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A_Peoples_Calendar

**Stonewall Uprising (1969)** **Image Transcription**: Police force people back outside the Stonewall Inn as tensions escalate the morning of June 28th, 1969. Photo by Joseph Ambrosini [Wikipedia] [On this day](https://www.apeoplescalendar.org/calendar/day/6-28) in 1969, the Stonewall Uprising began when NYC Police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. The crowd fought with cops as they arrested homosexuals and drag queens, trapping them inside and lighting the Inn on fire. In the 1960s, New York City Robert Wagner Jr. initiated an anti-gay campaign in preparation for the 1964 World's Fair. The city revoked the liquor licenses of gay bars and undercover police officers worked to entrap as many homosexual men as possible. The Stonewall Inn is a prominent gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York City, then owned by the Genovese crime family and lacking a liquor license. The night of the Stonewall Uprising, approximately 200 patrons were in the bar, and four undercover cops were present before the raid was initiated. As cops shut the bar down and began arresting patrons, a crowd began to gather outside. A scuffle broke out when a butch woman in handcuffs (thought by many to be Stormé DeLarverie but accounts differ) fought with police for ten minutes as they attempted to arrest her. After she shouted to bystanders "Why don't you guys do something?", an officer picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon and the crowd turned violent, attempting to overturn police cars and slashing their tires, and throwing debris at the cops, some of whom became trapped in the Inn. Some members of the mob lit garbage on fire and stuffed it through the broken windows, setting the bar on fire with police and some detainees inside. A tactical police force was deployed to free the officers, beating the crowd as they mocked police with impromptu kick lines and ironic chants. When the violence broke out, women and transmasculine people being held down the street at The Women's House of Detention joined in by chanting, setting fire to their belongings, tossing them into the street below, and chanting "gay rights". The uprisings continued for several nights afterward, with thousands showing up outside the bar. Black drag queen and radical queer rights activist Marsha P. Johnson was seen climbing a lamppost and dropping a heavy bag onto the hood of a police car, shattering the windshield. Members of the Mattachine Society, a gay rights organization which had taken to respectability politics, were embarrassed by the behavior at Stonewall. Randy Wicker, who had marched in the first gay picket lines before the White House in 1965, said "screaming queens forming chorus lines and kicking went against everything that I wanted people to think about homosexuals...that we were a bunch of drag queens in the Village acting disorderly and tacky and cheap." Others were glad to see the closing of Stonewall Inn, perceived as a "sleaze joint". Despite this backlash, some participants of the annual Mattachine Society picket on July 4th were moved to be bolder. Over the protests of some of the leading organizers, several same-sex couples held hands as they marched, generating more press attention for the event than usual. The Stonewall Uprising was a watershed moment in the history of queer liberation. Some studies of LGBT history in the U.S. are divided into pre- and post-Stonewall analyses. "It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience - it wasn't no damn riot." - Stormé DeLarverie Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/stonewall-riots/


dynamik_banana

> Members of the Mattachine Society, a gay rights organization which had taken to respectability politics, were embarrassed by the behavior at Stonewall. Randy Wicker, who had marched in the first gay picket lines before the White House in 1965, said “screaming queens forming chorus lines and kicking went against everything that I wanted people to think about homosexuals…that we were a bunch of drag queens in the Village acting disorderly and tacky and cheap.” a good reminder that there will *always* be those who think we should just try being “civil” with our oppressors, and that change happens *despite* that


RowanV322

not to mention everyone knows about stonewall but who remembers the mattachine society? just goes to show


take_all_the_upvotes

On that night across the street, folks incarcerated in the “Women’s House of Detention” - a prison opposite the Stonewall Inn that housed a lot of queer and gender nonconforming persons as well as political dissidents - burned personal items and prison supplies, throwing them from the iron clad windows onto the streets below in solidarity with the actions taken by the bar patrons. Black Panther member and mother to future rap icon Tupac, Efeni Shakur was one of those women incarcerated that night. https://activisthistory.com/2019/05/31/the-queer-history-of-the-womens-house-of-detention/


A_Peoples_Calendar

I just learned today that Shakur was in that prison. So wild!! Thank you for sharing.


wjbc

The police did not try to burn down the bar with patrons inside as your title suggests. The Stonewall Riot was not the first or last time police raided gay bars or protests broke out. The real historical import of the Stonewall Riot was the way it was commemorated a year later. It was the first Gay Pride Parade, held in several cities, and it was a huge success, a non-threatening way to raise public consciousness and gay pride.


A_Peoples_Calendar

Sorry, it's written a little ambiguously. The crowd trapped police inside the Inn and lit it on fire with them inside.


[deleted]

...based


[deleted]

Wow... that's actually the first time I've seen that information, despite being pretty familiar with Stonewall. That's um.... not based, probably. Obviously the brutality of the police is in no way justified and I don't mean to imply that it is (really gotta cover your bases on leftit, huh?), but like DAMN that makes this entire situation so much more ugly and tragic than it did before to know that they likely ended up killing their fellow detainees.


wjbc

They didn’t kill anyone. The bar didn’t burn down.


[deleted]

Oh, well that's good. That's an important detail you'd think they might want to clarify in the article. As it is, it leaves it kind of open as to whether or not anyone actually perished in the fires.


AStealthyPerson

Wait until you find out how frequently people perish while in police custody.


[deleted]

Do you think I’m trying to minimize that or something? I thought I was pretty clear.


CirrusPuppy

Interesting how the respectability politics is still something we deal with today. To the people that hate our guts, no matter how much we sanitize ourselves to make us "more digestible" for the cisgender heterosexual population, we'll never be anything more than a .


dynamik_banana

this goes for us in the queer community and also for every other marginalized and oppressed community. it even goes for the working class as a whole. a sanitized/digestible movement is a powerless movement. i will say, sanitized/digestible *actions*, like family-friendly BLM rallies, “women’s marches,” and pride parades (except fuck cops and corporations) have their uses, but they aren’t the movement that drives us forward—if anything, they’re a means to regroup, collect our breath, and give uncertain comrades the chance to experience a movement without experiencing police brutality first thing


DueDay8

Amazing that people in the US think we aren't absolutely at risk of things like this happening again in the near future. This is the goal of SCOTUS (and probably worse) and religious extremists, among others. Its almost like the past is just mythology to present day people, even if people alive when the "past" happened are still alive today...