The Untold Legacy of the Stonewall Riots: How One Night Sparked a Revolution in Gay Rights
The Stonewall Riots
TumblrMarsha P. Johnson, credited with inciting the Stonewall riots.
It started with the drag queens. Unwilling to accompany officers into the back room to have their sex checked, they stayed where there were. Other patrons refused to show their identification cards. When it was decided that everyone would be taken to the police station, Marsha Johnson, a black trans woman, proclaimed her rights by throwing a shot glass into the mirror.
Outside the Stonewall, a crowd was gathering. Many of those who had managed to escape lingered, waiting for news of their friends. Other members of the gay community joined them.
Rumors made their way out to the waiting onlookers: those inside, it was said, were being beaten by cops. The crowd began to perform, taunting police officers with exaggerated salutes as the first of the arrested emerged from the bar in handcuffs.
Stormé DeLarverie, known as the Rosa Parks of the gay community, brought tensions to a boiling point. She fought with police officers and was clubbed for her trouble. As she was thrown into the back of a patrol wagon, she turned to the crowd and shouted, “Why don’t you guys do something?”
Two of the leaders in the Stonewall riots, Marsha P. Johnson and Stormé DeLarverie.
With that, the floodgates broke. New York’s gay community could indeed do something — after all, the crowd vastly outnumbered the police.
They threw pennies, beer bottles, cans, and cobblestones at law enforcement officials. Tires were slashed, and as protestors fell to the ground, more surged forward to take their place. Parking meters were pulled from the pavement and used as battering rams.
In the chaos, detainees began to escape and join the fight. The police retreated to the bar, which patrons immediately set on fire.
The Immediate Aftermath Of The Stonewall Riots
Johannes Jordan/Wikimedia CommonsThe Stonewall Inn in 2008.
By 4:00 that morning, the Stonewall Inn was in ruins and the streets were quiet. Both police and rioters had been hospitalized, and the violence, it seemed, was over.
But things were only just beginning. In true Stonewall fashion, people turned out again the following night, and the night after that, taking to the streets time and time again. What had once been secret was now out, and there was no shoving it back in the closet.
The Stonewall was open to greet them.
Stonewall patron and protester Michael Fader explained the atmosphere, saying:
“We all had a collective feeling like we’d had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn’t anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration… Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back.
We weren’t going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around—it’s like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way, and that’s what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom a long time overdue, and we’re going to fight for it. It took different forms, but the bottom line was, we weren’t going to go away. And we didn’t.”
Stonewall The Movie
VultureA still from the 2015 film Stonewall.
The Stonewall Inn made headlines again in 2015 when its story came to the silver screen — but not in a good way.
The trailer’s release turned initial enthusiasm to anger and dismay. Outrage from the LGBTQ community took the form of 22,000 signatures and vows to boycott the film. Behind the widespread negative feedback was a common theme: casting choice.
Critics said Stonewall depicted cisgender white males as the unsung heroes of the movement. In reality, trans women of color, butch lesbians, drag queens, homeless queer people, sex workers, and gay people were the riots’ heart and soul.
The removal of these often “darker” heroes from a film isn’t a phenomenon specific to Stonewall; Hollywood has a long history of minority erasure in film. A study by USC’s Annenberg School of Communication analyzed over 700 films from 2007 to 2014.
The results make a strong case that, in general, roles for disenfranchised people in the entertainment industry haven’t improved over this period of time.
Gary LeGault/Wikimedia CommonsMarsha P. Johnson, Joseph Ratanski, and Sylvia Rivera in the 1973 NYC Gay Pride Parade photographed by Gary LeGault.
The statistics for erasure of queer characters are particularly bleak: after analyzing seven years of film and 4,610 speaking characters, there were only 19 gay characters represented and zero transgender characters. Nearly 85 percent of the gay characters appearing on the big screen were white.
These statistics present a formidable problem in their own right, but especially so since queer women of color actually fronted the Stonewall riots — not the fictionalized white males that the film’s producers decided to prioritize.
Stonewall the movie is a reminder of how far we still have to go. But its heroes — the real heroes — have faith. Today’s interviews with Stonewall rioters are generally optimistic. Things, they say, are still changing. And nobody knows change better than the people who sparked a revolution.
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