There Are Many Stories…

Of the Stonewall Uprising, the one I think is the closest is the article by Leslie Feinberg when Leslie interviewed Sylvia Rivera in 1989.

In 1969, the night of the Stonewall riot, was a very hot, muggy night. We were in the Stonewall [bar] and the lights came on. We all stopped dancing. The police came in.

They had gotten their payoff earlier in the week. But Inspector Pine came in-him and his morals squad-to spend more of the government's money.

We were led out of the bar and they cattled us all up against the police vans. The cops pushed us up against the grates and the fences. People started throwing pennies, nickels, and quarters at the cops.

And then the bottles started. And then we finally had the morals squad barricaded in the Stonewall building, because they were actually afraid of us at that time. They didn't know we were going to react that way.

We were not taking any more of this shit. We had done so much for other movements. It was time.

It was street gay people from the Village out front-homeless people who lived in the park in Sheridan Square outside the bar-and then drag queens behind them and everybody behind us. The Stonewall Inn telephone lines were cut and they were left in the dark.

But many news accounts gaywash us out of history, PBS documentary “Stonewall Uprising” says,

The Stonewall Inn was not a fancy establishment -- even its regular customers described it as a dive. Operated by the Mafia, the bar served watered-down drinks without a liquor license. Its two dark rooms had no running water -- just a tub where the drinking glasses were rinsed for reuse. The Stonewall Inn was, however, one of the only places gay people in New York City could socialize, providing a rare haven where they could drink, dance to the jukebox, and be themselves.

Previous raids of the Stonewall Inn had resolved peacefully. Typically, after police made some arrests, the bar shut down, reopening for business just a few hours later. But the raid on June 28th was different: patrons at the Stonewall resisted arrest and the police quickly lost control of the situation. A crowd gathered on the street outside the Stonewall, forcing police to barricade themselves in the bar. Riot officers wearing helmets and armed with nightsticks descended on the scene. The violent protests and demonstrations that erupted that night continued for almost a week.

Nothing about drag queens or even lesbian, only “one of the only places gay people.” Yahoo News has an AP article about Stomewall Inn becoming a historic landmark and the articles says,

NEW YORK (AP) — The Stonewall Inn, the Greenwich Village bar where resistance to a police raid sparked the modern gay rights movement, was made a city landmark Tuesday, the first time a site has been named primarily because of its significance to the LGBT history.
[…]
Patrons fought back against a police raid on the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969, and the street protests that followed for several days are credited with galvanizing gay activism in New York and globally. The rebellion is commemorated with annual gay pride parades in hundreds of cities.

Many people tell me I’m nitpicking that they are using “gay” to mean the whole LGBT community, but the thing is that many of the younger generation do not know that. They wrongfully believe it was just a “gay bar.”

When Congressman Barney Franks took out the coverage for trans people from ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) he said that he did it because we hadn’t paid our dues. That gays and lesbians have been protesting for forty years and the trans community just started to demand our rights. But in reality we were protesting even before Stonewall in places like Cooper's Donuts, Dewey’s Lunch Counter, and Compton’s Cafeteria. It was the drag queens who were being harassed by the police, many times they were checked to see if they had at least 3 items of male clothing on then as required by law.