Stonewall: June Twenty-Eighth, Nineteen Sixty-Nine

Christopher Street in Greenwich Village had been, for decades, one of the few places in New York City where gay men could be visible without immediate arrest. The Stonewall Inn was part of why. It was a Mafia-owned bar, the Genovese family held the license, and it operated with the kind of institutional corruption that characterized much of the city's underground commerce: the bar paid police not to raid, and then the police raided anyway when the payoff schedule ran behind or when a commander wanted to make an example.

In nineteen sixty-nine, homosexuality was a criminal offense in New York State. A person could be arrested simply for wearing fewer than three items of gender-appropriate clothing. The Vice Squad's routine raids on gay bars meant names in the newspapers, employment terminated, families destroyed. The system worked because everyone it targeted had reason to be afraid.

On the morning of June twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-nine, Sixth Precinct officers entered the Stonewall Inn expecting the usual outcome: compliance, arrests, dispersal. What happened instead changed everything.

Patrons resisted. They threw coins, then bottles, then whatever was at hand. Witnesses credit Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman, and Sylvia Rivera, a Latina trans woman, among those who escalated the confrontation from endurance into defiance. Also present was Storme DeLarverie, a butch lesbian who by witness accounts was calling out to the crowd from police custody, asking why no one was doing anything. The crowd answered. The Stonewall Riots lasted several nights. The modern LGBTQ rights movement dates its birth to those nights on Christopher Street.

What the official history long neglected to say clearly: the people who started Stonewall were trans women of color and gender-nonconforming people, the most marginalized members of a community that was already criminalized. The mainstream gay rights movement of the nineteen seventies, which pursued assimilationist politics and respectability, subsequently marginalized the very people who had fought first. Sylvia Rivera was physically removed from the stage at a Christopher Street Liberation Day rally in nineteen seventy-three by white gay activists who did not want her representing their movement.

Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson founded STAR, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, in nineteen seventy, to house homeless trans youth of color on the Christopher Street piers. Both women are only now being properly restored to the founding narrative they actually inhabit. Marsha P. Johnson State Park in Brooklyn, renamed in twenty twenty, is one small piece of that repair.