_
What was condemned now strives for acceptance.
We are living through one of the greatest revolutions
in history, the birth of a new civilization.
For decades they've been coming for us.
Get around here, queer. Get those fruits outside.
And it didn't matter if we were singing a song,
struttin' our stuff, or speaking our truth.
Outside, outside, move it.
Well, times they are a changing.
And in New York City, the patrons of a little gay bar
in the Village are about to end the '60s with a bang.
It's time to strut out of the bars to fight in the streets.
Darling, I want my gay rights now!
This is the story of Stonewall,
the story of a riot and a revolution
and the march toward power and pride.
Gay Power! Gay Power! Gay Power!
Revolution now!
CREDITS
The story of Stonewall isn't just one story.
Everyone who was there has their own tale to tell,
and to understand how and why it all went down
on a hot summer night in 1969,
we have to take a walk through the Village,
Greenwich Village in New York City
and meet some Village people who will tell it like it was
and tell us exactly what set the stage for the rage.
Like Mr. Martin Boyce, 21 years old in 1969
and an eye-witness to it all.
Well, the character of the Village in the 1960s
was a welcome mat where gays could go.
But you felt if you went down there, you were very hopeful
that things could go your way.
You could make friends and meet other interesting people.
Everybody could find a little spot in the Village
or at least tolerance, but real tolerance.
And that was all we really wanted from a neighborhood.
Hey, Tim. How are you?
I left home when I was 19.
Now meet lesbian feminist activist, Martha Shelley.
That year I joined the first women's judo class
in New York City, and that's where I met lesbians.
I hung around bookstores.
I used to hang around the section
where the trash novels were that had pictures of women
on the front cover.
Lesbian pulp fiction. Some of it pretty awful.
Was this also in Manhattan?
Yeah, it was in Greenwich Village.
When the dust settles on Stonewall,
she will help lead the way forward,
as will this fine fellow,
one of the forefathers of Pride itself,
Craig Rodwell.
As soon as I heard that all the queers
live in Greenwich Village in New York City,
I literally started saving my money.
And two months out of high school,
I was here on a bus with two suitcases.
There was a group of about at least a dozen of us
that hung out together on the streets.
I suppose it was the beginning of a Stonewall generation,
even though it was 10 years before Stonewall.
For one thing, we were here in Greenwich Village
leading openly gay lives.
It took me two summers cleaning toilets on Fire Island
to save up enough money to afford a shop
on Mercer Street, right over here in the Village.
I called it the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop.
Well, the most important thing about it is it was going to be
an openly gay, visible presence on the street.
I've always firmly believed, and I think today
it's just as important as ever, that will always be visible.
To me, it was more of a positive thing.
I had everything to gain by being openly gay.
What did you have to gain?
Well, just being me, being myself, being free,
being a whole person, not being afraid.
You and your books.
I first heard about the Stonewall because
I was with the hip crowd.
Hip or not, everyone in the Village
knew the Mayor of Christopher Street,
the iconic Miss Marsha P. Johnson.
First it was just a gay men's bar,
and they didn't allow no women in.
And then they started allowing women in,
and then they let the drag queens in.
It was about dancing, people could dance.
And me, I wasn't into dancing that much,
but the real thing was the excitement of everybody going.
The first place I ever seen go-go boys,
'cause they used to have several go-go boys
that used to dance on the bar at that place.
And then they had these drag queens working there,
and there was this, uh, Tiffany and, oh, this other drag queen
that used to work there in the coat check room.
They really had a culture in there.
It was really interesting and meaningful,
because here there was a group of gays that, you know,
really enjoying themselves as if the world were normal
and not worrying that the sun won't come up
and not worrying about tomorrow, and in an amazing way,
a celebration of surviving another day,
living another night, maybe meeting another trick.
Now let's take a seat at the bar next to
the one and only, Sylvia Rivera, a soldier in the battle
for gay liberation and transgender rights.
Before the Stonewall Riot,
I was involved in the Black Liberation Movement.
Back then my revolutionary blood was going.
I did a lot of marches.
I had to do something to show everyone the world was changing.
- Power to the people! - Power to the people!
I got involved in a lot of different things
because I had so much anger about this world
and the way they were treating people.
We demand an end to discrimination
against homosexuals.
The first time that I got arrested,
I was like, "I'm going where?"
So you went to jail a few times.
Oh, I went to jail a lot of times.
50 times? 100 times?
About 200 times.
If you walked down 42nd street and even looked like a faggot,
you were going to jail.
They'd get you for hustling,
and if you were looking a little too cute,
like I look right now, you know, in women's clothing,
well, they'd arrest you for impersonating a lady.
In 1960's America, laws were harsher against gays
than in Cuba, Russia, or East Germany.
Gay sex in your own home got you anywhere from
a light fine to 20 years in prison.
In Pennsylvania and California, sex offenders could be locked
in a mental institution for life.
And in seven states, you could be castrated.
While socially in some ways
New York City was more sophisticated,
having a Bohemian center like Greenwich Village
where gay people could at least find others like themselves
and be tolerated, New York City was also
cutting edge in catching homosexuals.
New York City was the first place to have vice squads.
They were the first place to do stakeouts of homosexuals,
to put mirrors, two-way mirrors in bathrooms
and microphones in park benches.
Complaints have been received against the operations
of this restroom for some time.
Now a pattern of homosexuality was centered in the city.
We were confronted with a problem.
You know, picking up strangers in his hell hole
could be a dangerous game.
Well, I only do it occasionally.
Occasionally?
Yeah, like every other day.
On Greenwich Avenue, it was a major cruising area at the time.
I mean, every night there'd be hundreds of gay guys
sitting on cars.
But if a cop came along, everybody would get up
and start walking,
and if you didn't they'd come up and they'd poke you.
It was just an easy way for them to fill a quota
and at the same time harass the queers.
It was a vicious circle.
What was everyone afraid of?
Being beaten or arrested, and I suppose ultimately,
of being publicly identified as a homosexual.
What would that mean?
Well, perhaps loss of job, or when they would raid gay bars,
the papers would publish the name and address
and where they worked,
of the people who were arrested on the front page of the papers
the next day.
I mean, like they were mass murderers.
And even though booze got legal after prohibition,
gay people still couldn't
legally get a drink at a bar in 1969.
The NYPD said serving gays and trans folks a drink
was disorderly, and therefore the bar could lose its license.
So who came to our rescue?
The Genovese crime family.
Out of the goodness of their hearts, naturally.
The mob ended up running most of the gay bars in New York,
and the Stonewall was the jewel in their crown.
The Genovese family opened Stonewall
and spent $3,500 on the decor.
The first night they were open, they took in $5,000.
The next night, another $5,000.
Not bad.
Most gay bars at that time lasted three to six months.
The Stonewall was unusual
in that it lasted almost three years.
And I think one reason that happened
is because it was the most lucrative gay bar in Manhattan.
And it was the biggest payer to the sixth precinct.
They got more money from the Stonewall Inn
than they did from any other bar or institution.
It was about $2,000 a month.
Now here's a lesson in Greenwich Village economics
and the way Lily Law made a little extra cash
at our expense.
You see, the mafia didn't want any trouble serving us gays,
so they paid off the sixth precinct.
The cops will call up the Stonewall
and give them a heads up they were on their way.
They'd confiscate a little booze and cash,
arrest a few queers to keep up appearances.
And that was just another night out in the Village.
The cops needed the mafia, the mafia needed the cops.
It was a disgusting system of exploitation.
It was very corrupt.
The Village at the time was a very dangerous place
if you went off Christopher on your own,
depending what time of night.
I mean, there was a lot of gay bashing,
but in order to gay bash you, they got to isolate you.
It's almost like a pride of lions.
They isolate you, and then they get you.
So you had to be wary.
The further you got from Christopher Street,
the more wary you were.
There was also vigilantism in Queens.
There was a gay cruising area in Kew Gardens.
People were going there at night
using walkie talkies to coordinate attacks on gay men.
When the police were called, they didn't do anything.
They took the side of the vigilantes.
So people felt like there was nowhere to turn.
'68, '69 rolled around, things got worse.
There were about 8 murders in 10 weeks.
A transit cop killed two gay men down by the piers.
And then you have people having their throats slashed.
There were bodies being carried out of subway stations.
Two of the other more horrible killings were brutal stabbings
and slashings in the subway johns,
and both were very similar in that the victims were nude
and were stabbed and slashed 50 or 60 times.
There was great pools of blood involved in both cases.
There was graffiti apparently written on
both of the john walls which said, "I'm going to kill
all the queers," or something to that effect.
It was a horror story in New York City.
The symptoms of society's breakdown
erupt on a worldwide scale.
We are living through one of the greatest revolutions in history,
the birth of a new civilization.
Protests shatter the structure of the old.
What was condemned now strives for acceptance,
symptoms of a society that is cracking
under the pressures for change.
1969 has been a hell of a year,
topping off one hell of a decade.
We have a lift off 32 minutes past the hour.
Lift off on Apollo 11.
A man is about to step on the moon.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s killer was just sentenced.
And bodies are still coming home daily from Vietnam.
Nixon just got sworn in,
and the fight for civil rights is in full swing.
What you're witnessing today
is the beginning of a new active movement.
We are simply following the lead of the Black Power movement.
The Black man said, "Black is beautiful,
therefore, I am proud."
Well, we are now saying, "Gay is good,
and therefore, we are proud."
A radical wave is building in the gay movement.
Year after year from picket lines to protests,
from raids to riots.
But the biggest wave yet is about to break.
Lifelong gay rights activist Mark Siegel
found himself at Stonewall,
just as history was about to be made.
Stonewall was a fire in the belly of the equality movement.
Even so, accounts of it are full of myths and misinformation.
The biggest fallacy is when people say,
"Of course they were upset,
Judy Garland was being buried that day."
"Somewhere Over The Rainbow?"
That song was wishful thinking,
an anthem for an older generation.
In this bar, we were about to smash that rainbow.
We didn't have to travel anywhere or go over anything
to get what we want.
That night I wasn't in full drag.
I was dressed very pleasantly.
I was wearing a woman's suit.
I made this fabulous suit at home.
It was light beige, something very summery, lots of hair.
We had just come back from Washington,
my first lover and I.
We were passing bad paper around making lots of money.
We were passing forged checks, and I said,
"Let's go to Stonewall."
It's June 28, 1969,
and I've only been in New York for one month.
Stonewall was filled that night with its usual clientele...
drag queens, hustlers, older men who liked younger guys,
and stragglers like me.
I was in the back of the bar near the dance floor
where the younger people usually hang out.
The lights in the room blink, a signal there'll be a raid.
As they always do, the cops walked in like
they owned the place, cocky,
assured they could do or say whatever they wanted
and push people around with impunity.
Get those fruits outside. Come on, let's go.
Go on, outside, outside, move it.
- Are the cops inside? - Yeah.
Let's go, let's get out of here.
Anyone with a decent job or family ran away from that bar
as fast as they could to avoid being arrested.
Those who remained were the drag queens,
hustlers, and runaways.
Some people in the crowd started throwing pennies.
The nickels, the dimes.
That was the payoff.
You already got some, and here's some more.
It was like a godsend thing.
I just happened to be there when it all jumped off.
And I said, "Great."
I said, "Now is my time to do my own thing,
for my own people!"
I started yelling, "Gay Power!"
and, "Get the mafia out of the bars!"
But there was trouble between one of the drag queens
in the paddy wagon and the cop outside,
and she kicked him.
I only saw her heel kick him back, but that was enough.
You heard it. You heard it.
The sounds of flesh and bone against metal.
And, you know, it was a sound we all knew.
Beautiful butch, gay civil rights icon
Stormé DeLarverie.
She very well may have been the match that lit the fuse.
I saw this one boy being taken out by three officers.
One of them did a drop kick on him.
Another one senselessly hit him from the back.
A cop said to me, "Move, faggot!"
thinking I was a gay guy.
I said, "I will not, and don't you dare touch me."
Four officers then attacked me, handcuffed me.
When I told them I was cuffed too tightly,
one of the officers hit me over the head with a billy-club.
As I was bleeding from the head,
I turned to the crowd, and I said,
"Why don't you guys do something?!"
And that's when everything exploded.
You're pigs!
You're a pig, too, mister.
You're a pig, too, you know it?
You're a pig, too.
You're a fucking Nazi, baby!
The riot was on in my section.
On!
We're not going to take this shit anymore.
Not me. And not a lot of people.
Seize the time.
Howard Smith, reporter for the Village Voice,
was also on the scene, reporting from behind enemy lines.
When I got to Stonewall with my press pass,
things were already tense.
I noticed the full moon.
This kind of crowd freaks easily.
I found Deputy Inspector Pine and followed him.
He says, "Let's get in there.
We'll lock ourselves in, it's safer."
We bolt the heavy door.
Two or three people picked up parking meters and trash cans
and started using them as battering rams.
It was medieval, you know?
Cross the moat and break the castle door down!
Inside, we could hear the shattering windows
followed by what we imagined to be bricks banging on the door.
And there's voices yelling...
"Let's take over the fucking place!"
I asked one cop if he was scared.
"No," he says. But they all look uneasy.
By now the mind's eye has forgotten
about the character of the mob because the sound
that filters in does not suggest dancing faggots.
It sounds like a powerful rage bent on vendetta.
I remember seeing the full moon over the bridge.
Then I found out what happened.
From lack of sleep and exhaustion,
I was sort of feverish, and I lay on my couch
thinking, "We got to do something,
we got to do something, we can't just let this pass."
Stonewall was no one-night affair.
The genie was out of the bottle, and the anger and the injustice
that had been building up for years
ignited another night of fire and fury.
The president of the Mattachine Society
at the time was Dick Leitsch.
This is his report from the front lines
written the night after the riot in the Mattachine newsletter.
The next day, a crowd filled the streets and singing
and chanting filled the park.
The crowd surged out on to the street and shouted,
"Christopher Street belongs to the queens!
Liberate the street!"
Sounds like more pigs on the way.
Never again will the fruits, the fags,
the lesbians, the queers be pushed into submission.
More and more police cars arrived.
I see Marsha at the top of this light pole
in platform heels, right?
And the next thing you know, she drops something heavy
right on the hood of the cop car.
And that's when everything got quiet.
Everybody looked around because it was silent. Why?
Nothing in a riot is more frightening
or unnerving than silence.
And you heard this thumping, like goose-stepping,
and the crowd opened, and there was the tactical police force,
armed to the teeth... shields and face shields.
It looks like the pigs are forming a line to break us up.
Honey, one kick line deserves another.
Come on, all you queens,
let's show them the power of a high stepping chorus.
Lift them legs, honey. This ain't no convent social.
And we all made this long line of Rockette-like kicks
and singing one of our big ditties
we used to always sing when we all got drunk.
? We are the Village Girls ?
? We wear our hair in curls ?
? We wear our dungarees above our nellie knees ?
But that's when it stopped
because that's what they charged us.
You know, nature has a special way
of protecting natural things.
Watch as policemen's truncheon destroys egg.
No good.
Nature's helmet for the tomato is also valueless
when the policemen's truncheon destroys it.
Pumpkin... closest thing to a human head.
Watch what happens.
Night after night, the battle raged on.
At one point, a cop grabbed a wild Puerto Rican queen
and lifted up his arm to bring his club down on her.
In her best Maria Montez voice, the queen challenged,
"How'd you like a big Spanish dick up your little Irish ass?"
A high shrill voice screams out, "Save our sister!"
50 homosexuals rush the cops
and take the queen back in the crowd.
They formed a solid front
to keep the cops from regaining their prisoner,
letting the cops hit them with their sticks
rather than let them through.
Whoever assumes a swishy queen
can't fight should have seen them.
Makeup dripping, gowns askew, fighting for their home,
and fiercely proving no one would take it away from them.
Turning over cars, and, oh, my dear,
blocking traffic and screaming and hollering and everything.
I'm looking around.
I'm seeing my people, the hustlers, the drag queens,
showing the cops and even some of our fellow gays
that we were human beings
and we'd be fighting for a piece of this world,
thank you very much.
We are united for the first time...
lesbian separatists, gay men in fairy communes,
people who had been part of other civil rights movements
but never thought about one of their own,
hustlers, drag queens, and many like me who knew
there was something out there for us
but didn't know what it was.
It found us.
On the last night, Wednesday, word had spread
to some of the heterosexual new left revolutionaries
who came to the Village itching for the revolution
to begin here and now.
But over the past few nights, some of the gays felt they had
made their point and left.
But those who stayed witnessed one last horrible
blast of police violence.
The fighting with the police only lasted an hour,
but once it was over, one could argue that Christopher Street
and the minds of many homosexuals had been liberated.
Now let me be clear.
Stonewall was no damn riot.
It was a civil disobedience.
It was an uprising.
It was a rebellion!
As the sun began to rise, you know,
with my head down and tired,
I kept looking up, and I saw this queen who was exhausted
and couldn't go on anymore, was just on a stoop exhausted
but at peace because near her was a cop who was also exhausted
that made no attempt to bother her.
I mean, the riot was really over.
Still, the street was glistening.
It was one of the most beautiful things I ever saw.
The whole street, just like diamonds,
but in reality it was broken glass,
The smell of the smoke of burning garbage cans was there.
All those smells that a riot make,
even a certain kind of sweat.
It was ugly and beautiful.
The end of the night and how that street glistened.
Very few things historically arise out of nothing.
The Stonewall demonstration was a direct follow up
and consequence of the fact that we had blazed the trail
starting in 1965 with public demonstrations by gay people.
We had risen up before...
the New Year's Ball in San Francisco,
the Reminder Day Notices, the Black Cat Protests.
These are just a few examples, but there were more.
And if the Compton's Riot of 1966
didn't set it all off, there just wasn't enough
combustible material in the culture yet.
We needed those three years of counterculture
and civil unrest to stoke the flame,
because that's how you get an inferno!
Whatever one may think of the merits of that particular
form of protest or dissent, those are not that relevant.
What's important is the message which is being conveyed,
and that is that we've been shoved around for 3,000 years
and we're tired of it and we're starting to shove back,
and if we don't get what's coming to us
and get it promptly,
there's going to be a lot more shoving back.
Problem is, Stonewall had changed how hard some of us
wanted to shove.
I no longer believed in the polite, apologetic,
well-mannered methods of the Mattachine.
So over the next year, I started thinking about ways to
commemorate Stonewall, all of the things we had just
seen and felt and a way to keep the momentum going.
2-4-6-8, gays unite to smash the state!
The Stonewall Rebellion served notice
on the heterosexual majority
that a growing number of gays were not afraid anymore
and were not content to continue living out their lives
in fear and oppression.
Stonewall didn't make front page news,
but there was a loose network of about 60 gay groups
across the country, and word spread.
And the organizing intensified.
And the momentum swelled for the first time
into a real grassroots movement.
One of the largest of the new organizations in New York
is the Gay Liberation Front.
Bob Kohler tells when it was founded.
June 28, '69, the day after the riots.
Black Civil Rights movement,
the struggle against the Vietnam War,
the women's movement, feminist politics,
and of course the gay cause.
We felt that the struggles should be united, not separated,
and that they were part of the same struggle.
We started a group to put out a newspaper which became
Come Out! that showed the grandness of our schemes
and the feeling we had that the revolution
was right around the corner
and that we were part of this vanguard
of this great revolution that was just about to happen.
We were young and idealistic and wonderful and brave, naive.
All those things.
The GLF was one of the first groups to focus
on these intersectional battles of class, race, and sexuality.
However, the Gay Activist Alliance,
founded in December, 1969, focused more singularly
on gay and lesbian rights
and were no less radical in their tactics of disruption.
Oh, this is definitely the Marriage Bureau,
but it's been taken over by the Gay Activists Alliance.
You calling us garbage?
Come back here and say that to a gay person's face!
Gay Power!
- Louder! - Gay Power!
- Loudest! - Gay power!!
Over the past year, homosexuals have been coming out
into public, refusing to hide in the closets, as we say.
What do you want the police to do?
We want them off our backs.
We want them to stop harassing us, stop pushing us around.
Now I'm a proud member of the GLF and the GAA,
but I started to realize, sometimes, if you're not white
or middle class, you might not always fit in.
Why are you here today?
Darling, I want my gay rights now!
I think it's about time the gay brothers and sisters
got their rights.
And especially the women!
My brothers and sisters from the gay community
were not very, very supportive.
They left us in the dark.
I mean, I'd given up my job,
given up everything for gay liberation.
I was sleeping in Sheridan Square Park
and hustling to support the movement,
and some of them just called us street people.
So in 1970, I started
the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries
with my best friend, Marsha P Johnson.
We fought for the liberation of our people.
And a lot of those who put us down didn't appreciate
the fact that we were there when they weren't.
We decided we're going to take care of our own
since no one in the movement would.
When we asked the community to help us,
there was nobody to help us.
We were nothing.
With the community mobilized in new and different ways,
another Reminder Day full of suits and polite politics
seemed, I don't know, antiquated.
So me, my lover Fred, and our friends,
Ellen Broidy and Linda Rhodes, we presented the idea of a march
to all the gay groups as a way to show the world
how far we'd come in the year since Stonewall,
and then activists in Chicago, Los Angeles,
San Francisco started planning their own marches.
And the idea, in a nutshell, is to set aside the day
for a show of unity, solidarity, and pride of gay people.
Clout was important because unless you have clout,
you're a victim, you know?
And we were tired of being victims.
Jerry Hoose of the Gay Liberation Front
was there at Stonewall and took the first steps
in the very first Pride March.
The first parade was in many ways
a very frightening event.
All sorts of threats had come into us, bomb threats.
People could take shots at us.
We were scared.
On top of that, the night before the march,
a bunch of gay bashers beat some boys senseless
not too far from Stonewall.
Not a good omen for the day ahead.
We didn't know how many people were going to show up.
We were very fearful that no one would show up.
We formed at Christopher Street by Seventh Avenue,
like a block down from the Stonewall.
Exactly one hour later, the march began to move.
I wasn't going to miss this for anything.
After being stomped on and talked down to for years, no!
This was our moment.
Oh, and me and my friends, we came suffragette serious.
Now let's get walking!
I remember it being maybe 100, 200 people.
But as we were going up Sixth Avenue,
it kept growing and growing and growing.
I kept looking back, and it got bigger and bigger
and bigger and bigger, and as we got to the park,
I remember turning around, and it was endless.
Thousands of people.
There's been nothing like this before,
and I hope it sets a tone and a trend for the whole future.
Beautiful. Just beautiful.
It's absolutely incredible.
Oh, it's fantastic.
- I feel better. - This is really where it's at.
No, really, straight people can do all this carrying on
and holding hands and kiss in the park.
Why can't we do it?
They ain't no better than I am.
It was one of the two or three greatest moments of my life.
It was just pure happiness.
Now let's stop being the fucking kind of homosexuals
who are hiding, and let's get on to Michigan Avenue.
Last year a group of homosexuals rioted in
the city of New York against the oppression
that they felt there.
We decided to make it an annual day for homosexuals
all across the nation.
That's the day I consider the gay community became real.
The riot was like the conception,
and the day of the first march
was the birth of the gay community.
I used to dream about millions of homosexuals
marching through the streets openly and everything.
And that's come to pass in my life.
So it was more than a dream.
It was almost a vision, in a way, of the future.
We are everywhere! We are everywhere!
We are everywhere!
We'll always have strength if we stand together.
And when we march forward,
we need to take everyone in our community with us.
It's a message that by 1973 some people
had already forgotten.
Luckily, Sylvia was there to remind them.
You all better quiet down.
I've been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers
and your gay sisters in jail
that write me every motherfucking week
and ask for your help,
and you all don't do a goddamned thing for them.
The people that are trying to do something for all of us,
and not men and women
that belong to a white middle-class, white club!
And that's what y'all belong to.
I believe in the gay power.
I believe in us getting our rights, or else
I would not be out there fighting for our rights.
I will not no longer put up with this shit.
I have been beaten, I have had my nose broken,
I have been thrown in jail, I have lost my job,
I have lost my apartment for gay liberation.
Think about that!
Revolution now!
Gay power...
Louder! Gay power!
Power to the people, to all LGBTQ-plus people.
We have been here fighting for our rights for years,
for decades.
And we are here fighting still.
They can give us our rights, and they can try to take them away.
So we need to take what's ours by any means necessary.
Are you ready to march?
Are you ready to fight?
So what are you waiting for?
Join the revolution!
CREDITS