Stonewall’s Impact: How an Uprising Changed A Movement

By Lucy Steward

   Glass bottles shattered over the crowd’s thundering shouts as heels thrashed and neon nylons flashed on the cobblestone Christopher Street, the crowd swallowing up the police officers in a rainbow flood against the darkening night—the fight had only just begun. The legacy of these riots marked American history as a beacon of pride against all odds, etched into the pages of classroom textbooks and floating on conversation as a fundamental moment in LGBTQ+ history, the Stonewall Uprising. In society’s contemporary understanding of Stonewall, the uprising is perceived as the ultimate catalyst of the American queer rights movement within the United States. Yet, this conception could disregard the previous acts of protest, albeit lesser known, that queer individuals have taken against oppression, leading historians to debate whether the Stonewall Uprising was a continuation of the LGBTQ+ rights movement or not. In truth, although the Stonewall Uprising was a continuation of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, it sparked a change in the tactics that queer people used and the general approach to protesting, transitioning from a passive to more aggressive and unified resistance while altering society's perception of the queer community.  

Early Queer Life 

   Acts of protest in the LGBTQ+ rights movement existed long before the Stonewall Uprising but were lesser known due to their smaller nature and less frequent media coverage. One documented example of queer protest stretches as far back as the American Revolution of the late 1700s, where biologically female Deborah Sampson dressed in what was considered men’s clothing while masquerading as a man, and additionally fought as a soldier in the war, in opposition to society’s strict gender binary policies. A descendant of hers remarked that Sampson was “subtly nodding to the fact that she liked this” and was “queer in that sense.” However, Sampson’s acts of rebellion remained an individual act without long-lasting legal strides in ensuring broader queer rights. Similarly, in 1955 the Daughters of Bilitis was founded as a lesbian organization, which, although prominent amongst some queer women of the time period, remained secretive and ultimately disbanded around twenty years later. Further along the historical timeline in 1966, a fight ensued at the Compton Cafeteria in San Francisco when a transgender woman threw a cup of hot coffee at a police officer’s face after he harassed her. Still, mainstream media largely ignored the ensuing skirmish. Furthermore, in regards to how well the queer community themselves even knew about these acts of protest, queer author and scholar Edmund White notes that “most gay people had hardly heard of them.” 

   Those initial acts of protest were responses to the long-standing queer oppression ingrained in American society even before 1969, as the nation perceived the LGBTQ+ community as inferior and therefore committed extreme acts of brutality against them. Queer people were considered a “threat to the nation’s wellbeing” and violated “the normal spectrum of human behavior,” an ideology ingrained “even among queers” themselves. Throughout the 1960s, homosexuals, and transgender people continued to be at risk for “psychiatric lockup” because mental institutes defined queerness as “sick, criminal, or immoral.” As scholar and University of North Carolina Greensboro professor Wade Maki noted, federal law reiterated this notion by banning consensual same-gender oral and anal sex, as well as dressing outside gender confines, in every state in the U.S except Illinois. In terms of the working environment, bars and restaurants could be shut down for having queer employees or customers, therefore, LGBTQ+ employees lost their jobs if their sexuality or non-comforming gender was discovered. Further, former President Eisenhower passed an executive order in 1953 prohibiting gay people from working in any branch of the federal government. This persecution continued in religious settings as well, for many Protestant orders sent homosexual minors to “conversion therapy” where they’d endure electric shocking and emotional, mental, and physical abuse in an attempt to eradicate the queerness within them. It wasn’t until much later in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association “removed homosexuality as an illness” in its list of diagnosed mental disorders, leaving queer people continuously oppressed and feeling helpless in their lack of rights for simply existing. 

The Nights of the Uprising

   The Stonewall Inn became a safe space for queer people seeking refuge from oppressive laws, surprisingly, because the Mafia stepped in to run it. As the LGBTQ+ community blossomed in New York City in the 1960s, “they had few places to gather publicly” and were “eager for any spot where they could safely come together.” When Tony Lauri, a head of the Genovese crime family in NYC, reopened Stonewall as a Mafia-run gay bar, the opportunity that the queer community was searching for had arrived. Operating as a private club to evade the control of the State Liquor Authority, they charged higher than typical prices. Portions of those earnings went towards bribing the local police precinct into completing occasional staged raids, in which paid-off police would warn the crowd to stop open displays of same-gender affection, and mainly leaving the bar alone. Aside from these harmless raids, the Stonewall Inn remained a “sanctuary” amongst bars and a rare space “for self-expression and affection” for the queer community because the Mafia managers didn't care enough about who was kissing whom or wearing what and saw the bar as merely another profitable financial investment. This attracted a “devoted young clientele” of “cross-dressers” in a “mix of men’s and women’s attire,” as well as customers who enjoyed mingling with the same gender. As Mark Segal, a young gay frequenter of the bar, remarks, it was a “glorious place to be because we could be open” and “dance…hug, and kiss.” Due to the Mafia’s control of the Stonewall Inn, it became a safe haven for its queer customers amidst a politically polar and oppressive landscape. 

   When a non-local police unit raided Stonewall on June 28th, that action set off the riotting conflict between Stonewall’s queer customers and the police. Although there were frequent staged raids—for the sake of maintaining the illusions that the bar was being monitored—that the Mafia manager knew about before they’d occur, on June 28th a non-local police precinct headed by the “peculiarly diligent lawman” Seymour Pine, the Deputy Inspector of the New York Police Department’s Morals Squad, raided Stonewall. Not affiliated with the local police precinct and therefore not bribed, Pine’s troops stormed into the bar under the guise of shutting it down for illegally selling liquor without a license, consequently allowing them to arrest any lawbreaking individuals they spotted on the premises, including queer people whose identities were illegal. Arrest reports documented thirteen customers and seven employees initially arrested and booked at the Sixth Precinct on charges of disorderly conduct and harassment. Despite a general attitude of frustration from the bar customers, Pine recalls that otherwise, “initially it was going pretty normally.”

   However, the night quickly took a turn for the worse as the queer people and patrons fought back instead of complying with the raid’s arrests because they were tired of being silenced. Drag queens and queer bar-goers began to flee the police and their detaining vans to escape arrest, as one drag queen “mashed an officer with her heel” and “grabbed his handcuff key” to free herself, and then “passed the keys to another queen behind her.” The increasingly agitated crowd of queer customers, who were being continuously harassed by police, began calling out “camp humor” that made fun of the officers, which quickly spiraled into shouting degrading insults like “pigs!” and “faggot cops!” amongst cries of  “gay power!’” Amidst the ensuing chaos, one particular eighteen-year old drag queen Martin shot “out of the back of the paddy wagon into the chest of a cop, throwing him backward.” Soon policemen were “dodging flying glass and missiles” as the crowd threw anything they could find. Furthermore, a reporter for the Village Voice, Howard Smith, recalled that the ruckus “sound[ed] like a powerful rage bent on vendetta.” As the conflict progressed from mere verbal shouts into a more aggressive physical altercation, that anger spilled into full fledged riots. 

   The queer customers’ aggressive reactions and refusal to comply shocked the unprepared police officers and left them disadvantaged in the escalating fight. Inspector Pine expected merely “two or three cops being able to handle with ease any number of cowering gays,” but was stunned and “frightened by the crowd's unexpected fury.” When one policeman, Gil Weisman, was hit in the eye with a glass shard and “blood spurted out,” Pine realized that the situation was “an actual threat to physical safety” and ordered his men to take cover inside the bar, despite how retreating was a “shock to self-esteem.” Even as the police called for backup via the Tactical Patrol Force (TPF), a specialized police force unit trained to disband riots, the protesting crowd still “did not break and run,” which was completely “contrary to police expectations.” Despite the TPF’s determined efforts to break up the conflict, the furious queer crowd continued to disperse and then “reform behind” the TPF while “yelling taunts, tossing bottles and bricks, setting fires in trash cans.” The nights of Stonewall were the straw that broke the camel's back and let loose years of buried anger of being ignored in their quest for equal rights. 

Impacts, Changes, and Life After Stonewall

   One significant impact was that the queer community became more prideful of their identities because the uprising at Stonewall showed that they didn’t have to tolerate hate any longer. Stonewall Inn customer Michael Fader, who was present during the historic event, recalls that “there was something in the air” and a taste of “freedom a long time overdue.” Similarly, queer author Edmund White excitedly conveyed in a letter to his wife Ann White and friend Alfred Corn a few days after the uprising occurred that the inextinguishable energy of Stonewall was “the most extraordinary thing” and that “the big news here is Gay Power.” White’s letter captures the wonder spreading like wildfire in the queer community about how large protests with rallied groups could actually be sustained unapologetically, as the events at Stonewall had demonstrated. This excitement peaked further with the founding of the first openly LGBTQ+ activist group a week after Stonewall, the New York Gay Liberation Front, followed by the formation of the Gay Activists Alliance in December of 1969 and the consequent chain reaction of swiftly forming LGBTQ+ activism organizations in 36 states across the U.S. The first Pride March event was held on June 27 of 1970 by the Chicago Gay Liberation coalition in NYC, L.A., and Chicago; a historic day that attracted thousands of participants, mirroring the hundreds of people at Stonewall who refused to have their pride silenced and fought back for six consecutive nights. The queer community’s pride flourished in greater prominence than ever before, and it was evident that “the bottom line was, we weren’t going to go away.”  

   Alongside this reinvigorated pride came the queer community’s realization that they wouldn’t tolerate homophobia any longer, therefore creating a new wave of activism. As the New York Mattachine Newsletter noted, the swell in queer pride triggered a notion that the queer community “couldn’t let the [Stonewall] riots become a footnote in history books” and therefore began organizing “a more unified gay liberation front.” Activism organizations across North and Eastern America coordinated a large-scale conference to discuss approaches to activism, dubbed the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, something that had not been done before. The combined efforts of “veteran pre-Stonewall activists” alongside “newly radicalized young LGBTQ people” shaped the angry energy “released at Stonewall” into a “newly supercharged national movement” that was increasingly louder and more unified in action. Activists created “planning documents, correspondence, flyers, ephemera” and more to efficiently act and make it easier to do so. Those changes in strategy led to the birth of a widespread movement, with louder intentions, such as the “Reminder Day Pickets" held on July 4 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where protestors gathered to promote public acceptance of queerness and remind the public that they were being denied fundamental rights. Changing the ways in which they protested brought in a new radical protesting movement, and louder than ever before, the queer community demanded to be heard. 

   An additional impact was that, alongside the rise of queer documentation in literature and media, society’s perception of queerness was altered from hostility to a more accepting perspective. The surge in organized activism brought the LGBTQ+ movement to the forefront of news sources, and as documentation of queer activism moved into mainstream papers due to its intensity, the general population outside of the inner queer network began to take more notice of the fight for LGBTQ+ rights. For example, the Village Voice newspaper wrote “two front-page stories on the riots” with one photograph titled “A photograph of the window of the Stonewall Inn in New York City, 1969” that captured the partially-erased slogans written on one of the Stonewall Inn’s windows, which floated around newspaper prints. Furthermore, mainstream literature publishing houses printed “hundreds of novels featuring homosexual characters and themes”, including “respected” and  “popular” literature, namely lesbian poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, James Baldwin’s 1971 ‘Just Above My Head’, to name a few. As Stonewall became the most documented queer act of protest and the consequent awareness about the movement for LGBTQ+ rights, most people began to no longer view homosexuals or transgender folks as “criminals or sinners or mentally ill”, but rather as “members of a minority group,” which was an “oceanic change” in perspective.   

   A final impact lies within the legislative front, where the increased societal acceptance of queerness paved the way for tangible changes in legislation supporting LGBTQ+ rights. As society became less homophobic they wanted to mirror that within the legislation. Former President Obama emphasized society’s reinvigorated notion that “all of us are created equal” as the “star that guides” America when he ranked the importance of Stonewall Uprising “aside Selma and Seneca Falls” in his second inaugural address, incorporating LGBTQ+ rights into “American liberalism.” The queer community sought to make legislation reflect the newer and more inclusive ideologies regarding their rights. A Black man himself, he understood the struggle queer people were facing. Activist Jim Fauratt noted that individuals wished to “be treated equally under the law,” but if the “the law doesn't, you have to change it.” In “distinct responses to legal issues faced by homosexuals” the first approach to a solution was to “work toward securing sexual freedom for all” by repealing sodomy laws and seeking to end discrimination under the law, similar to the “battles fought by African Americans and other disenfranchised groups.” In a culmination of the fight for equal rights, queer marriage was legalized in all 50 states of the U.S. alongside the abolishment of discriminatory laws against queer persons. 

   Ultimately, the Stonewall Uprising not only unified the LGBTQ+ rights movement but also created a strong environment for the movement to take off and be relevant to the present day. Although acts of protest had occurred for centuries before Stonewall, the uprising became more widely documented than any previous protest and set a louder example of what the future could look like for the queer community; unapologetically fighting back against oppression. It was the queer communities’ rallied reaction after the riots that ignited hope and inspired organized action, leading to a shift in tactics and strategies utilized. Where all previous acts of rebellion had lit a flame of resistance yet had quickly been put out, at Stonewall, the queer community refused to let that flame die and therefore shaped it into the legacy it holds today. It was the immense anger that wouldn’t remain contained any longer that sparked a new dawn of change, for Stonewall was a key turning point in the LGBTQ+ rights movement, but not the beginning point. Stonewall not only shifted queer individual’s perception of themselves and rallied more people on a more unified front, but also shifted protesting tactics that created a more effective movement, ultimately becoming more widely known for its effectiveness in both legislation and societal viewpoint changes. The Stonewall Uprising was the culminating moment of years of buried anger that finally spilled over, permanently changing the course of queer history.

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