STONEWALL  INN  STORIES

     It was approaching closing, and both the night of June 27, 1969, and the opening hour 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 the Gay clientele being who they were.

     During election seasons when candidates wanted to appear the more moral choice 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.

     What was different here was that this raid was too close to a previous one, and the violation of the unwritten rules on both sides 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. During them, 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 person who was in charge of the Stonewall Inn had either forgot, ignored, or simply resisted the existing arrangement, and a strong example was needed.

     The crowd on the street 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  of the Community 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 that 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 single 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 because, unlike today, you just did not walk in off the street into the body of the bar, but would have to turn right or left depending on the entrance set up, to go around the lind wall that protected those in side from being identified from the street and potentially lose a career, a family, a home, and a reputation.

     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 Johnson’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 and she began pulling them back off. 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 those who hold to the recent movie’s mid-western White boy throwing the brick clash with those who hold the shot glass theory,while Stormé DeLarverie, a 49 year old Lesbian 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. In the course of revision she 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.

      In explaining to me that the Boomers had nothing to do with the Stonewall Rebellion, a young Gay man showed pictures from that night, pointing out that the people in them were all young kids not the present Boomer generation who had done little to advance the cause of Gay Rights. Using my driver’s license I showed him in 1969 at 19 years old, I was a Boomer who hadn’t been there but could have while some of my friends of that generation and age group were.

     The objective of this section of the Institute’s website is to tell the story as it happened with all the rainbows and lollipops that have been added for the comfort of the modern audience. removed. 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.

     Whoever threw that "brick" will be replaced. It has already been a Gay man or street kid, a young Lesbian, a Drag Queen, and a Trans person all of whom have passed from one race to another.

      As she sat on her chair outside the Stonewall Inn watching out for her boys in all her Marlene Dietrich splendor, it was approaching the final hours before the bars closed and Storme's earlier activities as a Drag King in other venues had been completed, and, perhaps, as her evening wound down, as she often did, she took her spot like the owner of the shop and greeted passersby, conversed with regulars, chatted with the many street kids, and saw the detail that should not have been there that night, police officers quietly entering the bar.

     It was illegal to sell or serve a “homosexual” an alcoholic beverage outside a private location in New York City at the time and bars were not that. This created a system that benefited organized crime who made money and the local precinct so long as the owners made their protection payments. 

     Homosexuals needed places to gather and this meant money to be made even if it was on the fringe of legality because Homosexuals had money to spend. It is easy to try to explain that a lack of knowledge led to certain abuses, but there were some players whose benefits were enhanced by keeping things as they were. The bar was nothing fancy and nothing like the image in the minds of those born long after, who may not want to accept that it was just a glorified garage with the cistern in the rear only covered with a piece of wood to serve as a table or bench, no running water so the tub of water to wash used glasses was the same water all night just getting dirtier, making bottled beer the better and safer choice. Such bars were the norm in those days. They were not attractive places.

     The Stonewall was one of those bars that served as the last bar you went to at the end of an evening, or the only one that was located in a safe environment for the street kids and was easier to find and did not require an invitation to the soirees limited to the various mini-communities within the greater one. Homosexuals had a place to go. Organized crime had a good cash flow. The local precinct had a low crime area as certainly the Homosexuals were not going to bring too much attention to themselves, and there was the extra cash from protection money however it was dispensed back at the precinct. 

     There was nothing out of the ordinary going on that night, although Judy Garland lying in state uptown had a lot of fans out that night as they had either been to the wake or were just out toasting an icon which helped increase the people in the area. There were no signs of violence, no raucous action emanating from the bar in sound or deed. There were no fights on the street. Nothing but the typical crowd milling about in the final two hours as the bars were getting ready to close all over the city. 

     Storme would have noted this appearance of police, as anyone observant would have, and perhaps thought as there was no obvious reason for the police presence this was because, while the payment schedules for protection were like clockwork and discrete, the police showing up so openly on a busy night could mean that a payment was missed and not likely to be paid anytime soon and some sort of reminder had to be given. How big the debt and how serious the offense in delinquency could be assessed by what followed which, in all probability, would have been a warning, a few dirty looks, perhaps an extension, and a promise to return at an appointed time, with, I would assume would be standard, a warning that further delinquency or non-payment could mean trouble and perhaps a change in ownership.

     If there were any problems, it was not with the patrons, but the owner. Once the message was delivered, there should have been an exit after the outwardly calm tet-a-tet, but it went wrong because there had just been a bar raid a few days earlier and this one was noticeably too soon no matter how discreet it might have been intended to be.

     Nothing was happening that would have called for the police, but the questionable nature and timing of the "visit" and the patrons’ objection to the untimely raid created the atmosphere that had the police call for back-up, not that there was activity that needed immediate addressing but perhaps just in case. Their entering the bar as they did, assuming the worst, and, perhaps, as I was to learn from a co-worker whose brother-in-law was one of the the second group of police, relishing the chance to “Bash some Queers", and the arrival of the police wagon set the whole thing off because someone in the bar, perhaps more than one person, had had enough.

     The blind-wall at the entrance of the bar common to all Gay bars (the usual L shaped wall that kept the people on the street from seeing who was inside unless they too entered because being in such a bar was enough of an excuse for society to ruin your life) kept anyone on the street from seeing what was happening inside.

     After the additional officers showed up and entered the bar, the door was closed, perhaps, not so much to keep people in as the people inside were going through the standard procedures those who have been in routine bar raids know, but to keep anyone walking in on what the additional officers had thought would be a scene much worse than it was. It was when the door closed, which was new, that it became clear this was different.

     Someone inside, a police officer or a patron, took a deliberate action or even an accidental, unintended one that set off the brawl. It could have been an unintentional or deliberate push, a punch, or an accidental bump. The police were tense as they entered an unknown situation. Quiet patrons, about their normal activity went from dealing with an annoying routine “raid” to a SWAT team-like event when they had been following the procedure of showing IDs and the Drag Queens additionally displaying their three articles of mens’ clothing.

     Finding the person in a poorly lit bar with the last patrons of the night packed tightly together with the usual mix of alcohol and other recreational substance and the “demons” they would conjure who the person was who began it all would be like attempting to determine who fired the “Shot Heard Round the World” at Lexington.

     Inside the bar, whereas common practice was to mingle with whoever was there while maintaining a safe base for further security in an unsafe world by having your group with whom you most identified, be it because of race, language, longtime friendships, and the like, on this night it was Community as, regardless of anything other than that you were one of us, and even if I absolutely abhorred your very existence on every other night, that night we were on the same team. I have a Puerto Rican friend, a Newyorican, who saved a White stranger from Long Island who had been knocked to the floor, by stopping to take the time to bend down to help him up and out the door when he would have been out the door quicker and not have been whacked on the head with a nightstick if he had not helped that stranger. The stranger from Long Island then went on and scooped up another person and got him to the door.

     The blind-wall and closed door guaranteed nothing was seen from the street, while out on the street, Storme had to yell to the crowd who either had not seen any of the activity at the entrance of the bar or just didn't care to do something and it did.

     The exterior rebellion erupted as the interior one was in full swing and it was one community-wide swelling of action in both places as people began to act with some becoming more prominent than others as the evening wore on. We know of some people as they had a presence and could easily be seen in the crowd. We do not know of a potentially more heroic person because they were on a side street with little lighting and fewer fellow rebels. The greatest hero of the evening might be totally unknown.

     The amazing thing about Stonewall was that it was not organized and no one gave directions or usurped the power of the community by becoming a self appointed leader who would control the night.

     Although the raid could be seen as a dark comedy of errors with a positive ending, it was the last straw of a fed up community and every participant took their part according to whom and what they were with everyone equally fed up with how the people in the bar and out on the street, all of them, and those like them all over, were being treated. The community, regardless of any differences, race, color, creed, national origin and known gender variants acted spontaneously as one, not in groups.

     This was a time in history when it came to ice cream that we thought Howard Johnson’s with its 28 flavors was the pinnacle of ice cream variety until Baskin and Robbins blew us away with 31. Then, if it can be believed, along came Ben and Jerry and all ice cream hell broke loose. These flavors were probably around when the world had known only chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, but they had to come out of the freezer, and, as that happened, no new flavor diminished that of the existing ones or of any being or to be introduced. It was 1969 and even Gay people had a lot to learn about gender variants. Stonewall was during the Howard Johnson days of gender.

    On that night, though, that was irrelevant. A Community was acting as one. It was people helping people, strangers helping strangers in a total act of Community with no one leading but all knowing that the Community was tired of it, would have no more of it, and acted accordingly. That is what makes the real Stonewall more amazing than it is allowed to be seen as people fight over who started it as if they just cannot accept that the Community started it and Communities can act as communities. Stonewall was the Big Bang that started a movement, and, like the Big Bang, it happened in a moment as one singular event with all elements equally involved. Whoever, whatever, whether there was a name for it or not, or even if the known names were correct, was irrelevant because WE were there.

     Us.

     There were no credits at the end, just more work. 

     The Rebellion was spontaneous and united.

     During the time after the Stonewall, there was a demand and attempt to create community, which we saw we could be that night in June.

     With each generation Storme gets pushed into the shadows for the hero du jour and has gone from her Drag King self to a young Lesbian, then a Trans woman who was not there that first night, next a young Black person of ever changing gender, finally arriving at the apex of the rewriting as a young white boy from the Midwest who came to town just in time to meet everyone who would be at the Stonewall that night and be the one to throw the non-existent brick that set the whole thing in motion.

   This section is a place for those who had been in the Inn that night and know what they experienced regardless what myths have been created and legends passed on, so that there are first hand accounts preserving the facts the public only knows through the filters of writers and storytellers and not  without them.

      This is a place to tell your story directly, no edits, and how you remember it.

      Write down your personal experience, the role you played, referring only to others as they play into your story. You are the star, they the extras and supporting cast. It will happen that way with their tellings so there will, in the end, be singular and group intertwinings. This is your official account of your story, the one that, regardless how anyone else might twist it, will exist as your truth.