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JM: 50 years ago this week… in the early morning hours of June 28th, 1969… police raided a gay bar in New York City called the Stonewall Inn….
… and the uprising that followed became a turning point in the movement for LGBTQ rights.
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It’s the StoryCorps podcast from NPR. I’m Jasmyn Morris. And in this week’s episode, we’ll revisit the very first documentary StoryCorps founder Dave Isay made… back in 1989… called “Remembering Stonewall.”
Today, the Stonewall Inn is a national historic landmark. But when Dave made his documentary… many of those involved in the uprising had never told their story.
…and it’s worth noting the history of Stonewall is murky – did a drag queen start the riot or was it a butch lesbian? Did someone throw the first punch, or was it a shoe…or a brick… or a molotov cocktail? …
But what we do know…is that police would routinely raid gay bars…and for LGBTQ folks, this harassment was nothing new…
There had been other so-called riots around the country… in response to this treatment… … most notably in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
But what was different on this night at the Stonewall Inn… is that when patrons fought back… the world took notice…
Sylvia Rivera (SR): My name is Sylvia Rivera. I started dressing in drag in 1961.
The era before Stonewall was a hard era. There was always the gay bashings on the drag queens by heterosexual men, women, and the police. We learned to live with it because it was part of the lifestyle at that time, I guess, but none of us were very happy about it.
Seymour Pine (SP): My name is Seymour Pine. In 1968, I was assigned as Deputy Inspector in charge of public morals in the first division in the police department, which covered the Greenwich Village area. It was the duty of Public Morals to enforce all laws concerning vice and gambling, including prostitution, narcotics, and laws and regulations concerning homosexuality. The part of the penal code which applied to drag queens was Section 240.35, section 4: ”Being masked or in any manner disguised by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration; loiters, remains, or congregates in a public place with other persons so masked . . .”
SR: At that time we lived at the Arista Hotel. We used to sit around, just try to figure out when this harassment would come to an end. And we would always dream that one day it would come to an end. And we prayed and we looked for it. We wanted to be human beings.
Red Mahoney (RM): My name is Red Mahoney. I’ve been hanging out drinking, partying, and working in the gay bars for the last thirty years. In the era before Stonewall, all of the bars, 90% of the bars, were Mafia controlled. There wasn’t that many gay bars. You’d have maybe one, two uptown on the Upper East Side. They would get closed down. Then there’d be one or two on the west side, they’d get closed down. In midtown there’d be one, two, three, maybe open. As they would get closed down they would move around. And they were dumps.
Joan Nestle (JN): I’m Joan Nestle, co-founder of what is now the largest collection of lesbian culture in the world. The police raided lesbian bars regularly, and they did it . . . they both did it in the most obvious way, which was hauling women away in paddy wagons. But there was regular weekend harassment, which would consist of the police coming in regularly to get their payoffs. And in the Sea Colony, we had a back room with a red light. And when that red light went on it meant the police would be arriving in around ten minutes. And so we all had to sit down at our tables, and we would be sitting there almost like school children, and the cops would come in. Now depending on who was on, which cop was on, if it was some that really resented the butch women who were with many times very beautiful women, we knew we were in for it because what would happen is they would start harassing one of these women, and saying, ”Ha, you think you’re a man? Come outside and we’ll show you.” And the woman would be dragged away. They’d throw her up against a wall and they’d say, ”So, you think you’re a man, let’s see what you got in your pants.” And they would put their hand down her pants.
RM: The Stonewall? Oh, that was a good bar. That was. Just to get into the Stonewall, you’d walk up and you’d knock on the front door. You’d knock and the little door would open and ”What do you want?” ”A Mary sent me.” ”Good, come on in girls.” You know. The Stonewall, like all gay bars at that time, were painted black. Charcoal black. And what was the funny part, the place would be so dimly lit — but as soon as the cops were gonna come in to collect their percentage or whatever they were coming in for, from it being a nice, dimly-lit dump, the place was lit up like Luna Park.
SP: You felt, well, two guys — and that’s very often all we sent in would be two men — could handle two hundred people. I mean, you tell them to leave and they leave, and you say show me your identification and they all take out their identification and file out and that’s it. And you say, okay, you’re not a man, you’re a woman, or you’re vice versa and you wait over there. I mean, this was a kind of power that you have and you never gave it a second thought.
SR: The drag queens took a lot of oppression and we had to . . . we were at a point where I guess nothing would have stopped us. I guess, as they say, or as Shakespeare says, we were ladies in waiting, just waiting for the thing to happen. And when it did happen, we were there.
Dave Isay (DI): On Friday evening, June 27, 1969, at about 11: 45, eight officers from New York City’s public morals squad loaded into four unmarked police cars and headed to the Stonewall Inn here at 7th Avenue and Christopher Street. The local precinct had just received a new commanding officer, who kicked off his tenure by initiating a series of raids on gay bars. A number of the bar’s patrons had spent the early part of the day outside the Frank Campbell Funeral Home, where Judy Garland’s funeral was held. She had died the Sunday before. It was almost precisely at midnight that the morals squad pulled up to the Stonewall Inn, led by Deputy Inspector, Seymour Pine.
SP: For some reason, things were different this night. As we were bringing the prisoners out, they were resisting.
SR: People started gathering in front of the Sheridan Square Park right across the street from Stonewall. People were upset. No we’re not going to go and people started screaming and hollering.
SP: One drag queen, as we put her in the car opened the door on the other side and jumped out, at which time we had to chase that person. He was caught, put back into the car. He made another attempt to get out the other door and at that point, we had to handcuff the person. From this point on, things really began to get crazy.
Robert Rivera (RR): My name is Robert Rivera and my nickname is Birdie and I’ve been cross-dressing all of my life. I remember the night of the riots, the police were escorting the queens out of the bar and into the paddy wagon. And there was this one particularly outrageously beautiful queen, stacks and stacks of Elizabeth Taylor-style hair and she was asking them not to push her and they continued to push her and she turned around and she mashed the cop with her high heel. She knocked him down and then she proceeded to frisk him for the keys to the handcuffs that were on her. She got them and, uh, she undid herself and passed them to another queen that was behind her.
SP: That’s when all hell broke loose. And then we had to get back into the Stonewall.
Howard Smith (HS): My name is Howard Smith. On the night of the Stonewall riots, I was a reporter for the Village Voice locked inside with the police covering it for my column. It really did appear that that crowd, because we could look through little peepholes in the plywood windows, we could look out and we could see that the crowd, well my guess was within 5, 10 minutes, it was probably several thousand people. 2000 easy and they were yelling, ”Kill the cops. Police brutality. Let’s get them. We’re not going to take this anymore. Let’s get them.”
SP: We noticed a group of, uh, persons attempting to uproot, uh, one of the parking meters in which they did succeed. And they then used that parking meter to… as a battering ram to break down the door and they did in fact open the door. They crashed it in and, at that point, was when they began throwing Molotov cocktails into the place. It was a situation that we didn’t know how we were going to be able to control.
RR: I remember someone throwing a Molotov cocktail. I don’t know who the person was but, I mean, I saw that and I just said to myself in Spanish, I said, ”Oh my God, the revolution is finally here.” I just started screaming, “Freedom. We’re free at last.” It felt really good.
HS: There were a couple of cops stationed on either side of the door with their pistols like in a combat stance aimed in the door area. Couple of others were stationed in other places behind, like, a pole, another one behind the bar; all of them with their guns ready. I don’t think up to that point I had ever seen cops that scared.
SP: Remember these were pros but everybody is frightened. There’s no question about that. I know I was frightened and I had been in combat situations and there was never any time that I felt more scared than I felt that night. And, uh, there was just no place to run.
RR: Once the tactical police force showed up, I think, it really incited us a little bit more.
Martin Boise (MB): My name is Martin Boise and in 1969 I was a drag queen known as Miss Martin. I remember on that night, when we saw the riot police, all of us drag queens, we linked arms like the Rockettes and sang the song we used to sing. “We are the village girls. We wear our hair in curls. We wear our dungarees above our nelly-knees,” and the police went crazy hearing that and they just immediately rushed us. We gave one kick and fled.
Rudy: My name is Rudy and, uh, the night of the Stonewall I was 18 and, to tell you the truth, that night I was doing more running than fighting. I remember looking back from 10th street and there on Waverly Street, there was a police, I believe a cop, on his stomach in his tactical uniform and his helmet and everything else with a drag queen straddling him. She was beating the hell of out him with her shoe. Whether it was a high heel or not, I don’t know. But she was beating the hell out of him. It was hysterical.
Mama Jean (MJ): My name is Mama Jean. I’m a lesbian. I remember on that night, I was in a gay bar, a women’s bar called Cookies. We were coming out of the gay bar going toward Eighth Street and that’s when we saw everything happen. Blasting away, people getting beat up. Police coming from every direction. Hitting women as well as men with their nightsticks. Gay men running down the street with blood all over their face. We decided right then and there whether we’re scared or not, we didn’t think about it. We just jumped in.
RR: Here this queen is going completely bananas. You know, jumping and hitting the windshield. The next thing you know, the taxi cab was being turned over, other cars were being turned over. Windows were shattering all over the place. Fires were burning around the place. It was beautiful. It really was. It was really beautiful.
MJ: I remember one cop coming at me hitting me with the nightstick in the back of my legs. I broke loose and I went after him. I grabbed his nightstick, my girlfriend went behind him. She was a strong son of a gun. I wanted him to feel the same pain I felt and I kept on saying to him, ”How do you like the pain? Do you like it? Do you like it?” I kept on hitting him and hitting him. I was angry. I wanted to kill him. At that particular minute I wanted to kill him.
RR: I wanted to do every destructive thing that I could think of at that time to hurt anyone that had hurt us through the years.
MJ: It’s like just when you see a man protecting his own life. They weren’t the queens that people call them. They were men fighting for their lives. And I’d fight along side of them any day no matter how old I was.
RR: A lot of heads were bashed in that night. A lot of people were hurt but it didn’t hurt their true feelings. They all came back for more and more. Nothing… that’s when you could tell that nothing could stop us at that time or at any time in the future.
Judy Garland: (singing) I’ll be loving you…
JM: A selection from Remembering Stonewall produced by StoryCorps founder, Dave Isay in 1989.
Dave dedicated that documentary to his dad, Richard Isay, a well-known psychiatrist and gay rights activist. Richard Isay died in 2012… on the anniversary of Stonewall.
To hear the rest of “Remembering Stonewall,” go to our website… StoryCorps dot org.
Next, reflections on Stonewall from a StoryCorps booth… we’ll also hear from you! Our listeners. All season, we’ve been asking you to record an LGBTQ elder in your life… and you delivered.
Stay with us.
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JM: Welcome back.
As we noted earlier this season, some say what happened at Stonewall 50 years ago was a riot. Some call it a rebellion or an uprising. But regardless of the term, Stonewall doesn’t just refer to the events of June 28, 1969. The unrest actually lasted for six nights…
And Michael Levine was there. He came to StoryCorps with his friend Matthew Merlin… to remember how that week unfolded…
Michael Levine (ML): When we came back on Saturday night, we stood there on the street and held hands and kissed, something we would never have done three days earlier. It made me feel wonderful. I stood there with chills. It was like when you’re watching a parade and the flag goes by and, you know, you see something you’re so proud of, and you see your troops and you get that chill inside of you. I got a chill. I got a chill standing on the street and seeing guys holding hands and kissing.
And in the week that followed, I got phone calls from relatives, cousins, my brother, my aunt. ”We’re just calling to find out if you’re okay. We know you go to places like this. We want to make sure you’re alright.” That means they knew all along. It was like I was wearing a sign on my back. They knew. We never discussed it. I never once had to say to anyone in my family, ”I’m gay.”
Matthew Merlin (MM): How did you feel about yourself between the beginning of Stonewall and after Stonewall. Did you feel that you were a different person?
ML: No, I didn’t feel like that I was a different person. I was the same me. I was a homosexual person, coming from an old-fashioned Jewish neighborhood, living in Greenwich Village on my own. I felt the same. But I felt the world, now, is more comfortable with me. And Stonewall did that for me.
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JM: That’s Michael Levine talking with his friend Matthew Merlin at StoryCorps in New York City.
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If you’ve been listening all season, you know that in honor of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, StoryCorps launched an effort to document the stories of LGBTQ elders before they are lost to history. It’s called Stonewall OutLoud… and the goal is for people all over the country to take out their phones and record these stories using the StoryCorps app…
Like all StoryCorps interviews, each one is preserved forever as part of our archive in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
We’ve gotten too many submissions to play all of them here, but we wanted to share some that speak directly to Stonewall.
This one comes from Christina Cipriani Xavier, who is talking with her friend Amanda Berry…
Christina Cipriani Xavier (CCX): I was alive in the days of Stonewall. I was twelve at the time, and not out but, when it happened, I felt compelled to go down to The Village and just walk.
Amanda Berry (AB): Yeah…
CCX: You know, the people who were at the forefront of the Stonewall Riots, the people who fought back, fought back ‘cause they had no choice.
AB: Right.
CCX: And it’s on their backs that this movement is built upon. And, people like myself and people like yourself, all of us are a part of that. We just keep building, so that 50 years from now…Somebody will look back and say, “That was really the dark ages.”
JM: We’re hearing some familiar voices on StoryCorps app as well… like Alexis Martinez – who we first heard from back in 2013.
This time, she told her friend Luan (Loo-inn) Joy Sherman about the first Pride parade she ever attended… and Alexis started their conversation by talking about the path that led her there…
Alexis Martinez (AM): I was so frustrated as a kid because I knew, like, when I was four years old that I was a girl. And I would have to do everything in my power to disguise myself.
I got into a fight in the projects with this kid, Horace. He was like 14 years old, but he’s like 6’4 and a basketball player. He jumped on top of me. So what I did is I bit him in his nose.
Years later, right, the first time that I went to a pride parade in Chicago, I got hair down to my butt, I’m, like, this cute looking girl …
Luan Joy Sherman (LJS): Yeah…
AM: And who comes up to me but Horace and he’s got scars on his nose. He goes, ”What are you doing here?” And I go, ”I’m just watching the parade.” But see, he was queer.
In a lot of ways, I think it was exactly what Stonewall was all about, is this coming out. It was no, we don’t have to hide, we don’t have to be subjected to police raids. We have a right to exist.
I wasn’t at Stonewall when the whole thing broke up, but I think Stonewall served the purpose, like uncorking a bottle and, just, you couldn’t contain it anymore.
It was like an explosion that affected people across the country. All of a sudden, there was somewhere where people were standing up… and fighting.
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JM: That’s all for this episode of the StoryCorps podcast. It was produced by Jud Esty-Kendall and me. Our production assistant is Afi Yellow-Duke. Our engineer is Jarett Floyd. Natsumi Ajisaka is our fact-checker. Remembering Stonewall was produced by Dave Isay with Michael Schirker.
Special thanks to Katie Simon, Madison Mullen, Josh Christensen… and our partners, the National LGBTQ Task Force, SAGE, Griot Circle, and GLSEN.
And it’s not too late to record an elder in your community! Head over to StoryCorps – DOT – ORG – slash OutLoud to learn how.
As always, you can see what music we used in the episode… on our website, along with original artwork created for this season.
For the StoryCorps podcast, I’m Jasmyn Morris. Thanks for listening… and Happy Pride!
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