![]() Momentarily, fifty or more homosexuals who would have to be described as “nelly” rushed the cops and took the boy back into the crowd. A high shrill voice called out, “Save our sister!” and there was a general pause, during which the “butch” looking “numbers” looked distracted. As they carried him to a waiting van brought to take off prisoners, four more cops joined them and began pounding the boy in the face, belly and groin with night sticks. Suddenly, two cops darted into the crowd and dragged out a boy who had done absolutely nothing. (A bonus for your reading fun: some extremely 1960s hippie lingo.) Many of the sources in Stein’s collection come from these newspapers. ![]() Crage wrote in a 2006 paper analyzing why Stonewall “became central to gay collective memory while other events did not,” the story of Stonewall’s importance was, first, a construction-“a story initiated by gay liberation activists and used to encourage further growth.” This mythmaking greatly benefited from the recent expansion of alternative and gay newspapers across the country, which had built what Armstrong and Crage refer to as “gay mnemonic capacity” by 1969. “In the aftermath of the uprising,” Stein writes in his introduction, “the rebellion was commonly invoked in debates and discussions about the movement’s internal divisions.” As sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Suzanna M. The takeaway from Stein’s collection: Almost all of the present-day controversies around this event-its origins and its meaning-were matters of conversation among activists as early as summer 1969. When you’re trying to figure out what Stonewall meant to people at the time, these documents, many of which were first printed in the couple of years afterward, are indispensable. Marc Stein’s The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History is a primary-source collection of the sort that a professor might assign in a class on social movements. Debates like these can’t, by their nature, be resolved they’re persistent, messy, and vital.Īnd these conversations are as old as the events themselves. As a person interested in understanding the way movements shape themselves around iconic events, I’m loving it. And what about the West Coast’s contribution? The 50 th anniversary of the Stonewall riots has prompted the excavation of every controversy around the event, giving all of us a crash course in the politics of historical memory. A trans person threw the first brick- maybe? (Or was it a shot glass?) When describing Stonewall as a turning point in queer liberation, don’t forget to mention how much is left to do. The gay rights movement began way before Stonewall. This post is part of Outward, Slate’s home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture. “To Hold My Boyfriend’s Hand … Is Still Revolutionary”Įvolutionarily Speaking, Do Men Need to Exist? What Happens When Marjorie Taylor Greene Tells a Georgia Town You’re a Predator
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