

In the early hours on this day, the 28th of June, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, on Manhattan. Such things were a familiar occurrence. The Inn had a reputation of first, being owned by the Mafia, and secondly for catering to the most marginal of the Lesbian and Gay community.

The Wikipedia article on this event stated the clientele were mostly “drag queens, transgender people, effeminate young men, butch lesbians, male prostitutes, and homeless youth.” It was the only bar where same gender people could dance.

The raid began as the raids often did. But then things began to shift. First, people who were cross dressing refused to be examined for their gender. Then others refused to show identification. The police responded with force. There are allegations women were groped by some of the officers. Some were detained. Those who were released did not flee, but stayed in among a growing crowd. As people were being escorted to the paddy wagons, someone shouted “Gay power!” Someone began singing “We shall overcome.” An officer shoved a transvestite, who hit him with her purse.

At Wikipedia we’re told “A scuffle broke out when a woman in handcuffs was escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon several times. She escaped repeatedly and fought with four of the police, swearing and shouting, for about ten minutes. Described as ‘a typical New York butch’ and ‘a dyke–stone butch’, she had been hit on the head by an officer with a baton for, as one witness claimed, complaining that her handcuffs were too tight. Bystanders recalled that the woman, whose identity remains unknown (Stormé DeLarverie has been identified by some, including herself, as the woman, but accounts vary, sparked the crowd to fight when she looked at bystanders and shouted, ‘Why don’t you guys do something?’ After an officer picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon, the crowd became a mob and went ‘berserk’: ‘It was at that moment that the scene became explosive.'”

Of what followed, one of the patrons, Michael Fader writes:

“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…. All kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined, and everything just kind of ran its course. It was the police who were doing most of the destruction. We were really trying to get back in and break free. And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We weren’t going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around—it’s like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way, and that’s what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom a long time overdue, and we’re going to fight for it. It took different forms, but the bottom line was, we weren’t going to go away. And we didn’t.”

The world would never be the same…