STONEWALL - the early morning hours of June 28, 1969
Lots of commemorations - An exhibit at the New York City Public Library. Online, OutHistory.org has posted several newly-released police documents. Much of the original press coverage is here. Photos from the last night of the uprising here. Recollections by a participant and an observer. OutHistory has also posted this letter recounting the street action, which lasted several nights, written at the time by Edmund White:
Well, the big news here is Gay Power. It's the most extraordinary
thing. It all began two weeks ago on a Friday night. The cops raided
the <SW>, that mighty Bastille which you know has remained
impregnable for three years, so brazen and so conspicuous that one
could only surmise that the Mafia was paying off the pigs handsomely.
Apparently, however, a new public offcial, Sergeant Smith, has taken
over the Village, and he's a peculiarly diligent lawman. In any event,
a mammorth paddy wagon, as big as a school bus, pulled up to the Wall
and about ten cops raided the joint. The kids were all shooed into the
street; soon other gay kids and straight spectators swelled the ranks
to, I'd say, about a thousand people. Christopher Street was completely
blocked off and the crowds swarmed from the Voice office down to the Civil War hospital.
As the Mafia owners were dragged out one by one and shoved into the wagon, the crowd would let out Bronx cheers and jeers and clapping. Someone shouted "Gay Power," others took up the cry--and then it dissolved into giggles. A few more gay prisoners--bartenders, hatcheck boys--a few more cheers, someone starts singing "We Shall Overcome"--and then they started camping on it. A drag queen is shoved into the wagon; she hits the cop over the head with her purse. The cop clubs her. Angry stirring in the crow. The cops, used to the cringing and disorganization of the gay crowds, snort off. But the crowd doesn't disperse. Everyone is restless, angry and high-spirited. No one has a slogan, no one even has an attitude, but something's brewing.
Some adorable butch hustler boy pulls up a parking meter, mind you, out of the pavement, and uses it as a battering ram (a few cops are still inside the Wall, locked in). The boys begin to pound at the heavy wooden double doors and windows; glass shatters all over the street. Cries of "Liberate the Bar." Bottles (from hostile straights?) rain down from the apartment windows. Cries of "We're the Pink Panthers." A mad Negro queen whirls like a dervish with a twisted piece of metal in her hand and breaks the remaining windows. The door begins to give. The cop turns a hose on the crowd (they're still within the Wall). But they can't aim it properly, and the crowd sticks. Finally the door is broken down and the kids, as though working to a prior plan, systematically dump refuse from the waste cans into the Wall, squirting it with lighter fluid, and ignite it. Huge flashes of flame and billows of smoke.
Now the cops in the paddy wagon return, and two fire engines pull up. Clubs fly. The crowd retreats.
Saturday night, the pink panthers are back full force. The cops form a flying wedge at the Greenwich Avenue end of Christopher and drive the kids down towards Sheridan Square. The panthers, however, run down Waverly, up Gay Street, and come out behind the cops, kicking in a chorus line, taunting, screaming. Dreary middle-class East Side queens stand around disapproving but fascinated, unable to go home, as though torn between their class loyalties, their desire to be respectable, and their longing for freedom. Sheridan Square is cordoned off by the cops. The United Cigar store closes, Riker's closes, the deli closes. No one can pass through the square; to walk up Seventh Avenue, you must detour all the way to Bleeker.
A mad left-wing group of straight kids called the Crazies is trying to organize gay kids, point out that Lindsay is to blame (the Crazies want us to vote for Procaccino, or "Prosciutto," as we call him). A Crazy girl launches into a tirade against Governor Rockefeller, "Whose Empire," she cries, "Must Be Destroyed." Straight Negro boys put their arms around me and say we're comrades (it's okay with me--in fact, great, the first camaraderie I've felt with blacks in years). Mattachine (our NAACP) hands out leaflets about "what to do if arrested." Some man from the Oscar Wilde bookstore hands out a leaflet describing to newcomers what's going on. I give a stump speech about the need to radicalize, how we must recognize we're part of a vast rebellion of all the repressed. Some jeers, some cheers. Charles Burch plans to make a plastique to hurl at cops.
Sunday night, the Stonewall, now reopened--though one room is charred and blasted, all lights are smashed, and only a few dim bulbs are burning, no bad liquor being sold--the management posts an announcement: "We appreciate all of you and your efforts to help, but the Stonewall believes in peace. Please end the riots. We believe in peace." Some kids, nonetheless, try to turn over a cop car. Twelve are arrested. Some straight toughs rough up some queens. The queens beat them up. Sheridan Square is again blocked off by the pigs. That same night a group of about seventy-five vigilantes in Queens chops down a wooded part of a park as vengeance against the perverts who are cruising in bushes. "They're endangering our women and children." The Times, which has scarcely mentioned the Sheridan Square riots (a half column, very tame) is now so aroused by the conservation issue that it blasts the "vigs" for their malice toward nature.
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