A riveting look at the Stonewall riots
Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution
By David Carter, St. Martin’s, 336 pp., illustrated, $24.95
May 17, 2004 -- the day Massachusetts became the first state in this nation's history to legalize same-sex marriage -- is hailed as a landmark date in American lesbian and gay history. Still, even this groundbreaking moment can never surpass the events of June 28, 1969.
In the early hours of a steamy summer Saturday, a group of patrons at a Greenwich Village gay bar responded, for the first time, with violent resistance to unwarranted police harassment.
For six days, what would come to be known as the Stonewall Riots continued intermittently, with the swelling, agitated crowd pelting the cops with loose change, bottles, even Molotov cocktails. When the fracas at the Stonewall Inn subsided, a newly radicalized gay-rights movement was born.
In subsequent decades, dozens of books have dissected this event with varying degrees of success and accuracy. David Carter's riveting "Stonewall" presents not only the definitive examination of the riots but an absorbing history of pre-Stonewall America, and how the oppression and pent-up rage of those years finally ignited on a hot New York night.
While television shows such as "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and "Will & Grace" are now both popular and commonplace, "Stonewall" recalls a time when discrimination against lesbians and gay men was so pronounced that "homosexual sex was illegal in every state but Illinois," Carter writes.
Still, with its long history as a home for bohemians and artists, Greenwich Village also attracted gay folks "who sensed that a place known for wide tolerance might even accept sexual nonconformists," Carter writes. The Village's Christopher Street was a natural location for the Stonewall Inn, which, like a number of other gay bars in those years, was controlled by organized crime. Since it was illegal for bars to serve alcohol to homosexuals, mobsters ran gay establishments, which, Carter maintains, "set up a scenario for police corruption and the exploitation of the bars' customers. These victims were not likely to complain because they had nowhere else to go and because they feared the mob."
And they feared the constant, humiliating sweeps of the bars by the police who saw gays as easy targets -- at least until that June morning in 1969. In a style scholarly but never stilted, Carter masterfully re-creates the hours before and during the riots from the viewpoints of officers, patrons, and witnesses.
Along the way, Carter clears up one of the lingering controversies about the initial riot. While most have maintained that only gay men and drag queens participated, Carter contends it was a lesbian arrested at the bar whose actions sparked the outburst. Roughed up by the cops, she began fighting and screaming, even escaping from a police car at one point. Her wild resistance inflamed the crowd, which turned on the police with such malice and menace the officers were forced to barricade themselves inside the bar.
Carter also debunks the often-repeated but unsubstantiated theory that it was grief over the death of Judy Garland and her June 27 funeral that spurred the riots. Those who battled police "were not of the generation that listened to Garland," Carter writes, and he affirms the late film historian Vito Russo's assertion that Garland's funeral "historically marks the end of the old gay world and the beginning of a new one."
"Stonewall" concludes with a look at the formation of such groups as the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance, and at the first Christopher Street Liberation Day, which evolved into the massive gay and lesbian pride celebrations now held throughout the nation each June. The legacy of the riots, Carter writes, "is the ongoing struggle for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights." Yet it is a quote from the late poet Allen Ginsberg, who went to the Stonewall Inn the day after the initial melee, that best captures how the riots forever changed the gay community: "You know, the guys there were so beautiful -- they've lost that wounded look the [gay men] all had ten years ago."
