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Next month, we will mark the forty-sixth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. I could not think of a better topic for this month's edition of LGBT Literature as we prepare to celebrate LGBT Pride Month.
Nearly half a century later, Stonewall has begun to enter the public lexicon as we do a better and better job of teaching what used to be a hidden history. For the first time in our history, mention of Stonewall found its way into a presidential inaugural address when President Barack Obama symbolically named the riots along with Seneca Falls and Selma in a recognition of American social change that has occurred in the last century. And next month, Pride celebrations will take place across the country, in the wake of a likely Supreme Court ruling establishing marriage equality as the law of the land. Many will remember and invoke Stonewall in the process, making the books I'm going to discuss this evening quite timely. Follow me below the fold...
I'm sure you're at least somewhat familiar with Stonewall, but in case you're not, here are the bare-bones Wikipedia details (yes, we academics turn to Wikipedia, too):
The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the gay community against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. They are widely considered to constitute the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for LGBT rights in the United States.
[...]
Very few establishments welcomed openly gay people in the 1950s and 1960s. Those that did were often bars, although bar owners and managers were rarely gay. At the time, the Stonewall Inn was owned by the Mafia. It catered to an assortment of patrons and was known to be popular among the poorest and most marginalized people in the gay community: drag queens, representatives of the transgender community, effeminate young men, male prostitutes, and homeless youth. Police raids on gay bars were routine in the 1960s, but officers quickly lost control of the situation at the Stonewall Inn. They attracted a crowd that was incited to riot. Tensions between New York City police and gay residents of Greenwich Village erupted into more protests the next evening, and again several nights later. Within weeks, Village residents quickly organized into activist groups to concentrate efforts on establishing places for gays and lesbians to be open about their sexual orientation without fear of being arrested.
After the Stonewall riots, gays and lesbians in New York City faced gender, race, class, and generational obstacles to becoming a cohesive community. Within six months, two gay activist organizations were formed in New York, concentrating on confrontational tactics, and three newspapers were established to promote rights for gays and lesbians. Within a few years, gay rights organizations were founded across the U.S. and the world. On June 28, 1970, the first Gay Pride marches took place in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago commemorating the anniversary of the riots. Similar marches were organized in other cities. Today, Gay Pride events are held annually throughout the world toward the end of June to mark the Stonewall riots.
As an LGBT historian, I have taken (and will continue to take) great pains to teach my students that Stonewall was
not the beginning of LGBT history. That is true, and we cannot forget the invaluable contributions of activists who came before and organizations such as the
Mattachine Society and the
Daughters of Bilitis (and others) that helped lay the groundwork for the social change that we continue to see in rapid motion today. These activists worked in incredibly hostile terrain in the middle part of the twentieth century (and before) to begin a public recognition and legitimization of homosexuality. Nor was Stonewall the first LGBT riot; I'm thinking of the 1966
Compton's Cafeteria riot in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, which was a seminal moment in transgender history. Indeed, Stonewall did not occur in a historical vacuum. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Stonewall
was a watershed moment in LGBT history, and the importance of the riots cannot be downplayed. A flurry of activism sprung out of the gay liberation movement that followed the riots, and in many ways we
do have Stonewall to thank for much of the progress we have achieved in the latter part of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first.
Today, while there seems to be a common understanding that the modern LGBT movement can be traced back to Stonewall, there are surprisingly few formal studies on the event. I'm going to recommend two of them, both appropriately titled Stonewall (that certainly made titling this diary easy). I am not going to go too in-depth, because there is only so much I can say about each of them, and they really are required reading anyway if you have any interest in LGBT history.
The first is pioneer gay historian Martin Duberman's Stonewall (1993). At the time of publication, it was the most extensively researched account of the riots. As Duberman notes in the preface:
"Stonewall" is the emblematic event in modern lesbian and gay history. The site of a series of riots in late June-early July 1969 that resulted from a police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar, "Stonewall" has become synonymous over the years with gay resistance to oppression. Today, the word resonates with images of insurgency and self-realization and occupies a central place in the iconography of lesbian and gay awareness. The 1969 riots are now generally taken to mark the birth of the modern gay and lesbian political movement--that moment in time when gays and lesbians recognized all at once their mistreatment and their solidarity. As such, "Stonewall" has become an empowering symbol of global proportions.
Yet remarkably--since 1994 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riots--the actual story of the upheaval has never been told completely, or been well understood. We have, since 1969, been trading the same few tales about the riots from the same few accounts--trading them for so long that they have transmogrified into simplistic myth. The decades preceding Stonewall, moreover, continue to be regarded by most gays and lesbians as some vast neolithic wasteland--and this, despite the efforts of pioneering historians like Allan Berube, John D'Emilio and Lillian Faderman to fill in the landscape of those years with vivid, politically astute personalities.
As you can tell from this preface,
Stonewall is less about the riots than it is about the historical context in which they occurred. The riots themselves are not substantively mentioned until page 181, and even then they account for only twenty pages of the entire book. Duberman, while concerned with the riot details, is even more concerned with what preceded and came after (as a direct result of) the riots.
Duberman takes a novel approach to his study of Stonewall. Actually, it reads much like fiction, and you may forget you're not reading a novel as you eagerly flip the pages. The book centers on six characters:
Craig Rodwell: Raised in a Chicago school for troubled boys, he arrived in New York as a teenager, emerged as a radical figure in the Mattachine Society, opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore and spearheaded the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March.
Yvonne Flowers: The only African-American child attending an all-white grade school in New Rochelle in 1942, she grew up to become a jazz fanatic, a devotee of nightlife, an occupational therapist and teacher, and one of the founders of Salsa Soul Sisters.
Karla Jay: Born in Flatbush and a graduate of Barnard, she joined the feminist collective the Redstockings, as well as the Gay Liberation Front, subsequently completed a doctorate in comparative literature, authored a number of books and earned a full professorship.
Sylvia (Ray) Rivera: Hustling on Times Square at age 11, she became a street transvestite, a fixture in the Times Square area, a fearless defender of her sisters, and the founder of STAR--Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.
Jim Fouratt: Brought up in Rhode Island, a teenage of precocious intelligence, he joined and left the priesthood, became a New York actor, hipster, antiwar protestor, and a major spokesperson for the countercultural Yippie movement.
Foster Gunnison, Jr.: The privileged scion of a wealthy yet emotionally distant family, he forsook business and academic careers, plunged into the pre-Stonewall homophile movement, became its archivist, and helped plan the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March.
Not all of these characters were involved with the Stonewall riots; their stories ultimately converge not during the riots, but during the Christopher Street Liberation Day March that came a year after. Duberman shifts back and forth between these six characters for the duration of the book, for which he has drawn some criticism. I will admit to being a little frustrated myself at times with the book. If you are looking for an extremely detailed play-by-play of the Stonewall riots, this is perhaps not the book for you, but that does not mean there is nothing to learn from it. On the contrary, Duberman's
Stonewall is rich with history, and its approachable narrative style is a plus if you are not into the drier historical literature that is more commonplace. If you want a good primer on the homophile history that led up to Stonewall and the activism that came after, through the perspective of grassroots activists themselves,
Stonewall is a very valuable book indeed.
The next book is David Carter's Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution (2004). Carter's style is very different from Duberman's, but it is also a page-turner and far from a dry history. A former gay activist himself, Carter is not a professional historian, and his book reads at times more like really good journalism than history.
Carter's Stonewall is also much more focused on the riots themselves than Duberman's work. This is not to say that he neglects context--the entire first part of the book is devoted to "setting the stage," although the context is less homophile movement and more Greenwich Village and Stonewall Inn history. The second part of the book, consisting of five chapters, is the play-by-play riot action largely missing from Duberman's study. The third section delves into immediate aftermath of the riots, honing in especially on the establishment of the Gay Liberation Front and the initial rumblings of the broader gay liberation movement that came out of Stonewall.
While, as a historian, I tend to be much more concerned with big-picture themes than I am with minute details, there is much to be taken from Carter's exhaustive reconstruction of the Stonewall riots. I wrote about one important contribution: the tearing-down of the longstanding myth that the death of Judy Garland launched the riots. This is not as petty as it might sound, as the myth strips agency away from those who risked life and limb to resist the police. As I wrote in that diary:
Historians work with evidence (or, at least, that's how it's supposed to work). So, what evidence is there that Judy Garland had anything whatsoever to do with gay resistance at Stonewall?
As David Carter points out in Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, there is pretty much none. Absolutely no written eyewitness account of the riots in 1969 so much as mentions Garland. Had her death been central to the riots, doesn't it follow that at least somebody at the time, when recounting the events, would have said something about her? One historical document that does mention Judy Garland is a gossip and news column of the New York Mattachine Newsletter in August of 1969, which discusses the riots and, midway through, brings up the fact that Garland died (along with other bits of gay news). The two events are not linked in the piece in any way, shape, or form. A piece in Esquire toward the end of 1969 does the same thing. There is no hint in either of these pieces that Garland's death had anything to do with the anger unleashed on the police at Stonewall.
The only other relevant historical document that mentions Garland does draw a link between her death and Stonewall. That piece, by Walter Troy Spencer, is entitled "Too Much, My Dear," and it originally appeared in the Village Voice on July 10, 1969. One problem--Troy is heterosexual and is creating a link between Garland's death and Stonewall to mock what he calls "the Great Faggot Rebellion." This--a disgusting anti-gay column written by a homophobe--seems to be the first (and only) piece of historical evidence linking Garland's death with Stonewall. Not exactly admissible evidence, considering the source.
As Carter notes, most of the people on the front lines of the riot were those who had nothing to lose: street youths, many of whom were homeless, and many of whom could not have cared less about Judy Garland. This is another important contribution of Carter's work: recognizing the centrality of poor street kids, including gender-nonconforming youths and youths of color, in helping lead the resistance against the police. In his reconstruction of the riots, he highlights these kids' bravery in the face of terrifying police force:
As [an interview subject and Stonewall participant] watched the face-off between the men in the kick line and the [NYPD's Tactical Control Force (TPF)], he was amazed by the gay youths' courage. "The queens--they were extremely effeminate young men--formed this kicking line all across Christopher Street, and started to do a Rockettes kick. And singing, "We're the Stonewall Girls, we wear our hair in curls, we don't wear underwear . . . ," as it went. And the police started moving ahead, moving towards them." The TPF advanced at a slow and steady pace, inching forward. "And the queens did not move; they just continued to kick and to sing as the police just moved closer and closer and closer; and you just wondered how long are they going to keep this up before they break and run? The police got closer and closer to them with their clubs and their helmets and their riot gear and the whole thing; and I thought it was just very inspiring, their bravery, like Bunker Hill or 'Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes.' They were waiting until the very last minute, and it wasn't until the police were eight feet away from them that the crowd finally broke and ran."
This recovering of agency is central to Carter's work, and it is one of the things I appreciate most about it. Its meticulous research and reevaluation of the well-told Stonewall story make Carter's
Stonewall a must-read for anybody interested in the riots or LGBT history.
I could probably go on a bit more about these two books, but I think you get the idea. If you haven't read them, make that your reading homework for June, as we all celebrate LGBT Pride Month. Stonewall is so central to the history that has shaped our movement into what it is today.
There are few better ways to celebrate Pride than to read, learn, and retell our history.
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