The Promise of Stonewall.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Stonewall Riot, New York, New York, 1969 - Brief Article

On a visit to New York City two l years ago, I was intent on seeing Stonewall, a bar where three days of rioting in June 1969 touched off the grassroots gay and lesbian movement. So I asked a friend to go with me.

It was a Thursday afternoon about 4:00 P.M. The place was quiet, with three patrons besides us and a bartender. This was where it started--"the hairpin drop heard `round the world," as it was called by the New York Mattachine Society, a gay civil rights group.

There should be something here, I told my friend, some recognition of what this place has meant to so many people. But it looked like any other dive. I drank a soda, bought a T-shirt, and we left.

This past June was the thirtieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. And Stonewall, the building, did receive recognition in the National Register of Historic Places. There are 70,000 or so national landmarks, and this is the first one associated with gays and lesbians, says the bar's present owner, Bob Gurecki.

On June 28, 1969, the police raided the Stonewall Inn, one of many police busts in an era when it was illegal to cross-dress or dance with a partner of the same sex. But this time, the people fought back, and their defiance was contagious. Theirs was the desperate resistance of those who had learned to love the only corner that would shelter them--a seedy, mafia-run bar.

"Why the Stonewall and not the Sewer or the Snake Pit?" asked the New York Mattachine Newsletter shortly after the riots. "The answer lies, we believe, in the unique nature of the Stonewall.... It catered to a large group of people who are not welcome in, or cannot afford, other places of homosexual social gathering.... When it was raided, they fought for it.... They had nothing to lose other than the most tolerant and open-minded gay place in town."

The riots ended, amazingly, with no one dead. But the impact was immediate. "For those of us in Public Morals, after the Stonewall incident things were completely changed," said Seymour Pine, who was deputy inspector in charge of the New York City Police Department's vice squad. "They suddenly were not submissive anymore." The news spread, and four months later, Time and Newsweek featured stories entitled "The Homosexual: Newly Visible, Newly Understood" and "Policing the Third Sex."

In the early days of the popular gay and lesbian movement, there were gay be-ins in Central Park, with thousands together for the first time--many of them crying with exhilaration...