"We all had a collective feeling like we'd had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn't anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration.... Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back. It was like the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us..."

Today is the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, which became "Christopher Street Liberation Day", and ultimately the Gay Pride movement, the festival you attend in your city every year. But it wasn't pretty. As always, speaking truth to power and religious moralization never is. There have been many, many come before us that have fought for our freedoms. Not all of them have been in uniform. And some will never get the attention that their bravery and persistance deserve.

There have already been some very good diaries on the events at Stonewall Inn which changed the way gay people view themselves in America forever. Some diaries didn't get the attention they deserved, while others were blessed with an author's name who Kossacks recognize and rec more frequently.

But I just thought there would be something terribly wrong to let June 28th, the Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, to go by without at least trying to pin my own personal celebratory card on the wall for my sisters and brothers to remember and celebrate.

So here's to my Forequeers. Thank you girls, some of you adults with a full head of political activism who fought with years of preparation, and some innocent young kids left homeless on the benches of Christopher Park who stood up just out of the innate sense that something wrong needed to stop, all of whom made that night the night gay people would never go back into the closet without a fight.

.