Stonewall at 55: The Stonewall Riots remembered

55 years ago today, the Stonewall Riots changed the face of LGBTQIA+ activism in a watershed moment felt round the world.

In the early hours of June 28, 1969, the New York City Police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.

It was not the first time the Lower Manhattan gay bar had been raided. Since the early 1960s there had been a campaign to rid New York of its gay establishments by revoking liquor licences and by using undercover officers to entrap gay men.

Like most of the city’s gay bars, the Stonewall Inn was controlled by the mafia and its owners would pay off the police with weekly envelopes of cash to keep it open as it had no liquor license.

As the only bar in New York where gay men could dance together, the Stonewall Inn had a captive audience who would put up with watered down, overpriced drinks, the lack of fire exits and overflowing bathrooms.

Patrons were inspected through a peephole in the door before being let in and were required to sign their name in a book to prove the venue was a private “bottle club” and not a public bar but they rarely used their real names.

The bar’s interior was painted black and lit with black lights unless the club was about to be raided, when the house lights would be switched on to warn the patrons to stop dancing.

During a normal raid the police would line the patrons up and check their identification cards.

Anyone without identification or who was in drag would be arrested.

Women would be arrested if they were not wearing more than three feminine items of clothing.

The owners were also blackmailing some of their patrons and were making more money by extorting customers than they were from selling drinks.

Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution author David Carter has put forward the view that corrupt police wanted their share of this blackmail money and decided to close the bar permanently when the owners refused to give them a cut.

The Police Raid Begins

Earlier in the night, two undercover police women and two undercover policemen slipped into the bar to gather evidence while the New York Public Morals Squad waited outside.

Stonewall had already been raided on the Tuesday before the riots. The bar’s owners had heard there might be another raid but they were expecting it to happen earlier in the evening so had let their guard down.

At 1.20am four plain clothed police, two officers in uniform and Detective Charles Smythe and Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine arrived at the door and demanded to be let in.

There were over 200 people in the bar and when the lights came on many tried to flee through its back doors and windows but found them barred from the outside.

Patrons were made to line up for the ID check while police seized twenty-eight cases of beer and nineteen bottles of liquor from behind the bar.

Some of the men refused to provide identification and a group suspected of cross dressing were separated from the rest in a back room.

A number of lesbians were sexually touched while being frisked by police which soured the mood in the bar.

Those who passed the ID check were allowed to leave but many chose to remain outside while the police waited for vehicles to arrive to transport the prisoners to the police station.

The crowd quickly began to grow as they were joined by passersby and within minutes it had grown to over a hundred.

When the first police vehicle arrived they brought out the mafia members they had found inside to the cheers of the crowd. Then the bar’s staff were brought out.

Someone yelled “Gay Power!” and another person started to sing “We Shall Overcome.”

Things Turn Violent

A police officer shoved a gender non-conforming person who then hit him over the head with their purse. When the officer struck them back the crowd began booing.

Police scuffled with a lesbian they had put in handcuffs who yelled “Why don’t you guys do something?” and the crowd turned on the police.

Who started the riots is the subject of debate and our own community’s myth making.

One name that often comes up is Marsha P Johnson, a pioneering New York trans and sex worker activist who was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front in the wake of the riots.

But by her own account, the riot was already underway when she arrived on the scene. The truth is, we’ll never know.

When the crowd tried to overturn the police wagon, it and two squad cars left the scene immediately.

When someone yelled that the bar had been raided because the owners hadn’t paid off the police the crowd of now more than five hundred began pelting them with coins and beer cans and the ten remaining police officers barricaded themselves inside the bar.

Garbage cans, bricks and bottles were hurled at the bar, smashing its windows. The rioters stuffed burning garbage through the windows and uprooted a parking meter to use as a battering ram against the door.

When the rioters broke through the windows the police trapped inside drew their weapons and threatened to shoot.

Fire Trucks arrived, followed quickly by the Tactical Patrol Force (TPF) of the New York City Police to rescue the police inside Stonewall.

The Village Voice later reported “A stagnant situation there brought on some gay tomfoolery in the form of a chorus line facing the line of helmeted and club-carrying cops.”

“Just as the line got into a full kick routine, the TPF advanced again and cleared the crowd of screaming gay powerites down Christopher to Seventh Avenue.”

Rioters overturned a car to block the street while a group of trans women fought furiously with the police.

But by 4am the street had nearly been cleared. Only thirteen people had been arrested though others in the crowd were taken to hospital and four police officers were injured.

News Heard ‘Round The World

The following day The New York Times, the New York Post, and the Daily News all covered the riot, with the News putting it on the front cover.

Thousands of people returned to Stonewall the following night, choking Christopher Street and then the surrounding blocks. Fires were started in garbage cans all over the neighbourhood. This time over a hundred police mobilised and engaged the rioters in running battles as they tried to contain the crowds.

For the next two days it rained, but on the Wednesday the rioters returned to Christopher Street and threatened to burn down the offices of The Village Voice after its homophobic reporting on the initial riot.

Another street battle with police broke out as businesses were looted on the final night of the riots.

By then the message had been heard around the world. That the gays and trans folk were done with being pushed around.