Jun 12, 2009  |  By: Amy Cavanaugh  | COMMENTS     

STONEWALL

Karen: Let’s talk a little about Stonewall. This is the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and I am in a city where Stonewall does not exist and there are folks in this room who were not born when the Stonewall riots took place, but it is one of those mythic touch points in the timeline of our movement. But I want to ask, how many people have a sense of what happened at Stonewall? Tell me what little you know.

Parí: It was a hotel or something like that, I think. There were riots, the police raided, which started a lot of gay and lesbian riots, and they were fighting against the police … It’s like gay liberation. That’s what I know, that little bit.

Terra: My first time hearing about Stonewall was at SMYAL, we watched the Stonewall movie. It was like, “Wow,” just thinking about how that all went down … the coming to arms and being able to stand together and say you know what, “I’m tired. I’m physically tired and emotionally tired and I’m not going to deal with this anymore.”


Karen: How about folks who were alive and out or thinking about coming out around the time riots were taking place — how did you find out about them if you weren’t in New York and what did that mean? How did that feel?

Alan: One of the things we take for granted right now is the GLBT press. It didn’t really exist then. Whatever reporting there was came from the national press. If you read the New York Times … you probably saw something that was fairly prominently portrayed. If you were living in a lot of other places in the country, it did not get reported at all. It was not until the first Gay Pride in New York in 1970, which was a year after, that people were talking about this. It was how this Pride movement came into being, so for a lot of us, even though we may have been out to ourselves and maybe a few friends, if you were not reading the national press, it didn’t exist. It hadn’t happened.

Karen: The only paper that initially covered it was the New York [Daily News], and the headline, which was considered perfectly appropriate at the time, was “Queen Bees All Abuzz as Nest is Raided by Police.” You wouldn’t hear things like “Laurie said,” or “Alan stated”… all the descriptions in the paper are “she lisped,” “he fanned himself.” All the men were described as “she,” and always very, very effeminate. That was considered standard, completely appropriate reporting. This is a major daily newspaper, and that was how the Stonewall riot was initially covered.

Nick: I think Stonewall from the West Coast perspective was picked up more as a symbol of gay liberation than for the significance of the three days of rioting. By its first anniversary it became the thing which was the uniting symbol for the entire movement, but it wasn’t so much so at the very time that it happened.

Laurie: What it did was scare people. What it did was probably keep me from coming out for four or five years. Because in a very public way, what I saw was how we were treated and that it wasn’t OK to be who we were.

John: When you think about D.C., the Post carried it somewhat, because I remember looking at it in the monastery, it was my hometown, New York, thinking “I wish I was there, I missed a party.” The only thing you read about in D.C. for the gay community back then was when President Johnson’s assistant was arrested at the restroom at the Y. And that’s how closeted this town was, and then Frank Kameny, when we got our first delegate to Congress, Frank ran for Congress as an openly gay man and he got 6,000 votes, I said “Where do all these people come from?”

HIV / AIDS

Karen: When the New York Times reported on a mysterious cancer that seemed to be affecting primarily gay men [in the 1980s] it was known as GRID, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. And it’s now known as HIV. How has it had an impact on those of you who remember a time before HIV/AIDS, and how has that shifted in your lives today? And there’s a whole bunch of you at this table ...