It was a warm summer night in the New York neighborhood of Greenwich Village when a police officer told a drag queen to get into a paddy wagon.

The queen snapped at the officer, “Have you ever tried to climb a ladder like this in high heels?”

This is how Dick Busby, who lives at the Stonewall Gardens assisted living community in Palm Springs, remembers the night when police raided the Stonewall Inn.

The former Angeleno was in New York on June 28, 1969, when he witnessed the start of what is considered to be the pivotal moment in the gay liberation movement in the United States.

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Busby, who worked as a children's television programming censor, was getting ready to return home to Southern California after spending the month on Fire Island, a barrier island east of New York. It’s been a popular spot with the gay community since the 1930s.

Before leaving the East Coast, Busby and his host decided to have dinner at a Chinese restaurant. On the way, they stopped for a drink at the Stonewall Inn. Busby wasn’t impressed.

“As we walked in, I thought to myself, ‘What a depressing place,’” he said, “because it was all painted black.”

Several hours later, after they finished dinner, they decided to return to the gay bar for a nightcap before heading home. It was about 1:15 a.m. when they arrived at Stonewall.

They never got that drink.

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Busby said a crowd of people in their late teens and early 20s stood outside the bar on Christopher Street in Lower Manhattan, yelling at police and “making a lot of noise.” The group told him the bar had been raided.

Busby had no idea at the time what the repercussions would be.

“Our host said, ‘(The police) do this all the time,’ so it didn’t really register with us as being a matter of great importance,” Busby said. “It was just another bar raid.”

It wasn’t until he returned to Los Angeles that Busby read a story in the newspaper about the riots — which lasted for several nights — that followed.

At the time, under New York law, homosexual acts were a misdemeanor. Laws regulated what men and women could wear. Police regularly raided establishments frequented by LGBTQ people, harassing and arresting bar owners and patrons.

The police claimed they were cracking down on New York City's unlicensed bars. But liquor licenses were not granted to establishments that served gay people. Places like the Stonewall Inn, a two-story brick building with blacked out windows that offered much needed refuge for many gays, lesbians and transgender people, turned into cash machines for the mob and became the targets of regular police raids.

“(Stonewall) skewed toward a younger place," said David Anderson, a member of the Pride Committee for the United Methodist Church of Palm Springs. "The younger kids of that generation were thrown out of their homes and churches and schools, and they had no place to consider home.”

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The inn also was a place where underage young people were known to hang out, according to Richard Pass, a Palm Springs resident who lived in New York at the time and frequented the bar.

“It was the only place you could go that was reasonably safe,” said Pass, who works as a volunteer at Stonewall Gardens in Palm Springs.

Pass and Busby were guest speakers Thursday evening at the Stonewall Commemoration 50th Anniversary service held at the United Methodist Church of Palm Springs.

During an emotional 90-minute interfaith service, members of Palm Springs’ LGBTQ community sang, prayed, hugged, laughed and cried as they reflected on the gay rights movement that began a half-century ago in New York.

Pass, who was inside the Stonewall Inn during the raid in 1969, remembers seeing the doors open, the lights go on and the cops enter. Once inside, he said, police began to arrest the drag queens.

“The few of us people who were dressed in regular clothes, we were able to slip out,” Pass said, “because they didn’t barricade the doors at first.”

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Pass, like many of the people at the bar that night, didn’t immediately go home. Instead, he stood outside the bar and watched as the scene unfolded.

“Once that guy threw that cobblestone I left because the police get really ugly when you throw things at them,” Pass said.

At the time, he was a vice consul with the British Government at the consulate on Lexington Avenue. He wanted to avoid trouble, so he hopped on the subway and went home.

A year later, Pass and several hundred people gathered outside the Stonewall Inn and marched up Sixth Avenue to Central Park. When they arrived at Sheep Meadow, a 15-acre meadow not far from Lincoln Square with a history of being a gathering spot for demonstrations, the crowd had grown to thousands, he said.

“Walking out on the street openly gay, that was exciting,” Pass said. When he saw the other people participating in the march, he thought, “Oh my god, there are lots of us."

“It is mind-boggling to see the changes (since the Stonewall riots),” Pass told the United Methodist Church congregation. “Now I’m married to my longtime partner, the love of my life.”

Despite both being at the Stonewall Inn that day, neither Busby nor Pass knew each other. They didn’t meet until after Busby moved to Palm Springs in 2015. As they talked, they discovered their paths had unknowingly crossed the night of the police raid.

They also both vacationed on Fire Island.

“Your house on Fire Island was next to the one I rented, by the way,” Pass told Busby as the men reminisced about the summer of 1969, shortly before the commemoration service.