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As we are entering Pride Month, the “who started the Stonewall Rebellion” competition will come up and it will, of course, include which color on the “progressive” Flag was responsible for starting things because the idea that the Community acted as a cohesive group, a COMMUNITY, didn’t and  had to be told what to do being unable to act as the people there actually did. There was no meeting, no planning, no discussions of who should do what. The people present reacted and acted as one.

 I had friends there that night and according to those in the bar itself, it just happened. The raid was not according to the arrangement with the precinct and as it was close to closing and people had been partying, for whatever personal reason, someone, or a group of someones reacted to something a police officer did and, as in many tense situations, a minor, random action caused the explosion. To many in the bar it was a spontaneous flash and it was on.

There were those in the bar and those on the street, and neither was aware of what was going on in the other location, until when the police closed the door with the patrons inside, Storme Leveray, who often sat outside the Inn in her Marlena Diertich finery to look after her boys, yelled to the crowd to do something. Sadly in recent years, her role has been reassigned to someone who was not even there.

In this “It was ME” era she is apparently not glitzy enough to be remembered and has been replaced with two people who in multiple interviews repeated that one was not there for the opening act and arrived later with the other admitting she had not been there the first night, returning the second because of the buzz on the street that it was not over by a long shot.

Storme may have been a power in the community, but she was not a brick and would have been too large for someone to pick up and throw. 

Because of the possibility of losing everything, your job, career, any professional certification, reputation, social acceptance, your life, and all you had worked for by being seen entering or exiting a Gay bar, which a weak excuse that you entered a random bar not knowing what it actually was might help, but if you were seen IN the bar socializing with a drink in hand, you would be defenseless.

I once had to assure one of the deputy superintendents of the school district in which I taught that my telling people I saw him in a Gay bar would be a self-confession and professional suicide, so he had nothing to worry about. I told no one. He needed to be there and all else was his dealing with himself in a public position in he Buckle of the Bible Belt. My activism covered him too.

For that reason, Gay bars that hadn’t found an obscure enough location, a dark alley, a warehouse at night, had a blind wall at the entrance which was an L-shaped wall so that upon entering you faced one blank wall at which you had to turn to the right or left to go around before you were in the bar itself. 

There was one bar in Boston located behind the Public Library whose entrance was in the service alley. Upon entering the patron would walk down a featureless corridor turning to the left at the end and walking along the perpendicular wall until you entered the bar itself. The other end of the bar was on a major street, its facade blending in with the other buildings with big store windows and a street entrance, and was rendered safe by the sheets of plywood inside the windows so no one could see in or would have difficulty throwing something through the glass. Both further prevented by heavy curtains covering the plywood from inside. When things in the city became more open minded in the mid to late eighties, the bar closed for renovations and on the night of the big reveal, patrons entered through the alley and the blind wall as they always had. Most of the interior visible renovations were decorative with the old brick walls re-exposed, the lighting improved, and the cleanliness more obvious than before in the dim lights. When asked about the new look, the general impression was that instead of leather, levis, disco, and sweat, it could now be summed up as “Ferns and brass”. At the big moment, as people were gathered in the bar for the speeches, many standing in the area by the board and curtain-protected windows to be far from the entrance and have that measure of safety even if that was merely the extra time this afforded you to find escape before those attacking had crossed the room, after a dramatic musical introduction, the curtains covering the plywood fell to the floor and those in the shelter of the corner found themselves standing at the huge windows with a great view of the street from inside and a view of whoever was inside from the street. The reaction, although what one should have expected but was still rather comical, was the patrons in the bar acting like an amoeba on speed moving in a solid mass to the other side of the bar away from the windows.

Partons could be seen from the street, and at the time this was seen as threatening to those who had been Gay before the renovations which was everyone in the bar. 

There were bars, usually women’s bars that not only had the blind entrance but also required the patrons to be buzzed in to avoid the problems someone just walking in could cause the women who had to deal with the misogyny of the times with the added anti-Lesbian attitudes of many so as not to have yet another safe place made less so.

In most places, however, the blind wall was only as wide as was needed for a small bulletin board and the magazine rack for the local Gay Rag, but wide enough to keep the people on the street from seeing inside.

And that is why, while the debate rages as to the Rebellion’s beginning with one camp claiming a changing cast had thrown a brick, there were no loose bricks inside the bar, while the other side claims the people on the street started the Rebellion when someone they could not possibly see had thrown a shot glass inside the bar requiring that  the person who took that initiating action be both inside with a shot glass and outside with a brick at the same time.

We need to stop.

We need to give the competition over who we want to lionize a break  and take the time to read historical accounts by people at the time and not view things from modern times as if 1969 were the same as 2024. 

In 1969, Gay or Straight, Transgender was Christine Jorgenson, and a person known as a man to friends and the Community wearing a dress was a Drag Queen as there was little gender nuance at the time. We might be born Gay, but that does not mean we are born with all the knowledge necessary to understand all aspects of gender, and learned the proper names and terms by intuition as we may never hear any of that growing up. In 1969, outside of the informed few, society as a whole was an infant in the area of gender.

Remember, at this time we also began to learn that there were a lot more categories of children with special needs than what society had always known as deaf, dumb, and blind. In the late 70s I had an Autistic student in my Special Ed class and having the training I was the only one in the system who knew he was not what in those days was “retarded”, so I could address his needs not those of someone who did not exist. It was a battle then, but a very well addressed topic now. I was annoyed at the time because I was prevented from doing the right thing according to the moment and not things based on a well meaning lack of information based on the past, but, in retrospect have to admit, others were seeing things from their knowledge and experience base while I, having a Masters, had gone past that. 

If this were to happen now after all that has been learned about Special Needs in the time between then and now, the ignorance would be deliberate and harmful. It may have been harmful but that harm was not deliberate. 

In the past we were told our history by those who controlled it by having the voice to do so. They told society who we are and what we have done while taking upon themselves credit for what we accomplished so that we appeared to have contributed nothing positive to society and therefore deserve rejection.

Now we have our own voice but fight among ourselves to assign credit to individuals when a Community acted and to do so, rely on historical fiction 

With all the threats to our rights, getting involved in historically inaccurate, fractious discussions based on modern interpretations and description of past events while dismissing those who know there was a blind wall, is self defeating unless we are no longer a Community.

We were a Community and we acted as one.

Now, however, people want a spotlight that is bot deserved and in so doing chip away at Community and let those from without get some of their control back..

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