Cassandra Landrum
Spring 2015
1) Title: LGBT Protest Politics
2) Key Words: identity, queer, gay, homosexual, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender, equality, gay
pride
3) Brief description: On June 28, 2969, a small gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village
neighborhood, The Stonewall Inn, was raided by the police. Rather than the norm of passive
consent to the police, the patrons began to fight back leading to an all-out riot in the streets of
lower Manhattan. The Stonewall Riot is referred to by many as the turning point in the struggle
for gay rights.
4) Key points:

The police justified these raids as “public morals” or collected payouts from owners and
patrons to avoid being shut down.

The Stonewall bar and other gay bars in the west village are periodically raided and
patrons thrown in jail.

On June 28, 2969 the police again raided the Stonewall Bar.

Many patrons were arrested but the crowd refused to disperse and began to fight back.

There was a climate of protest across the country for equal and civil rights for all
Americans.

Stonewall was the breaking point for those tired of being oppressed fought the police and
riot squads.

The following nights and weeks the riots continued, grew increasingly violent and the
crowds grew to record numbers making their demands.

The events at Stonewall provide the spark to consolidate the “gay pride” movement to
enact social change
5) Photos:
An image of the protests following the Stonewall Riots.
Cbsnews.com Leonard Fink
The banner at outside the Stonewall Inn in NYC in 2009, the 40th anniversary of the riots.
Truthscold.worldpress.com
A street flier/advertisement to gain support and raise awareness.
Grid.org
Recent action of protesters fighting for marriage equality.
Huffingtonpost.com
6) The relative freedoms and social acceptance that millions of particularly urban American
LGBT people experience today would have seemed as surreal to that earlier generation as the
prospect of electing an African-American president. (Sherry Wolf) The repressive era after
World War II generated a wealth of suppression when the men returned to the United States and
expected to reclaim their position in the world. They hadn’t realized the undercurrents of change
that was sweeping the nation for the now displaced women, blacks, and other minorities that
filled those positions in their absence. Major shifts in social construction were underway and
progressed for the next few decades. Much like the Jim Crow laws that suppressed the rights of
African Americans in the south, there were similar laws on the books that criminalized the
LGBT community.
The Stonewall riots took place during the summer of love. A local New York watering
hole known as Stonewall Inn was an establishment owned and operated by the Mafia. Filmmaker
Vito Russo described the place as “a bar for the people who were too young, too poor or just too
much to get in anywhere else. The Stonewall was a street queen hangout in the heart of the
ghetto.” The owner paid off the cops in order to maintain a decent relationship with them but
they continued to arrest, harass and shut down gay friendly establishments in the area.
On the night of June 28th 1969, several plain clothes police officers and one in uniform
came to the Stonewall Inn. It is unclear exactly transpired as there are varying accounts, but
while the police were arresting the patrons, putting them in the back of a paddy wagon, some
began to fight back. The fighting increased until the riot squad was called in. The patrons joined
by other supporters in the area refused to back down from the aggression. The standoff lasted for
hours with groups of drag queens fighting off the police in Rockettes style chorus lines, chanting
“Gay power!” and high-kicking, while other groups flanked the police and retaliated by throwing
bottles and bricks. Protesters rioted outside the Stonewall Inn until the police sent a riot-control
squad to disperse the crowd. The next night, as word spread, the crowds returned even larger
than the night before, with numbers reaching over 1000. For days following the initial
confrontation, demonstrations of varying intensity took place throughout the city.
“In order to mobilize a constituency, a social movement must draw on an existing
identity or construct a new collective identity, known as identity for empowerment. The Civil
Rights movement drew on a black identity, whereas the labor movement had to create a worker’s
identity in order to mobilize.” (Calhoun, 1993) Similarly, the “labor movement may have sought
protection for the rights of ‘workers’ (once a novel category), just as lesbian and gay activists
seek protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation. Identity is also a goal of ‘queer’
activists as they seek to break down divisions between sexual categories (Gamson1995; Epstein
1999).
In the wake of the riots, intense discussions took place in the city’s gay community.
During the first week of July, a small group of lesbians and gay men started talking about
establishing a new organization called the Gay Liberation Front. This act of defiance was the
unifying event that awakened the need and desire for nationwide equal rights for this community.
Some have attributed the wide-spread effect to the amount of national news coverage. Within
two years of the riots there were gay rights groups formed in nearly every major city across the
U.S. Identity may also be a goal of social movements, as activists ‘‘challenge stigmatized
identities, seek recognition for new identities, or deconstruct restrictive social categories.’’
(Bernstein 1997a: 537) These riots gave them a new identity to the LGBT everywhere. The
adoption of the Rainbow flag served as a symbol that members and supporters alike could use to
identify one another and promote that identity. Every year in celebration of those that came
before them the LGBT community celebrates with a Pride Parade.
In recent years the LGBT activists have been successful transforming their social
activism into political action. They have taken on challenges such as adoption for same-sex
couples to equal protection and marriage rights as well as anti-discrimination laws and getting
“gay bashing” classified as a hate crime. They have made great strides in securing their right and
protections and continue to work on a variety of levels to further their causes. I believe that
without the Stonewall Inn Riots, although not the first or only act of resistance was the most
significant, because it allowed an opportunity for the LGBT community to self-identify and unify
on a greater scale than they ever had before. The climate across the country was that of
challenging the status quo in favor of support for increased equality across the board, via the
Civil Rights Movement and all the subsidiary uprisings. By bringing the topic of gay rights to the
forefront of the nation, it allowed for mobilization across state, gender, racial, age and
socioeconomic status lines, leading ultimately greater success.
References
Armstrong, Elizabeth A., and Suzanna M. Crage. "Movements and memory: The making of the
Stonewall myth." American Sociological Review 2006, Vol. 71, No. 5, pp 724-751
Carter, David. Stonewall: The riots that sparked the gay revolution. Macmillan, 2010.
Hutchinson, Darren Lenard. “Out Yen Unseen: A Racial Critique of Gay and Lesbian Legal
Theory and Political Discourse” Connecticut Law Review, 1997, Vol. 29, No.2,
Websites:
http://www.socialistalternative.org/stonewall-riots-1969/
http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/stonewall_riots.html
http://prospect.org/article/45-years-after-stonewall-lgbt-movement-has-transphobia-problem
http://isreview.org/issue/63/stonewall-birth-gay-power
http://www.civilrights.org/archives/2009/06/449-stonewall.html