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The 400 revellers at Montreal’s Sex Garage loft party did not know they were going to be part of history when police showed up in the early-morning hours one hot July night in 1990.

The gays and lesbians attending the party were accustomed to police raids, but they knew there would be trouble when they filed outside around 3 a.m. and saw more than two-dozen Montreal police officers take off their ID tags.

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“We were scared when the police got into battalion formation because we knew then that we were going to be beaten,” said photographer Linda Dawn Hammond, who had been hired to take pictures of the Saturday night party and whose images of police clashing with the crowd — the only ones taken in the days before cellphone cameras — would appear in the Monday morning papers.

Partygoers said police taunted them with insults and obscene gestures. The crowd responded with chants of “Gay rights now!” and the scene devolved into violence. Eight people were arrested on charges ranging from mischief to assaulting a police officer.