New York City's Mafia control of gay bars created this archival, imaginative deep-dive into the story of the 5-night-long 1969 rebellion in Greenwich Village. It uncovers tales of Mafia-police corruption, queer resistance, and the birth of the Gay L...
On the night of June 27th, 1969, an eruption of monumental proportions took place in a bar called the Stonewall Inn located in New York City's Greenwich Village. This Article will detail the events of the fateful weekend that made international news and discuss the rebellion's precedent, implications, and impacts.
The Stonewall riots were NOT the first instance of homosexual resistance to police harassment and raids on queer spaces in the 1960s; raids on Compton's Cafeteria (1966) in San Francisco, The Black Cat Tavern (1967) in Los Angeles, and other queer spaces frequented by people of color were regular occurrences in the Civil Rights era. Additionally:
Cooper Do-Nuts in Los Angeles in 1959;
Fundraiser for the Council on Religion and the Homosexual in San Francisco in 1965;
Dewey's restaurant in Philadelphia, in 1965.
The Trip, a gay-owned restaurant-bar complex at 27 E. Ohio Street, in 1968.
Snake Pit, located higher in Manhattan, in 1970.
However, it is important to understand how it happened, why it occurred on that prideful night, and what followed that made it such a pivotal event in the quest for gay rights.
In Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney's Out For Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, there is a secondhand account of the Friday night riot, a description of the following nights, and a discussion of Stonewall's historical context and implications.
Martin Duberman and Andrew Kopkind's "The Night They Raided Stonewall" offers an exceptionally thorough description of the entirety of the weekend's uprising.
The Village Voice, a New York City newspaper, published an article by Lucian Truscott IV that details the occurrences of the weekend; it is pictured below.
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