Stonewall Inn, 50 years later
LGBTQ Pride Month is barely a month away. As 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, this year is of particular significance to the community. That salient convulsion in our LGBTQ history on which the celebration of Pride Month is founded began on June 28, 1969, when New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay, Mafia-run, unlicensed “bottle bar” frequented by drag queens, lesbians and an otherwise regular crowd of gays. Its popularity was primarily in the fact that it was the city’s only gay dance bar.
Throughout the country back then, police raids of gay bars were commonplace. But this time, the standard police practice of seizing alcohol, checking identification and arresting drag queens went awry. There was resistance. A crowd gathered, and a riot ensued. Marked by violence and a face-off of cops in riot gear and gays in a chorus line performing a coordinated kick routine, the Stonewall Riot (also referred to as the Stonewall Uprising or the Stonewall Rebellion) represented a breaking point.
As one witness purportedly said, “The fags have had it with oppression.” And, in a symbolic moment of institutional impotence, when the police tried to turn a firehose on the rioters, it failed for lack of pressure. The rest is history. In 2016, President Barack Obama declared the site a U.S. National Monument. Of course, there are those who don’t see Stonewall as “the event.” I’ve heard a younger gay man shrug off the Stonewall story with an eye-roll and “so what?” while an older gay man wondered why we put so much value in it.
Political movements often simmer almost unnoticed for prolonged periods while the forces behind them evolve and gradually grow. Along the way, they often seethe quietly with an occasional hint of building pressure before reaching the boiling point. The litany of LGBTQ oppression goes back decades.
Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against communism evolved into the “Lavender Scare” of the 1950s that, similar to today’s military trans ban, sought to purge the U.S. State Department of gay employees. In Milwaukee, some years before Stonewall, there was a famous bar brawl in which drag queens duked it out with a pair of inebriated sailors who made the mistake of presuming drunken straight might means right. Historical examples of such a pattern in revolutionary movements abound. The American Revolutionary War, itself, broke out into pitched battles years before the July 4, 1776, Declaration of Independence.
While I was a member of the PrideFest board of directors, it was the inevitable annual exercise to discuss moving the festival to a more weather-reliable weekend. While PrideFest’s traditional early June dates gave us the cachet of being the season’s first Milwaukee Lakefront festival (and among the first LGBTQ pride events in the nation), we were at the mercy of Wisconsin’s fickle late spring weather. Alternative dates were considered, but the simple argument always won out: Weather be damned, June is Pride Month—the celebration of Stonewall and LGBTQ liberation.
But clearly, like other social revolutions, ours, even a half-century after Stonewall, continues as an ebb and flow of victories, retreats and defeats. So long as hate and discrimination remain as a cause for our enemies, Stonewall must remain a living inspiration for our continuing struggle.
