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New York Public Library Biography

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“For some people the march was and will be one of the highest points in their lives. The courage that it took for some people to make those first steps from Sheridan Square into Sixth Avenue and out of the Village was the summoning up of a whole lifetime’s desire to finally come clear, to say the truth as it is, to expose themselves nakeder than any pinup boy in any flesh book, to show their heads as well as their bodies and to put their heads and souls where their bodies have been for so many years.”

Stonewall
Book:The Stonewall Reader
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“Some say that Stonewall was the first time LGBTQ people fought back, which is also not true. Stonewall was preceded by earlier queer revolts such as the Cooper Do-nuts Riot in Los Angeles in 1959, the Dewey’s restaurant sit-in in Philadelphia in 1965, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco in 1966, and the protests against the raid of the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles in 1967, among many others. Scholars, participants, and the interested public also debate how many days the uprising lasted and who threw the first brick, the first bottle, or the first punch. And more, beyond any of these questions we wonder what these events that transpired fifty years ago mean to us today.”

Stonewall
Book:The Stonewall Reader
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“It has been over forty years since the Gay Liberation Front first took trans seriously, but the gay men who wore those shirts with the polo players or alligator emblems didn't want trans people as the representation of their community. Their revisionist history has been accepted into popular culture because they were the ones with connections to publishers, the influence, as well as the money and time to sit back and write about what "really" happened.”

HistoryLgbtqiaStonewall
Book:The Stonewall Reader
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“No, this wasn’t a 1960s student riot. Out there were the streets. There were no nice dorms for sleeping. No school cafeteria for certain food. No affluent parents to send us checks. There was a ghetto riot on home turf. We already had our war wounds. So this was just another battle. Nobody thought of it as history, herstory, my-story, your-story, or our-story. We were being denied a place to dance together. That’s all. The total charisma of a revolution in our CONSCIOUSNESS rising from the gutter to the gut to the heart and the mind was here. Non-existence (or part existence) was coming into being, and being into becoming. Our Mother Stonewall was giving birth to a new era and we were the midwives.”

ActivismLgbtHomosexualityGay RightsLgbtqiaLgbt RightsStonewallStonewall Riots
Book:The Stonewall Reader
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