on how to be and act and deviance from this ideal, would cause the ARussian
Bear@ to invade the American peace loving neighborhoods. I think homosexuals
were used as scapegoats and were a minority that could be sacrificed for the
governments proclaimed Agood@ of the nation.
SOURCES: – The American Record; volume II: since 1865, by William
Graebner & Leonard Richards, McGraw-Hill, Inc. – Making History; The
Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights 1945 – 1990, by Erik Marcus,
HarperCollins Publishers
INTERESTING AND MORE DETAILED EXCERPTS FROM INTERNET SOURCES FOR FURTHER
READING:
The Stonewall Inn, (named after the Confederate General ‘Stonewall’ Jackson),
was a gay bar (said to be sleazy and Mafia-run) at 51-53 Christopher Street just
east of Sheridan Square in New York’s Greenwich Village. On the night of 27/28th.
June, 1969, a police inspector and seven other officers from the Public Morals
Section of the First Division of the New York City Police Department arrived
shortly after midnight, served a warrant charging that alcohol was being sold
without a license, and announced that employees would be arrested. The patrons
were ejected from the bar by the police while others lingered outside to watch,
and were joined by passers-by. The arrival of the paddy wagons changed the mood
of the crowd from passivity to defiance. The first vehicle left without incident
apart from catcalls from the crowd. The next individual to emerge from the bar
was a woman in male costume who put up a struggle which galvanized the
bystanders into action. The crowd erupted into throwing cobblestones and bottles.
Some officers took refuge in the bar while others turned a fire hose on the
crowd. Police reinforcements were called and in time the streets were cleared.
During the day the news spread, and the following two nights saw further violent
confrontations between the police and gay people. The event was important less
for its intrinsic character than for the significance subsequently bestowed on
it. The Stonewall Rebellion was a spontaneous act of resistance to the police
harassment that had been inflicted on the homosexual community since the
inception of the modern vice squad in metropolitan police forces. It sparked a
new, highly visible, mass phase of political organization for gay rights that
far surpassed, semi-clandestine homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s,
exemplified by the Mattachine Society. The Mattachine Society newsletter
described the rebellion as ‘the hairpin drop heard round the world’. The event
has been commemorated by a parade held each year in New York City on the last
Sunday in June, following a tradition that began with the first march on 29th.
June, 1970, and by parallel events throughout the United States.@
STONEWALL: THE HISTORICAL EVENT
The confrontations between demonstrators and police at The Stonewall Inn in
Greenwich Village over the weekend of June 27-29, 1969 are usually cited as the
beginning of the modern movement for Lesbian/Gay liberation. What might have
been a routine police raid on a bar patronized by homosexuals, became a signal
event which sparked a movement. The Stonewall riots have developed into the
stuff of myth, about which many of the most commonly held beliefs are probably
untrue. In 1969, it was illegal to operate any business catering to homosexuals
in New York City-as it still is, today in 1991, in many places in the United
States and elsewhere. The standard procedure was for the New York City police to
raid such establishments on a semi-regular basis, to arrest a few of the most
obvious ‘types’ and to fine the owners prior to letting business continue as
usual by the next evening. It has been suggested that the majority of the
patrons at the Stonewall Inn were black and Hispanic drag queens, but perhaps
the goddess has always valued these rare creatures much too highly to ever let
them become a majority. In fact, most of the patrons that evening were most
likely young, college-age white men expecting to spend the rest of their lives
in the quiet desperation of the middle-class closet. They knew that it was
reasonably safe to enter the Stonewall Inn precisely because there were a few
colored drag queens, butch bulldykes and others whose double-minority status
made them far more likely candidates for arrest; this gave everyone else time to
cover their faces and run for the nearest exit. After midnight June 27-28, 1969,
four men and two women from the New York Tactical Police Force called a raid on
The Stonewall Inn at 55 Christopher Street. After leaving the bar, many of the
patrons decided to wait around outside while the police dispatched the ‘usual
suspects’ into the vans. It is said that this was the first time where Lesbians
and Gay men fought back; in fact, there had already been several incidents in
both Los Angeles and New York where sizable groups of Gays had resisted arrest.
More to the point, the queens targeted for arrest had always fought back, alone
and unsupported as they were led time and again to the vans. What was unique
about Stonewall and gives it a resonance which continues to inspire today was
that it was perhaps the first time when Lesbians and Gay men as a group were
able to see beyond the lipstick and the high heels, beyond the skin color and
recognize the oppression which threatens us all. The greatest great myth
concerning the Stonewall riots is that it was a Lesbian/Gay event. It is likely
that many of those who began pitching pennies, then beer bottles, at the police
that night weren’t even homosexual. The only publicly reported arrest was a
straight folk singer who was appearing next door and who joined the melee after
leaving work. The streets of Greenwich Village were home to many young people
whose politics were defined by the blossoming anti-war movement, left-wing
political ideologies and the successes of the Women’s liberation and Black Civil
Rights movements. Like their Lesbian/Gay brothers and sisters, they were
prepared to recognize oppression and thus willing to respond to it. (Anyone who
thinks being able to see oppression is easy has to only remember the Clarence
Thomas confirmation hearings.) In all, some 300 to 400 people became involved
in the attempt to stop the arrests, erupting into violent protest. The police
and the bar owners, who were perceived to be part of the repressive system at
work, barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall Inn for protection. While they
awaited reinforcements, the crowd outside attempted to burn the bar down with
the cops inside. Eventually, a squadron of patrol cars arrived and chased the
crowd away from the bar, and then around the narrow village streets for several
hours. The following night, a new crowd assembled outside the Stonewall and
rioted when the police attempted to break it up. Provocative articles appearing
in the NY Post, Daily News and especially The Village Voice helped to
consolidate Gay willingness to fight back. Within a few days, representatives of
the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis organized the city’s first
ever “Gay Power” rally in Washington Square. On July 27, 1969, speeches by
Martha Shelley and Marty Robinson were followed by a candlelight march to the
site of the Stonewall Inn. Five hundred people showed up, thought to have
included almost the entire ‘out-of-the-closet’ population of Lesbians and Gay
men in New York, as well as their supporters from the political left. The rest
as they say is history… STONEWALL: The Movement Before Stonewall, there were a
number of groups working for homosexual rights, ever since the concept had been
defined in nineteenth century Germany, home to the world’s first politically
organized movement. In the United States, since April 1965, Frank Kameny of
Washington, DC had been organizing Homosexual Reminder Days on the ellipse
across from the White House and at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. These were
sedate affairs of a few dozen picketers with the men in jackets and ties and the
Lesbians in skirts and dresses. Their principal demand was for civil service
protection and the right of homosexuals to hold government jobs. The New York
delegation that attended the July 4th picket in 1969, one week after Stonewall,
held hand and shouted down the other marchers. This was the last Homosexual
Reminder Day and a clear sign that the Stonewall riots had set something new in
motion. During the first year after Stonewall, a whole new generation of
organizations emerged, many identifying themselves for the first time as “Gay”
meaning not only a sexual orientation, but a radical new basis for self-
identification and with a sense of open political activism. Older groups such as
the Mattachine Society or the Westside Discussion Group whose members had used
first names or altogether fictitious ones to protect their identities soon made
way for the Gay Liberation Front and the various regional Gay Activists
Alliances. The vast majority of these new activists were under thirty, new to
political organizing and believed everything was possible. Many groups were
affiliated with specific colleges and universities, again with “Gay” replacing
“Homophile” in the names of most older groups and almost all new ones. By the
summer of 1970, groups in at least eight American cities were sufficiently
organized to schedule simultaneous events commemorating the Stonewall riots for
the last Sunday in June. The events varied from a highly political march of
three to five thousand in New York to a parade with floats for 1200 in Los
Angeles.
MATTACHINE SOCIETY
One of the earliest gay movement organizations in the USA. It began in Los
Angeles in 1950-51. Its name was given by the pioneer activist Harry Hay in
commemoration of the French medieval and Renaissance SociJtJ Mattachine, a
musical masque group which he had studied while preparing a course on the
history of popular music for a workers’ education project. The name was meant to
symbolize the fact that “gays were a masked people, unknown and anonymous”, and
the word, also spelled matachin or matachine , has been derived from the Arabic
of Moorish Spain, in which mutawajjihin , relates to masking oneself. Such an
opaque name is typical of the homophile movement of the time in which open
proclamation of the purposes of the group through a revealing name was regarded
as imprudent. At first the structure of the society followed that of freemasonry
with a pyramid structure, where cells at the same level would be unknown to each
other. The founders were Marxists and analyzed homosexuals in terms of an
oppressed cultural minority. The communist leanings of the organization put it
under some pressure during the anti-Communist phase in the USA. The era of
McCarthyism had begun on 9th. February, 1950 with a speech by Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy of Wisconsin, at Lincoln’s Birthday dinner of a Republican League in
Wheeling, West Virginia. Paul Coates wrote in a Los Angeles newspaper in March
1953 linking “sexual deviates” with “security risks” who were banding together
to wield “tremendous political power”. The Mattachine Society was restructured,
with a more transparent organization, and its leadership replaced. It also
changed its aims to the assimilation of homosexuals into general society, which
reflected its rejection of the notion of a homosexual minority. However the
Society declined, and at its convention in May 1954 only forty-two members
attended. The Mattachine Society produced the monthly periodical ONE Magazine ,
starting in January 1953 and eventually achieving a circulation of 5000 copies.
The regular publication of the magazine ceased in 1968, but its publisher, ONE
Inc., still exists. In January, 1955 the San Francisco branch of the Mattachine
Society began a more scholarly journal, Mattachine Review , which lasted for ten
years. The periodicals reached previously isolated individuals and helped
Mattachine to become better known nationally. Chapters functioned in a number of
USA cities through the 1960s. However, they failed to adapt to the radical
militantism after the Stonewall Rebellion and faded away.