes and so this basically just turns into like full-blown like people throwing things people are picking up rocks from the ground it doesn't appear that they were bricks people say that the first brick at Stonewall but like there's some reports that there never were bricks. I mean people say there's a construction site like a couple blocks away but then the guy that I interviewed who was there he's like who runs a couple blocks away to get bricks and runs back during a riot like you throw whatever's there you throw what you have yeah and so maybe that's true maybe it's not who knows but anyway people just start throwing stuff my favorite part of this is as this chaos breaks out the patty wagon like people are sitting in the patty wagon and the doors are open so as

this rain of coins and things start coming down on the cops two of the dudes in the patty wagon who handcuffed together wow are like fuck this we're out and so they just like leave the patty wagon and run away and the cops can't really catch them but they're they're handcuffed together oh my god so they walk around Greenwich Village until they find somebody who's like in the s and m community who has a handcuff key I want a movie about that just two handcuffed together guys walking around for like looking for like a leather shop worker where are the kinksters they will have the know how to set us free that's beautiful and then basically like what's weird is that the cops at this point completely give up on like trying to do any cop stuff like the patty

wagon drives away with the remaining people in it and then you've basically just got the cops are still in the bar and so the cops barricade themselves into the stone wall haha and they're like this is the only place where we can feel safe oh the irony it's also funny that like then the assault becomes on the gay bar right because people are mad at the cops but the cops happen to be in the gay bar so then there's people who I still don't know how they did this they picked up a parking meter I think they like rocked it back and forth until it came loose and then like four of them lifted it up and they start using it as a battering ram wow on the door so this becomes like a helm's deep shit of like trying to break in and like get to these cops so I want I mean I

want to read to you because I think this is like really important of like the emotional state of people I love it when you read to me this is very moving to me and like the feelings in the crowd are something new and so one of the guys that was there and was throwing shit in the crowd says everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back it was the last straw it was time to reclaim something that had been taken from us all kinds of people all different reasons but mostly it was just total outrage anger sorrow everything combined we felt that we had freedom at last or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom we didn't have the freedom totally but we weren't going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around it's like

standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way that's what caught the police by surprise there was something in the air freedom a long time overdue and we were going to fight for it it took different forms but the bottom line was we weren't going to go away and we didn't that's sort of what stonewall was right and like that's still what it was about is this feeling of i'm not just going to put my hat on and walk into the night i'm going to stay and i'm going to throw fucking pennies at you like it's well i guess that like straight culture america large new york city the nypd etc you know everybody had been feeding and feeding and feeding this fire that they didn't even know that they had created because they weren't thinking about the

humanity of the people that they were abusing and terrorizing they didn't know because they never bothered thinking about it as far as i can tell that they were creating this outrage and this hurt and this fury and this need for recognition yeah and that's an extremely important moment i mean you know if you remember in the obesity epidemic episode we talked about you know i interviewed this researcher who said the process of coming out isn't about telling other people that you're gay it's about telling them you're not going to apologize for it yeah it seems like that really wasn't an option before and i don't want to slip back into the big bang thing with stonewall that like no one had ever thought of that before like the term gay power

had showed up in flyers in la in 1966 like these ideas had been bouncing around yeah but for the people at stonewall and i think for people reading about it afterwards it sort of opened up this idea that like fighting back is an option yeah and it speaks to the power of protest you know and to the power of being uncivil right because if you see someone who is agitating on their own behalf for the same reasons that you have been hiding then like you can suddenly realize that like you are worth fighting for too you are worth fighting for yourself and you know and for your community and we model behavior for each other we're social animals like we we learn these things by observing each other yeah and there's power in a collective right like together we have much more power

than separately and doing this meek softly please respect me good sir type of thing you're not gonna build power like that like that doesn't feel like power to people it's too cerebral whereas like let's all get together and throw rocks and cops barricaded inside of a bar feels like power yeah like if you treat us this way there will be consequences yeah yeah and so what mark says later on is that like it completely rejiggered the relationship between the cops and the gay community that the cops it was now an option that gay people were going to fight back and so there were actually a bunch of riots after stonewall 2 where they would demonstrate outside of the police precinct they would throw shit at other bars there was a huge riot one year after stonewall so it is this kind of like we can

do this like we can actually take power back that framing that reframing of the gay rights movement was extremely important although of course it's not only stonewall like you have to give all these caveats that it's like stonewall didn't inevitably lead to oh no everything's fine now right yeah but then what's amazing is that you know this this riot keeps going the cops are locked inside the crowd starts trying to light the stonewall on fire so they start it's not clear if they were molotov cocktails because i think molotov cocktails are a specific thing and you need like gasoline you need stuff yeah but people have lighter fluid like what you put in a lighter like a zippo so they start like squirting that onto the stonewall and lighting it or like

maybe they're squirting it into bottles the cops are losing their fucking minds the cops are terrified inside to his great credit seamore pine the cop that had organized the raid goes down the line of every single cop and he tells them we're not going to shoot the protesters uh this is not a crime that merits any show of force wow i feel like seamore pine is like exactly the kind of person that you encounter you know in history where you let in all the complexity we're like he made bad choices and then he made some good ones and both were true and like there was stuff that he was able to reckon with morally and stuff that he didn't and he's like he is so recognizable as like this is how humans behave this is how we are capable of moments of grace before complicit

and abusive systems like this is our complexity embodied yeah yeah so there's there's actually weirdly there's a village voice reporter inside of the bar at this point because he like snuck into the bar once he saw the raid was happening he was like i don't want to be in here anymore he's like bronson pink show and true romance and of course like he doesn't have a gun so when pine comes over to him and it's like how you holding up buddy he's like can i have your gun and it's like absolutely not that's delightful so basically the cops don't really know what to do they try to train a fire hose on the protesters but like it's not a fire hose it's like a normal hose so like they just spray like a garden hose at the door so they just water them they just moisten them

and of course the crowd just like thinks this is funny and starts like getting their shirts wet and like dancing and party like no one takes it remotely seriously like oh fuck we've made them sexier and then somehow one of the cops i think it's one of the women because she's a little bit smaller she sneaks out the window or ventilation duct or something somehow she gets out the back she then calls the tactical squad like basically the swat team to come and this is how the whole thing ends the cops are still barricaded inside they call the swat team the swat team comes gets the cops out like another patty wagon comes the cops dive into this van the van pulls away and then it's basically the protesters versus the swat team and it's like riot cops like everything

you've seen from like billy elliot right like with the shields and the helmets and the night sticks oh but then basically this whole thing becomes like a skirmish between the swat team and a thousand protesters so because there's narrow streets in Greenwich Village the cops will sort of advance on the protesters and then the protesters will just run around the block so that they show up behind the swat team and this goes on for hours the swat team advances on people and then they form a chorus line really and they start doing like rocket kicks and like taunting them i mean this to me it's like it's seen as this like you know explosion of camp within this violent scene but it's also just like that's a form of power yes right like you're taunting these people like you're feeling

like you can get away with this now they're calling them the girls in blue and lily law uh yeah and they're like come on sweetie like this is people realizing the power numbers that they have and so that's really cool how has this never been made into a musical or has it no just one abysmal movie yeah so the cops are feeling humiliated this actually gets pretty ugly like the cops just start like beating people with night sticks yeah you know if you're a cop and and someone calls you a girl in blue one time in your whole life you have no choice but to wail on them right it's like it's it's again it's like this feels like such a theme like when the police intervene in these situations with communities that are used to being belittled and harassed and beaten

and profiled every single fucking day yeah they reveal their unbelievably low tolerance for any degree of disrespect totally this is what one of the one of the rioters says to david carter for his book in 2004 the cops are totally humiliated this never ever happened they were angrier than they had ever been because everybody else had rioted everybody in america who had a beef had already rioted but the fairies were not supposed to riot and nobody else had ever won the cops realized that just by having to call in reinforcements by barricading the door no other group had ever forced the cops to retreat before so their anger was enormous wow and this is really interesting in that another misconception about stonewall is that stonewall by coincidence did happen on the

day of the funeral of judy garland oh yeah this was always kind of part of the explanation that like sort of gay togetherness sisterhood was in the air that day because like we're celebrating judy garland and so when i talked to mark about this who was at the stonewall dancing that night he's like punk we didn't listen to judy garland like that's our parents music like that's not we were listening to let the sunshine in like that was his jam which is a much better riot incitement song like if you're sitting around listening to judy garland you're just going to be like softly weeping into your brandy all night and also this judy garland myth starts in a really homophobic column oh really i can't imagine that that's possible exactly so it's like this homophobic

column is for the new york daily news who's like you know these homos they're going to the funeral of like their hero and then they want to riot and like no one gets in a rioting mood at a funeral well and also it's like normally they would have been fine with this but like the death of judy garland and it's like right there were no other problems it's like if judy were still around everyone would have been perfectly happy with the way they were being yeah and also other riots like one thing i love from that quote about the cops is that you know every other group in america had already rioted and that's really important to why stonewall happened is that they're watching the civil rights movement they're watching the black panthers

they're watching you know women are getting much more radicalized at that point rioting is like a thing that happens a lot in the late 1960s right the dnc right and protesting which is i think it's it's important to recognize that there's a very porous line between protesting and and what we call rioting absolutely riot is a great word to imply that the behavior the so-called rioters are exhibiting is disproportionate yeah absolutely yeah one of the historians that i interviewed he ryan talks about how overlooking the stonewall is a women's house of detention oh right it's a lot of people of color it's a lot of political prisoners it's a lot of like black panthers where andrea dworkin got the pelvic exam exactly liester totally and where um

angela davis was there too later on right and so the women in the prison are watching stonewall happen and they start lighting their stuff on fire and pushing it out the windows and they start chanting gay power oh god bless the women prisoners so tupac Shakur's mother afini Shakur who's really important in the black panther movement over the course of this summer the following year she sees more of these gay power demonstrations and she starts going up to her fellow prisoners and saying tell me about being a lesbian tell me about your sexuality and once she's out she starts then fighting within the black panther movement for them to do much more work on misogyny and homophobia that's so wonderful she's like looking out through the bars right

and she's like this is a teachable moment i need to think about my revolutionary methodology and this is also happening both ways so that what this judy garland myth totally ignores is like gay people are noticing vietnam war protesters like they're pulling from these other movements it's not a singer that their parents were into who died i mean you know cutie garland was great but we we can't give her credit for everything so that's basically it you know that skirmish between the swat team and the riders goes on it eventually peters out it's 4 a.m by that point everyone kind of goes home but then mark this guy that i interviewed who was there says one of the people like i think it was one of the owners of stonewall gave him a piece of chalk and was like go around

Greenwich village and write on every single flat surface tomorrow night stonewall protest so the night after stonewall there's 2 000 people because again this is like woken up something in people yeah and then there's five nights of riots after stonewall wow so this is a thing now let it go let it go don't hold it back anymore no i i lost it but right it's like it's it was always it was there it's just like and now that it's out like it can't go back in and also kreg rodwell this guy that started the annual reminder parades during stonewall he leaves to go get his camera because he knows this is going to be historic although none of the photos come out which is like a national tragedy that's terrible yeah and he calls the new york times the new york

daily news and the village voice and he's like something is happening you need to get down here and so there's all this amplification that happens there's all this political organizing that happens so they're also like we need to force the issue that this is in fact news exactly and like that was very smart like it gets written up in all the papers i mean this is something that is you i mean this the civil rights movement was also very strategic about and that is still something that i think mainstream society hasn't accepted and that we you know today will like use to discredit a movement or a protest or whatever that like oh they wanted to be in the paper they wanted media attention and it's like yes that's how you force change that's how you bring light to injustice

but this is i mean one of the things i think is so interesting there's this really great article about why did stonewall blow up like why was stonewall a thing and they talk about it was bigger it was in new york which had more of an established media but also before stonewall there wasn't any infrastructure to make a story like this national right there weren't gay publications there wasn't enough gay rights stuff happening in different cities for them to communicate with each other but between 1965 and 1969 that infrastructure was being built so the advocate which i believe is the first gay publication in america had 28 000 subscribers by 1969 and like that's not a lot but like that's enough to get the word out nationally that like look at this

uprising yeah look at what we can do yeah and so kreg rodwell that you know there's a lot of other people that basically dedicate themselves to like let's make stonewall a thing and this is where we get gay pride that they decide on the first anniversary of the stonewall riots they're going to have the christopher street liberation day parade right it's i mean there's just so much invisible labor within social movements and i think it's also so important to remember that like humans aren't actually good at remembering what got us where we are people have to like put a lot of time and work into into organizing acts of of remembrance there's a thing where sylvia revera climbs the walls of city hall wearing a dress and high heels to protest a closed door

meeting about a civil rights bill that they're thinking of passing and heels my god there's also there's stories of people using their work printers to make like 500 copies of gay leaflets there's a lot of this sort of quiet stuff happening and this you know stonewall was this galvanizing force that all of a sudden there's trans rights groups that form out of this there's youth groups because youth had been excluded from the madishine society before they didn't want people under 21 but you know sex workers it's all these groups that had been excluded from the sort of establishment gay rights groups that all of a sudden were like well we can organize so they you know they form the gay liberation front which is the much more radical side of things and what's really interesting

is all of the debates about respectability everything that was happening all the infighting before stonewall continued huh so the madishine society didn't want to celebrate stonewall right of course because if you still think the police might be nice to you someday then you want to be like i i know i don't think anyone should whip pennies at you that's the thing i mean there's there's a really good paragraph in martin duberman's book where he says not all gays were pleased about the eruption at stonewall those satisfied by or at least habituated to the status quo preferred to minimize or dismiss what was happening many wealthier gays sunning at fire island or in the hamptons for the weekend either heard about the rioting and ignored it

or caught up with the news belatedly when they did they tended to characterize the events of stonewall as regrettable as the demented carrying on of stoned tacky queens precisely the elements in the gay world from whom they had long since dissociated themselves stoned tacky queens thank the lord for the stone tacky queens i feel like that's the main the stone tacky queens are the ones secretly running this coin yes and this is sort of again this is an element of stonewall that sort of overlooked now is that eventually everything sort of reverts back to that that by 1973 the gay liberation front is de facto defunct like it's it's splintered off it's not really centrally organized there's something called the gay activist alliance

which emerges to replace it and then the gay activist alliance takes this tone of we only want to work on gay rights we're not going to work on all these other issues the civil rights bill that sylvia climbed the city hall to protest that passed but it didn't include anything about gender expression so there was like a brief moment where the sort of the radicals were in charge and then it just sort of drifted back to this kind of respectability let's make the parade family friendly like let's make sure we're doing everything by the book let's get all our permits etc and then the gay community was like you know as long as we never need like a lot of money or research funding or like care or recognition from the straight

communities holding the purse strings for you know medical research or what have you like that's not going to happen we'll be we can just it's fine i mean yeah i don't know i mean i think there's this old quote that i forget where i got it from but it's talking about respect for the dead and it says to the living one owes respect to the dead one owes only truth and i think it's like very important to just be honest about what was happening and the thing is i don't think that it's like every single person who was involved in gay rights at that time was like a racist prick like a lot of them were like radical socialists and like wanted to create a wildly equal society and were like also doing black panther stuff like there was a lot of crossover between all of the

civil rights movements and one of the things that hu ryan the historian that i interviewed mentioned is like all of the groups deradicalized during this period like from 1970 to 1975 was a really bad period for radicalization like most of these movements were deradicalizing at this time because the christian rite was mobilizing and cops like as there became more infrastructure for movements to organize around the country there was also more infrastructure for cops to mobilize around the country and this sort of increasing militarization it's like the beginning of the mass incarceration move yes this is the beginning of the law and order years like yes people have more to be afraid of like new and more dire consequences are being invented for for social radicals i mean i think

it's important to acknowledge that like there's no correct way to change society yeah we're all going to be shaped by our own fears and the ways that we were raised and everyone was doing their best and like the point is not pillaring people who we can now with like decades of hindsight see behaved in ways that were maybe harmful or ineffectual in the long run because no one can know that about what they're doing and yeah the the central injustice is that you have to do it at all oh yeah absolutely the debate over the tactics and strategy that the gay rights movement used in the 1960s and 1970s will never end and it's fundamentally unknowable yeah we don't know in a counterfactual world what could have been different we do know that we could have taken

a lot better care of marsha and sylvia and the people like them that we've completely forgotten about like we can be clear on that but i think also people at the time were pissed off about them getting erased too like it wasn't monolithically let's get rid of marsha and sylvia like there were people that were fighting for their inclusion there were people that ended up leaving new york city because they were really pissed off about the way that it was going like all of the divisions and diversity that we have within the gay population now were there then and so you don't want to paint anything with too broad of a brush the legacy of the stonewall rights it's like you know you interview enough historians and you become just like totally insufferable about making any bold statements about

anything i don't think that's insufferability i think that's a good thing well i just think that like stonewall was really important and a lot of other stuff was really important too yeah and so i think that the big bang narrative of stonewall is a bit oversimplified but it's also not completely bullshit either now stonewall was different and stonewall was bigger and stonewall was the first event like this to get national attention and to drive a feeling within people that like this can be different this reminds me of my favorite queen thomas jefferson like the opening of the the declaration of independence my paraphrase of it is bitch it is already over if another country treats a country the way you have treated us like you don't notice anymore like that's it you don't

and the radical nature of that statement is something that i cherish as like that you can make your rights real you can manifest your rights by saying them and at the same time i can see the root of so much of the straight male capitalist great man theory of history that we will have ideas and we will get them right the first time and then we will be done and it's like right no like you can have a really great radical idea and then you have to keep working on it every single day and you have to keep thinking about the fact that it doesn't speak for everyone and that that you are initiating endless work and endless learning and like you know as americans we are so enamored of the idea that we can get big ideas right the first time and never have to revise

anything right like yeah both of these things can be true like stonewall can have been this momentous moment that did change the world and that did say you know it is already over like we can't be treated this way anymore and by saying it we are ushering in a new world and also we still have to keep working on on making that world real every day yeah can i end with the best moment that i had from any of my interviews yes so this guy mark who was at the stonewall riots he was telling me about the year after the stonewall riots all of the work that they were doing right the phone calls the leaflets kids were arriving as young as 13 years old in new york city he would put them up on his couch he's talking about nobody had training there was no such thing

as any infrastructure to care for these kids or to care for each other and as he's telling me this i said you know it sounds like there's just layer like a wedding cake of trauma everybody's dealing with like it must have been so hard and he said you know what it was one of the best years of my life he was driving a cab to make enough money to do this at night he felt like it was the first time that he could actually fight for a better world and that was extremely empowering and it made everybody really happy and i think that's that's really important too that like it wasn't all trauma and misery it was fun and it was people spending time in each other's houses and brainstorming the insane projects that they wanted to work on like you know having a parade full of gay people

which was a completely ludicrous idea at the time and then they made these ludicrous ideas happen yeah yeah and just the knowledge that the point is not to take decisive action and get your rights and be done because a that's impossible and b it's by struggling and communally recognizing what we have been through and what we need to do and finding language for experiences that like that's how we come to know each other that's how we build community that's how we experience intimacy like yeah you know as emma goldman never actually said but it spiritually feels like her kind of statement the same way that marcia p johnson spiritually through a shot glass if i can't dance it's not my revolution yeah and if somebody doesn't let you dance

whip some pennies at him and you