The Stonewall Uprising.

There are so many myths surrounding the uprising and those who know the truth are dying off. As more movies and documentaries portray it as a white gay riot the truth is getting lost.

5 things you may not know about the Stonewall rebellion
LGBT Nation
By Gwendolyn Smith
June 3, 2018

The Stonewall rebellion: it is widely recognized as the flashpoint of queer liberation. The event was the moment when members of our community stood up against a police raid in a bar, the Stonewall Inn, in Greenwich Village of New York City.

Much of the story is well known, passed down like one might share a community’s legends.
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This wasn’t the first time we rose up
While it is true that the Stonewall Rebellion was a pivotal moment in queer history, it was not the first such uprising — just one of the best known. Several other actions happened before the 28th of June around the county.

The best known of these is probably the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, which while taking place across the continent from the Stonewall Inn, shares many of the same causes.

Compton’s Cafeteria was part of a chair of such restaurants, in operation from the 1940-1970s. The location in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood was a popular hangout for trans people and hustlers. Cafeteria personnel, fearing the loss of more profitable clientele, would call the San Francisco Police to clear the place out.

On an August night in 1966, when the police attempted to arrest a trans patron, she responded by throwing her coffee in the officer’s face. This touched off a riot, with a picket against Compton’s the following night.

Many other actions have been recorded in the pre-stonewall era, from a riot at Cooper Do-nuts in Los Angeles in 1959, a sit-in at Dewey’s lunch counter in Philadelphia in 1965, and a picket of the Chicago newspapers in 1066 for refusing Mattachine Midwest, an early gay rights organization, advertising space.

One thing I learned researching the uprising… you don’t want to be around mad trans women with a cup of coffee. Just about every one of these uprisings started with a cup of coffee being thrown at police officers, in the case of Stonewall it was pennies and nickels.

It wasn’t the first police raid at the Stonewall Inn
Police raids on the Stonewall Inn and other bars were frequent. At the time, it was illegal for members of the same sex to dance together, and laws made it illegal to wear articles of clothing of the gender opposite the one they were assigned at birth.

The Stonewall Inn has been raided just days before the one that led to the rebellion.

“This wasn’t the first raid,” said Robert Herndon, a veteran of the Stonewall Rebellion, who now resides in Myrtle Beach, far from the village. “The police would come in and check everyone’s ID. They were looking for illegal booze.”
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The Stonewall Inn wasn’t exactly above board
The Stonewall Inn has long been pinpointed as a mafia-controlled bar under the ownership of the Genovese crime family. It had no liquor license, no running water — patrons would often get ill from the glassware, which was rinsed in a tub of water — and there were no fire exits.

“It was a place that was heavily connected with blackmail. They had a prostitution ring that was run out of the second floor above the Stonewall Inn, and one of the owners of the Stonewall Inn, Ed Murphy, was the person who had run a national blackmail ring, had over a thousand victims, over 10 years,” said Carter.

Because it was illegal to be LGBT back then, legitimate bars and clubs didn’t want anything to do with us so we had to hang out in the seedier part of the cities.

It was about more than police; it was about community
In spite of the conditions and the crime connections, the Stonewall Inn served as a de facto hangout for the local area.

Tommy Lanigan Schmidt, another survivor of that note who spoke on WNYC, addressed why the community fought for the stonewall, “This bar had been open for a few years. Generally bars closed down quickly. Also this bar — it’s hard for people to imagine now — but gay people weren’t allowed to dance with each other, it was against the law, and this bar allowed slow dancing.”

They made it illegal to be gay, lesbian, or trans which forced us in to the sleazy bars run by organized crime. It was kind of self-fulfilling we couldn’t go to mainstream bars and nightclubs, we couldn’t marry and from that came the image of gays, lesbians, and “drag queens” hanging out in dark smoke filled bars and jumping from one bed to another.

Everyone was a part of the rebellion
The community of the time was not as granular as it is today, with clear identities delineating people within it, and those who we would call transgender today were more likely to hang out with everyone else. Everyone was an outcast, and everyone could find a place at the Stonewall Inn.

“That’s the thing I like, that made me comfortable. It was there were all age groups. They weren’t all 20 years old. There were all types there, including people who were transsexual and those who were transvestites. It was a mixture of all kinds of people and that’s what make it so good to me,” said Herndon.

I find that today marriage and equality the gay bars are closing, there is only one gay bar left in Hartford; the need for gay bars is declining. Why do you need a gay bar when now you can meet your friends at the corner bar? I meet with a group of lesbians for game night once a month at an avant-garde art gallery something that never would have been heard of 20 years ago.

We cannot let them force us back into the closet under the guise of “religious freedom.”