#Pride101: The 50th Anniversary of Stonewall

Fifty years ago today, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn--a gay bar in Greenwich Village that catered to drag queens--in an ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation specifically targeted at people wearing clothing that didn’t conform to the conventions of their “assigned gender.” These arrests usually led to people’s names and photographs being published in the newspaper … which carried the high risk of the them losing their jobs and even their families.

Usually the people submissively complied as they were being arrested. But this time they fought back. When an officer clubbed a black lesbian named Stormé DeLarverie over the head for complaining that her handcuffs were too tight, the crowd that had gathered outside the club had had enough. Marsha P. Johnson, a black drag queen, and Sylvia Rivera, a Latinx queen, were two of the first to actively resist the police that night, and their fellow queens joined them in throwing bricks, bottles and shot glasses at officers and effectively shutting down the raid. I mention these people’s ethnicities and orientations here to give credit to the non-white, non-cis-presenting people for showing the courage and gumption to initiate the fight back and start what ended up being six days of riots in the neighborhood surrounding the Stonewall Inn that finally ignited a national fight for the rights and equalities that everyone under the LGBTQ+ rainbow enjoys today.

Stonewall wasn’t the first riot in defiance of police raids; in 1959 angry gays fought police after a raid of Cooper’s Do-Nuts--a gay-friendly diner--in Los Angeles, and in 1966 a trans woman threw a cup of hot coffee in a police officer’s face in a raid at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, sparking a riot that inspired the city to acknowledge the trans community and develop a network of trans-specific social, mental-health and medical services. But Stonewall was the turning point. The police raid quickly drew a large mob whose collective lifetimes of oppression and discrimination boiled over into a violent revolt that trapped police in the bar until the NYC Tactical Patrol Force was dispatched to rescue them. Riots erupted the next night and through the week in the Christopher Street and other nearby gay neighborhoods, including one mob that threatened to burn down the offices of The Village Voice for describing the riots as "forces of faggotry" and "Sunday fag follies." The next year, an orginization called Chicago Gay Liberation organized a parade on the anniversary of the Stonewall riot, and the city has staged a parade on the last Saturday in June ever since.

Now every major metropolis and many smaller cities have pride parades and events, many of which spill beyond the last week of June to pop up in celebrations all year. But June is officially Pride month in the hearts and minds of gay people--and an exploding population of straight people and businesses large and small--and we owe it all to the brave gay people who had had enough and fought back at great risk to themselves and even to our community fifty years ago today.

THIS IS WHY WE CELEBRATE PRIDE.