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New York City’s Mattachine Society secured legal gains in 1966 when they organized a “sip-in” at the bar Julius’, securing the right of homosexuals to gather in public.
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In Washington, D.C., LGBTQ veterans chose the Pentagon as their place to picket, making it onto national television with signs reading, “ Homosexual citizens want to serve their country too.” Subsequent demonstrations targeted the White House and the offices of Federal agencies. Subsequent demonstrations were subsumed by the Stonewall commemorations.Īctivists were busy on the East Coast before Stonewall, too. police beat a gay man to death in front of the Dover Hotel, but this 120-person-strong rally and march to the police station did not inspire activists in other cities. Los Angeles activists did organize a one-year vigil on the anniversary of the night the L.A. nightclub The Patch, patrons struck back immediately, marching to city hall to lay flowers and singing civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” But its anniversary passed without remembrance. While the Black Cat demonstration garnered support from heterosexual activists for Chicano and Black civil rights, no further coordination occurred, and the event was not commemorated. That demonstration played a role in the founding of the leading national LGBTQ magazine, The Advocate. The 1967 police raid on the Black Cat bar, for instance, led to a demonstration 400 people strong that garnered evening news coverage.
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Bar raids in late-1960s Los Angeles also prompted resistance. In Los Angeles, the first national gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society, was founded years earlier, in 1951, and spawned chapters in other cities around the country. city with gay rights activists gaining strength. The city’s gay establishment did not participate, however, and distanced themselves from the transgender and street youths and their political organization, Vanguard, behind the “violent” protest.
#THE FIRST GAY PRIDE PARADE WINDOWS#
In 1966, again in San Francisco, LGBTQ people rioted at Compton’s Cafeteria, smashing all the windows of a police car, setting fires, and picketing the restaurant for its collusion with police. This New Year’s Eve raid attracted wide media attention, garnered heterosexual support, and is credited with galvanizing local activists, but it was subsequently forgotten. Crage detail four previous police raids on gay bars in cities across the United States that prompted activist responses-and local gains-but that either faded from local memory, did not inspire commemorations that lasted, or did not motivate activists in other cities.įor example, San Francisco activists mobilized in response to police raids on gay bars in the early 1960s, which came to a head during a raid on a New Year’s Eve ball in 1965 that eventually brought down the police commissioner. The story of how this particular night and this particular bar came to signify global gay rebellion is a story of how collective memory works and how social movements organize to commemorate their gains. Those nationally coordinated activist commemorations were evidence of an LGBTQ movement that had rapidly grown in strength during the 1960s, not a movement sparked by a single riot. It was not the first rebellion, but it was the first to be called “the first,” and that act of naming mattered. What was different about Stonewall was that gay activists around the country were prepared to commemorate it publicly. British activists can join Stonewall UK, for example, while pride parades in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are called “Christopher Street Day,” after the street in New York City on which the Stonewall Inn still sits.īut there were gay activists before that early morning of June 28, 1969, previous rebellions of LGBTQ people against police, earlier calls for “gay power,” and earlier riots. In fact it is conventional to date LGBTQ history into “before Stonewall” and “after Stonewall” periods-not just in the United States, but in Europe as well. The story is well known: A routine police raid of a mafia-owned gay bar in New York City sparked three nights of riots and, with them, the global gay rights movement. Despite what you may hear during this year’s fiftieth anniversary commemorations, Stonewall was not the spark that ignited the gay rights movement.