It was getting close to closing, and the night of June 27 and the opening hours of June 28, 1969 had been uneventful. The people inside the Stonewall Inn were having a normal evening while, outside, the people on the street were going to and from one place to another and the homeless kids were getting ready to do what they did on any given night.
There was no indication that this night would be any different than any other, until the break in the routine.
Gay bars were raided for a number of reasons then, and in some places still now, often with the least reason actually being related to the Gay clientele being who they were.
During election season when candidates wanted to appear the more moral of the choices to the voters, one, usually the incumbent, who had a connection with the local police would promote a raid to show he or she was the toughest on immorality. At other times the raid was a signal to the owner of the bar that some prior arrangement had been violated and a lesson needed to be taught. Considering that those scooped up in a raid would have their names and addresses printed in the newspaper, a raid could result in a slump in clientele that affected the bottom line as people would be temporarily reluctant to go where a raid could happen again, and the threat of lost income would have the owner address whatever the offense had been.
In many cases, as with the Stonewall Inn that night, the offense was a violation of a monetary arrangement when the owner was late with a certain protection payment to the local precinct. Supporting a corrupt system was covered by the appearance of protecting a law or defending morality.
There was a certain predictability to raids, almost as if you could have a pretty good idea when one was due, or the assurance, at least that a recent raid ruled out any additional one too close to the last.
What was different here was that this raid was too close to a previous one, and the violation of the unwritten rules made it an extraordinary one.
As abhorrent as the raids were to the community, they were somewhat expected, and part of the way things were. Any closeness in the bar became distance, IDs were taken out, and Drag Queens made sure they had the required minimum of three pieces of male clothing somewhere on their person. When that dance was done, the bartender would hand over the envelope, and that would be that.
In this case that was not so. There was something very wrong. The Mafioso who was in charge of the Stonewall Inn had resisted the existing arrangement, and a strong example was needed.
The crowd reacted when some of the people from the bar were brought out and put into the police wagon.
As history is being rewritten, more for the self-esteem of various people and groups as opposed preserving facts about the events as they happened, credit for throwing the brick that got the riot started has been reassigned over the years, although people who had been there are ignored when they try to explain there was no such signal brick. There was a unified explosion directed toward the police wagon.
Anything thrown was thrown during the riot, not as a signal to begin it.
It was a spontaneous action of a group of people, unrelated except in their anger.
Sadly, now people are trying to erase that magic moment by attempting to claim they are part of the group to which the “brick thrower” belonged and so they can claim to have inherited that legacy. They are characterizing people at the riot according to recent names and labels while actually ignoring the names and groups from back then. This is done in the name of inclusion and the demand that people accept certain groups were there and had a leadership role, but the irony is that as they do this to emphasize the need to remember an inclusive community, their attempt actually erases the fact that that morning people were a spontaneous all inclusive community.
I recently read that it was Marsha P Johnson’s throwing a shot glass at the mirror behind the bar out of frustration that started it all, ignoring that the people out on the street would not have seen that, and so would not have even known it happened.
An unseen action cannot signal anything to people who do not see it.
I spent some time in the Village one summer, having arrived the day after Marsha’s body was retrieved from the Hudson, and spent time talking to those who knew her best.
The new version of things expunges her actual act of, having been outside when people were taken out of the bar and put in the police wagon, she began pulling them back off.
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Throwing a fictional shot glass pales in comparison to what she actually did, but the revisionists want some sudden action to be the catalyst for something they have not truly researched, and to address this, the recent movie had a mid-western White boy throwing the brick, which has been accepted as the truth white-washed because it was actually someone else who threw the non-existent brick.
Meanwhile, Stormé DeLarverie, a 49 year old Lesbian in 1969, who protected her boys who frequented the Stonewall , and who scuffled with the police outside the bar that night which caught the attention of the gathering crowd and is accepted by eyewitnesses as the person who inspired others to act, and even yelled at people to do something, first morphed into a young twenty something Lesbian based on a photo from that night of an angry young Lesbian yelling, and now has completely disappeared from the new version of events.
Storme` died at the age of 93 in 2014. She always insisted,
“It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience — it wasn’t no damn riot.”
And oddly, considering her age and her role in events, it is sad that in all the new stories, older GLBT people go unmentioned as if none were present, and those who were young then, but old now, are ignored as sources of information and have to see their own story rewritten and their roles expunged.
So my plea is that those telling the story, please get the facts, stop the incorrect and self-esteem building revisions, talk to the older people, and accept that the magic of that night was that hundreds of people, many total strangers, acted as one without labels and without the desire to gain fame as opposed rights and respect.
There is enough room for all of us in the Alphabet soup that is the Community’s designation, with more letters being added frequently. There is no need to push anyone out to enter. There is no need to remove someone or some group from it to claim you are retelling history.
Those who have made history see ourselves being replaced with fiction and rewrites, and if inclusion and correcting past omissions is the aim, it is not an acceptable practice to accomplish that by the erasure and exclusion of others.
There are many documentaries and books based on witness and first hand interviews, and there are stories, like the newest movie, that are romanticized versions.
Poetic license is not factual. it is interpretation.
Marsh P Johnson did not run off to another bar to have the handcuff chains broken to separate her from the fictional kid who threw the fictional brick.
Find out who was there.
Read their accounts.
Whoever threw that “brick” will be replaced soon by someone from another group.
What won’t change are the true facts whether ignored or not.
The exclusionary guys aren’t the ones demanding faithfulness to the history, but the ones who adjust the story according to taste.
