A Riot in a New York Bar 50 Years Ago, and America's Fight for Gay Equality | Stonewall at 50

In a series of articles, we examine — from social, cultural, and other angles — how the Stonewall riots became possible.

At 1:20 a.m. on June 28, 1969, Seymour Pine decided he would wait no longer.

The NYPD deputy inspector's target that night was a gay bar in Greenwich Village called the Stonewall Inn. Openly, Pine hoped the raid would strike at the Mafia that controlled the bar, and at the organized crime it ran there — prostitution, bootleg liquor. Privately, he admitted that arresting the bar's gay patrons was good for the department's numbers. “Arresting those customers was easy. They never gave you any trouble.”

Four days earlier, Pine had raided the Stonewall Inn, arrested the man running it, and seized every bottle of hard liquor on the premises. As he was leaving, one of the bar's owners told him, “If you want to make a scene, go ahead, but we'll open as usual tomorrow.” Pine was furious. This time he came prepared, bringing in officials from several government agencies so he could shut the Stonewall Inn down for good. A few hours earlier, four plainclothes officers gathering evidence had already slipped inside. Now he turned to the four colleagues waiting at the door. “Let's go, boys.”

Pine expected this raid to go as smoothly as the many raids on gay bars before it. So, in fact, did the people inside the bar. Elliot Tiber — an artist and playwright, and one of the organizers of the Woodstock festival — was among the more than two hundred patrons in the Stonewall Inn that night. “At first, it was just another night of partying at the Stonewall … Out of the mounting, angry confusion, someone shouted that tonight we were going to fight back. I was stunned. This had never happened before. We were used to being raided. Now, suddenly, there was revolution in the air.”

The air inside the bar turned tense; many patrons refused to show the police their identification. As officers marched customers out one by one, a crowd gathered on the street. Being raided twice in a single week was more than anyone could bear, on top of the years New York's gay bars had already spent under police harassment. As officers loaded the Mafia men into a patrol car, some in the crowd began singing the best-known protest song of the era. Scuffles broke out. A lesbian wrestling with police became the final spark.

“That was the moment the riot began,” wrote Lucien Truscott, a reporter for the New York weekly The Village Voice.

The Stonewall riots went on for days, and the crowd grew from more than five hundred people on the first night to several thousand within days. The target of the protests widened from the police to the Mafia that controlled the bar. Groups already working for gay rights moved in quickly. The following year, Christopher Street Liberation Day, held to commemorate the riots, took place for the first time, and over the years it grew into Pride Month.

In the 1970s, the LGBT rights movement grew fast once it took in other sexual-minority issues, including bisexuality and transgender identity.

In the 1980s, the Democratic Party announced its support for LGBT rights. States across the country repealed their anti-gay sodomy laws one after another.

In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court granted marriage rights to all LGBT Americans.

Today, attitudes toward the LGBT community may be the biggest shift Americans have lived through in the past 50 years. According to the General Social Survey, run by the University of Chicago, just over 10% of Americans supported same-sex marriage in 1988; by 2014 the figure had risen to nearly 60%. The share of Americans who thought sex with someone of the same sex was not wrong at all also grew, from 12% in 1987 to 49% in 2014. The Stonewall riots were the turning point for all of it.

In 2004, Pine took part in a forum on the Stonewall riots hosted by the American Historical Association. He admitted that in 1969 the police held prejudices against gay people. Someone in the audience asked him to apologize for what had happened that year, and he did. The historian David Carter quoted Pine as saying, “If what I did helped gay people, then I'm glad.”

As the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots arrives, QDaily will use a series of articles to look back at the social, cultural, and other forces that made the event possible. From here, Stonewall can look like an accident. But at every level, American society at the time was already prepared to accept this group of people.

Even without Stonewall, all of it would have arrived soon enough.

“By the end of the 1960s, homosexual acts were illegal everywhere in the country except Illinois. No law — federal, state, or local — protected gay men and women from being shot or thrown out of their homes. There were no openly gay politicians. No television show had a recognizably gay character. When Hollywood made a film with a gay character, that character was either shot or committed suicide. There were no openly gay police officers, public school teachers, doctors, or lawyers. And no political party had an openly gay legislator.”

That is how the historian David Carter describes the life of gay people in America before the Stonewall riots, in his book Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. The main cause was the law against deviant sex then in force across the country — inherited from colonial legal codes, and known as the sodomy laws.

The word “sodomy” comes from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis. In the original teaching, Sodom and Gomorrah were nothing more than two wicked cities. But in the first century CE, the Jewish philosopher Philo attributed God's punishment of Sodom to the same-sex sexual acts within its walls. The church kept this error alive for centuries afterward, and many religious figures cited it as the moral basis for punishing gay people.

Same-sex sex has not always been taboo. People today are eager to stress that it is natural behavior, written into human genes. In ancient Greece, in ancient China, and in other periods, it was widely treated as a legitimate part of social life, free from punishment open or hidden. But once Christianity became the strongest force in medieval society, same-sex sex was defined as abnormal human behavior and regulated accordingly.

Scholars today all believe that the church turned this Bible story into a social norm less for religious reasons than because rulers found the teaching useful for controlling society. To the medieval church, sex was a naturally driven desire, and therefore at odds with the spirituality God stood for. Encouraging sex did nothing to help people seek God; only by suppressing sex could people be made to submit to God — and to the church that spread the gospel in God's name.

“Because sex was equated with sin and abstinence with virtue, only one expression of sexuality could be tolerated: people could express and practice sex only for the purpose of reproduction,” wrote the independent historian James Neill in The Origin and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies.

The idea later crossed the ocean to America. Most of the early settlers willing to leave Britain for the North American colonies were Puritans. They rejected the Catholic Church's elaborate rituals, but they still inherited its views on family and marriage. Puritans believed people should not follow the impulses of passion but should live under the guidance of virtue.

“Most of the early settlers of New England hoped to build a godly community centered on the family.” Guided by that idea, North America in the 17th and 18th centuries settled into a strict code of sexual conduct. The American historians John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, who study the history of gender, called it a “family-centered, reproductive” system of sexual relations. “The family was the only acceptable outlet for sex, and its main purpose was to produce legitimate children.”

Any sexual act outside reproduction was forbidden. That is why sodomy laws spread so widely in North America. Strictly speaking, any unconventional sexual act could be judged unnatural and swept into the reach of the sodomy laws. Oral sex was included because it could not produce children, and sexual acts involving violence were banned under those laws too. Some legal documents argue that the sodomy laws were not aimed specifically at same-sex sex. Still, as a form of sex that could not produce children, same-sex sex was naturally among their targets.

Under the cover of the sodomy laws, police could arrest and prosecute gay people with ease. “Plainclothes officers worked in pairs. One played the bait, exposing himself at a urinal or dangling his keys in tight trousers. The other trailed at a distance, ready to appear as an eyewitness,” wrote the American author Arno Karlen, describing how the police enforced the law at the time. Before the NYPD dropped the practice in 1966, he noted, more than 100 gay people could be arrested this way in a single week.

It created an atmosphere of intense repression, and it also made gay people doubt, deep down, the things they did. Tiber described the mental state of gay New Yorkers then: “We were a separate community, an underground group that, sadly, was rotting away, oozing with anger and a deep sense of injustice, and an acquired, permanent self-denial.”

In this sense, one precondition for the Stonewall riots was a new self-awareness within the gay community — one that no longer saw same-sex sex as a crime. What made it possible was sexual liberation. In that process, people gradually pulled sex apart from reproduction and granted it a legitimacy that did not depend on producing children — that is, the idea that human beings can enjoy sex without reproduction as the price of admission.

Sexual liberation is usually thought of as a product of the years after World War II, from the 1950s on. But historians now generally believe the consciousness behind it had already appeared in the late 19th century. In fact, the whole arc of sexual liberation from the late 19th century to the 1960s should be read as one coherent and natural process — one that, judged by its results, first stripped sex of morality and then handed it a new moral meaning.

The study of middle-class sexual consciousness in the late 19th century comes from the historian Peter Gay. In Education of the Senses, he draws on the diaries of many middle-class people who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries to argue a single point: it is widely assumed that Victorian sexual restraint still shaped how those people saw sex, and yet their attitudes toward it were in fact already relatively open.

“If it is purely out of passion, to satisfy one's own desire — as I have heard it said — that is exactly why I pity them. Sexual desire is simply an instinct given to us by heaven, and to my mind it is even more natural than the need to drink when thirsty, since the need for water is itself an unnatural, non-innate demand.” This is a passage from the diary of a woman named Mabel Todd. Gay thought “Todd representative of most married middle-class women,” and noted that “the bourgeoisie left an extraordinarily rich record of this kind of passion, felt by couples from adolescence through maturity.”

Set against a longer timeline, D'Emilio and Freedman argue that this marked a shift in how people understood sex — from a moral activity aimed at reproduction to a romantic, intimate act.

In the 1920s, sexual expression became more visible. Hollywood began making films with unmistakable sexual undertones. The novels of Fitzgerald and Hemingway put more weight than ever on the part romantic relationships between men and women played in their stories. And Middletown, the sociological study long treated as a faithful record of American life, asked more than 550 high school students in the small town it studied about a single statement: 90% of high schoolers had been to “petting parties,” where guests were free to hug and kiss. Half of them agreed.

“The ethics of relations between the sexes, and of marriage and the family, departed clearly and swiftly from America's moral standards of an earlier day. An entirely new idea took hold in the country: people came to feel that the virtues of chastity and fidelity were pitched too high, and endorsed the view — championed by Mrs. Bertrand Russell — that men and women should share equal rights and experience sex freely. That view seemed to spread and win public acceptance,” wrote the American historian Frederick Allen in Only Yesterday, his book on the social changes of 1920s America.

Sexual liberation gets taken for a contemporary phenomenon because the Second World War, running from 1938 to 1945, changed how people perceive history. Once that is clear, the course of sexual liberation since the late 19th century turns out to hold a fairly consistent shape throughout.

In some ways, the return of sexual liberation in the 1950s carried the same outward markers as the openness of the 1920s: pornography easier to come by, and sex more frequent. In fact, when the American author William Manchester described the offhand attitude of 1960s teenagers toward sex in The Glory and the Dream, his word choice, his sentences, and his tone looked no different from Only Yesterday, written more than 40 years before.

The two world wars and the Great Depression struck ordinary daily life harder than anything before them. Once daily life recovered, sexual liberation went further, sweeping across American society in the 1950s with a force nothing could match.

Still, resting the case for sex on pleasure alone was thin ground. Criticism of hedonism has never gone away, and it would keep troubling those in pursuit of sexual pleasure. Gay believed Mabel Todd paid a price for what she did: “She lost her peace of mind, and lost the generous support of her contemporaries. Despite having the best intentions in the world, she still hurt her husband and her daughter.”

The same problem troubled Alfred Kinsey, born in 1894. As a teenager, he was trapped between desires he had no outlet for and society's blanket suppression of adolescent sexuality. Decades later, he wrote with a note of anger: “[Society as a whole] allows adults a stable sexual outlet within marriage, partly because it recognizes the sexual needs of adult men. But it does not recognize that adolescent boys are typically more sexually capable and more active than their 35-year-old fathers.”

On this passage, Kinsey's biographer James Jones points out that when Kinsey's own father turned 35, Kinsey was exactly 13 — the average age at which men of his generation entered puberty. Elsewhere in the biography, Jones also notes that Kinsey realized early that he was drawn to men, and that at the time “few gay men were spared the pain, unease, and fear of having their secret found out.”

“From childhood on, Kinsey lived with a secret about his own sexuality, and was profoundly divided his whole life. But he understood how hard it was to change his own sexual needs, and how much easier it would be to hope for sympathy and understanding from society at large. To help himself, he also had to help others. And so he set out on a hard journey to remake the world that had repressed him.”

The weapon he chose was science. “In our Euro-American culture, sexual response has been placed under the constraints of religious considerations, social taboos, and legal standards more than any other physiological activity. It is clear that these customs and laws, by restricting scientists as individuals and restricting research in this field, have left humanity knowing very little about sexual behavior,” Kinsey wrote.

After surveying more than 12,000 people, including face-to-face interviews with more than 5,300 men, Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 — the book that contains the passage above — in an attempt to offer a new way of understanding sex. Five years later came Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The two books established Kinsey as the pioneering figure behind the sexual liberation of the 1950s.

On one hand, Kinsey exposed a long list of misconceptions about sexual behavior. The Kinsey Report found, for instance, that about 37% of adult men had had at least one same-sex sexual experience in their lives, and that 10% showed a clear and exclusive homosexual orientation for at least three years.

More important, this research was the first to separate human sexual behavior from the cultural and moral meaning loaded onto it, and to study it as a physiological act carrying no value judgment. It was Kinsey, Jones argues, who convinced most Americans that human sexual behavior can and should be studied scientifically — and, just as important, that scientific data should guide social policy.

Kinsey's research was hugely successful, especially Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Time magazine reported in 1948 that two months after publication, sales had already reached 200,000 copies — “Not since Gone with the Wind has publishing seen such a triumph.” Afterward many popular songs took Kinsey as their subject and worked him into their lyrics. Popular culture took Kinsey in quickly, and helped push Americans further toward sexual liberation. After Kinsey died in 1956, the research partnership of William Masters and Virginia Johnson picked up his work on sexual behavior without delay.

The models for the American TV series Masters of Sex, Masters and Johnson devoted themselves to studying human sexual behavior from 1957 on. Masters treated Kinsey's work as the foundation of his own, but their methods were far more radical than Kinsey's conservative questionnaires and interviews. They had couples have sex in a laboratory, filmed the act, and measured it with instruments. To make the method look legitimate, they argued that people are never honest about their own sex lives. “Lies, half-truths, self-deception, wishful thinking, willful blindness, and concealment are all part of how people look back on their sex lives.”

The method shocked Americans, and even Manchester's account of it in The Glory and the Dream slips into an exaggerated, sensation-seeking tone. “Of the equipment Masters and Johnson used, the most striking was a plastic, motorized phallus fitted with a miniature camera and cold-light illumination, which could observe and record the changes taking place inside the vagina. The size of this artificial phallus could be adjusted, and the woman using it could control how deep it went and how fast it moved.”

Masters and Johnson believed their research into sexual behavior could improve people's quality of life. They eventually brought a treatment called Dual-Therapy to market: through interviews and observation, Masters and Johnson would give couples guidance and observations about their sex lives, and lead them toward pleasure in bed. “When vaginal penetration occurs, both partners, as biological beings, give themselves to each other so that both may find pleasure,” Johnson wrote in one of her books.

“Given these medical facts, the rich body of research from Masters and Johnson freed Americans from cultural superstition and from Freudian misunderstandings of women.” Thomas Maier, Masters and Johnson's biographer, rated their work that highly.

By the 1960s, young people could face sex with complete ease, and were even willing to enjoy it — thanks in part, of course, to the spread and improvement of condoms. And after this scientific de-moralizing, history handed sex a fresh layer of moral insurance. People began to feel that sexual expression should not merely be permitted but encouraged, because sex is bound up with identity, and identity, in today's world, has become political correctness by default.

People living in the 21st century are no strangers to the expression of identity; in fact, it has quietly worked its way into everyone's everyday language. In the United States, people are used to sorting ethnic groups into white, African American, Latino, and Asian American. In China, labels attached to women reliably set off enormous discussion — the “female driver” label, and the sexual-assault case involving Jingyao Liu and Liu Qiangdong.

Identity always draws complicated emotional responses. Some people believe systemic identity-based inequality persists in society — that women, for instance, always face greater obstacles and trouble than men when looking for work. Others believe identity has become a different kind of unfairness — that Black students admitted to universities, for instance, have lower average entrance scores than white students, and lower still than Asian American students.

Identity became attached to these arguments because, from the moment the concept appeared, it has been used as the basis for judging whether a group faces systemic discrimination. Cressida Heyes, a professor at the University of Alberta, defines identity politics as a series of political movements and theoretical efforts launched by a group pushed to the margins by the mainstream, out of a shared experience of inequality. The key word is “inequality.” In other words, identity itself is not the goal; it becomes the target of political movements only because certain forms of systemic discrimination in society work through the label of identity.

The origins of contemporary identity politics are usually traced to the civil rights movement of the 1950s. In 1955, Rosa Parks, a Black woman, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus, setting off a Black community protest that lasted 381 days. In 1957, after Arkansas refused to carry out a Supreme Court ruling handed down three years earlier that struck down separate schools for Black and white students, the state capital, Little Rock, fell into chaos that September.

“The crowd multiplied, until nearly 1,000 people had gathered around the school, bent on making trouble. The weakness the police showed when a Black reporter was attacked convinced the mob that starting a fight would go unpunished. Finding no fresh target at hand, they turned on white reporters as well … At 11:50 a.m., Mayor Mann could only give in, ordering the Black students to leave the school. The thugs dispersed with sneers on their faces,” Manchester wrote in The Glory and the Dream.

Alongside the movement against racial discrimination led by Black Americans, the women's movement against sex discrimination burned just as hot. “Feminism began to win a large following in the 1960s. The civil rights movement and antiwar demonstrations mobilized millions of people, and the moral standards and egalitarian language of the time endorsed the justice of the feminist cause,” wrote the political scientists Baradat and Phillips in Political Ideologies: Their Origins and Impact.

At bottom, the civil rights movement and the women's movement reminded people of one thing: precisely because identity had become a channel for systemic discrimination in society, changing that discrimination and claiming one's rights could start from identity. In this sense, the stress the civil rights and women's movements placed on identity soon generalized to other dimensions — including but not limited to age, religion, culture, disability, education, nationality, and occupation. Naturally, that came to include sexual orientation and sexual expression as well.

There are reasons people could understand sex so naturally as a form of identity. In the 1910s, Freudian theory became popular in the United States. The idea that sex was an individual need, one that shows itself in many different ways, was accepted by most Americans without resistance. It was on that level that people came to believe sex has to do with the individual, that it is a mode of personal expression — and therefore a form of identity.

Once homosexuality became an identity, activists began to copy the approach of other identity issues, like race and gender, trying to show that gay people as a group faced systemic discrimination and had the right to demand fairer treatment. In 1968, at The North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, Frank Kameny put forward the slogan “Gay is Good” for the first time, modeled on the Black civil rights movement's “Black is Beautiful.”

The slogan became the core of the idea of pride in what would become Pride Month, and it woke a sense of self-identity in gay people. Granted, by the 1960s that awareness had not yet been distilled by scholars into a tightly summarized body of theory. But among the crowd at Stonewall, the notion of identity behind “Gay is Good” had already become a kind of collective unconscious.

On the night of the Stonewall riots, Maria finished putting on her drag. Born Steve Ritter, she believed, deep down, that she was a woman. Maria had been to the Stonewall Inn before, and that night happened to be the day she came of age. On the ride to Stonewall, dressed to the nines, she felt an extraordinary excitement: “I felt like I had finally reached the age where I was truly grown up. I would finally have the ability to live the life I wanted for myself. Because I was grown up, because I had finally gained some freedom, I was truly excited.”

“When society hates you for who you have sex with, sex becomes a revolutionary act, and for many people an expression of rage as well,” Tiber wrote. “It is a raised middle finger, the most fatal response to everyone who looks down on you. It faces difference squarely. It insists, absolutely, on the right to live.”

The patrons of the Stonewall Inn were ready.

Sexual liberation brought with it more forms of sexual expression. Starting in the 1950s, a magazine called ONE became the first magazine in America to win national influence. In the next piece, we look at how it changed the way the American legal system treated gay people, and how it shaped the unconscious of the gay community.

References:

Frederick Lewis Allan: Only Yesterday;

William Manchester: The Glory and the Dream;

David Carter: Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution;

John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman: Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America;

Peter Gay: Education of the Senses;

James H. Jones: Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life;

Arno Karlen: Sexuality and Homosexuality - A New View

Thomas Maier: Masters of Sex;

James Neill: The Origin and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies;

Elliot Tiber: Taking Woodstock;

Cover image / Wikipedia