Stonewall

Tom Rosshirt
Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:00:00 -0800
Opinion

On the night Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, a student from Georgetown University crouched in the dark next to the White House fence, jumped to grab an upper bar and hoisted himself onto the White House grounds.

He didn't get far before the Secret Service nabbed him, recognized the event as a dumb stunt and released him to the custody of a Georgetown priest.

That kid was my brother Matt. He chose Georgetown, he said, for two reasons: He wanted to be close to politics, and he wanted to be more openly gay — something he thought Washington, D.C., could allow him. His dream, he told me, was to be at the White House someday as the president signed a gay rights bill into law.
Updated: Fri Jan 23, 2015

On the night Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, a student from Georgetown University crouched in the dark next to the White House fence, jumped to grab an upper bar and hoisted himself onto the White House grounds.

He didn't get far before the Secret Service nabbed him, recognized the event as a dumb stunt and released him to the custody of a Georgetown priest.

That kid was my brother Matt. He chose Georgetown, he said, for two reasons: He wanted to be close to politics, and he wanted to be more openly gay — something he thought Washington, D.C., could allow him. His dream, he told me, was to be at the White House someday as the president signed a gay rights bill into law.

Matt died of AIDS at the age of 23. I wish I could have heard him react to the mention of Stonewall in President Barack Obama's inaugural address on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

The line "Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall" and the defense of gay marriage gave the gay rights movement exposure, stature and momentum in a way no other act by the president could have done.

Stonewall, as more of the country now knows, refers to the uprising that took place in June 1969 as New York police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village.

David Carter's book "Stonewall" and the "Frontline" documentary based on the book paint a deeply depressing picture of gay life before Stonewall. Gays were stigmatized. They were shunned. They were illegal. They had no places to gather. They met in meat trucks and in bars in out-of-the-way neighborhoods. One gay activist wrote of Stonewall: "There is no question the bar was illegal, dirty, dingy and exploitative: in 1969 it was virtually all we had. ... Crumby as it was, it was ours."

But the police chased gays out of even those dismal places where they gathered. On Friday night, June 28, 1969, the cops raided the Stonewall Inn for the second time in a week, planning to shut the bar down. They let some people go, but when those customers left the bar, they didn't leave. Instead, they gathered. And the crowd grew as passers-by stopped to watch and people called their friends from pay phones. People got angrier and angrier as the cops arrested more people and beat them in front of the crowd.

The trigger came when a handcuffed lesbian was dragged from the bar, yelling and fighting bitterly as cops led her to a police car. According to one account, there were three or four cops on her. "Once inside the car, she slid back out and battled the police all the way to the Stonewall Inn's entrance. ... After she reached the Stonewall the police pulled her back to the police car and again put her inside it. She got out again. ... This time an officer picked her up and heaved her inside."

The crowd was screaming at the cops to leave her alone, and she yelled to the crowd: "Why don't you guys do something?" That struggle ignited the riot. The crowd advanced, and the police withdrew, barricading themselves inside the Stonewall.

One activist said: "In the civil rights movement, we ran from the police; in the peace movement, we ran from the police. That night, the police ran from us, the lowliest of the low. And it was fantastic."

Eventually, riot police showed up and tried to clear the streets, which made the crowd all the angrier. One man said: "That was our only block. That was our world, that block."

A 19-year-old gay man, before grabbing something to throw, said to himself, "I'm sick of being told I'm sick."

The riots and protests would go on for four more nights. They led to a blossoming of gay rights activism and the nation's first gay pride parade, on June 28, 1970 — marking the anniversary of the uprising.

How far have we come from Stonewall to Obama's second inaugural?

In 1966, Richard Inman, the head of the Mattachine Society, one of the country's first gay rights groups, was asked on a television news program, "What kind of laws are you after?" He pointedly said that the organization did not want the right to marry or adopt children. "You might find some fringe character someplace who says that that's what he wants."

Then the interviewer asked him, "Are you a homosexual?" He answered nervously: "Yes and no. I was a homosexual. I first engaged in such acts when I was 14 years old. ... But I gave it up about — oh, I forget — some years ago, over four years ago. It's not my cup of tea."

I would love to know what my brother would say of the change. He told me once, "It's terrible to find out you are what you hate."

That's not going to happen so much anymore.