50 years ago, in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, a Saturday, the New York Police Department launched a raid on a bar in Greenwich Village called the Stonewall Inn.
Here’s how the scene was described in a piece for the Village Voice called, “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square” By Lucian Truscott IV published a few days later.
“Cops entered the Stonewall for the second time in a week just before midnight on Friday. It began as a small raid — only two patrolmen, two detectives, and two policewomen were involved. But as the patrons trapped inside were released one by one, a crowd started to gather on the street. It was initially a festive gathering, composed mostly of Stonewall boys who were waiting around for friends still inside or to see what was going to happen. Cheers would go up as favorites would emerge from the door, strike a pose, and swish by the detective with a “Hello there, fella.” The stars were in their element. Wrists were limp, hair was primped, and reactions to the applause were classic. “I gave them the gay power bit, and they loved it, girls.” “Have you seen Maxine? Where is my wife — I told her not to go far.”
Suddenly the paddywagon arrived and the mood of the crowd changed. Three of the more blatant queens — in full drag — were loaded inside, along with the bartender and doorman, to a chorus of catcalls and boos from the crowd. A cry went up to push the paddywagon over, but it drove away before anything could happen. With its exit, the action waned momentarily. The next person to come out was a dyke, and she put up a struggle — from car to door to car again. It was at that moment that the scene became explosive. Limp wrists were forgotten. Beer cans and bottles were heaved at the windows, and a rain of coins descended on the cops. At the height of the action, a bearded figure was plucked from the crowd and dragged inside. It was Dave Van Ronk, who had come from the Lion’s Head to see what was going on. He was later charged with having thrown an object at the police.
Three cops were necessary to get Van Ronk away from the crowd and into the Stonewall. The exit left no cops on the street, and almost by signal the crowd erupted into cobblestone and bottle heaving. The reaction was solid: they were pissed. The trashcan I was standing on was nearly yanked out from under me as a kid tried to grab it for use in the window smashing melee. From nowhere came an uprooted parking meter — used as a battering ram on the Stonewall door. I heard several cries of “Let’s get some gas,” but the blaze of flame which soon appeared in the window of the Stonewall was still a shock. As the wood barrier behind the glass was beaten open, the cops inside turned a firehose on the crowd. Several kids took the opportunity to cavort in the spray, and their momentary glee served to stave off what was rapidly becoming a full-scale attack. By the time the fags were able to regroup forces and come up with another assault, several carloads of police reinforcements had arrived, and in minutes the streets were clear.”
The Stonewall Riots marked a turning point in the history of gay and lesbian rights. Symbolically that night, and the six nights of rioting that followed after, signaled a shift in the minds and hearts of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender persons from tacit agreement with the culture that we were disreputable people to a new claim that we were good people, morally sound, mentally healthy, that our sexual orientations and expressions were part of the normal human experience. From resigned acceptance of our second-class status legally, morally, and socially, to an affirmation that we deserved and would henceforth demand full inclusion as full members of society.
LGBT persons turned that evening from shame, to pride. From shame that we were sick and damaged perverts, dangerous and disgusting, to pride that we knew ourselves to be beautiful, loving, creative, spectacular, fabulous. From a self-understanding that who we were was inherently wrong and pitiful, to a claim that we were persons of inherent worth and dignity. From a lesson taught to us by ministers and mental health experts that our twisted sexuality condemned us to lives of despair on society’s margins, to the true knowledge that it was the prejudice of ministers and mental health experts that condemned us to marginal lives and that it was society’s attitude toward our sexuality that was twisted, not us.
The gay rights movement did not begin that evening in New York. Notice that the title of that article from the Village Voice was, “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square” coming, obviously from somewhere else. Homosexuals under various names and understandings of themselves had been organizing for decades by 1969. Harry Hay had founded the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950. The lesbian organization, Daughters of Bilitis had been founded in 1955 in San Francisco. A gay man named Frank Kameny organized an action in front of the White House in 1965 protesting the ban on homosexuals working in the Federal Government. Nor was Stonewall even the first time that gays had protested against social stigma at a bar, against police abuse.
An important and similar event happened in Hollywood two and a half years prior to Stonewall. At a Silver Lake bar called, The Black Cat Tavern, plainclothes policeman entered the bar on New Year’s Eve as 1966 became 1967. At midnight the police started arresting the men in the bar. The offense? Kissing. Affection between persons of the same sex was deemed public lewdness and was illegal in Los Angeles, in 1967.
But, as in New York, two and a half years later, this time the arrested men didn’t quietly submit. Although there was no riot at the bar that evening, a month later, on February 11, 1967, 200 persons staged a demonstration against police abuse in the street in front of the bar. The demonstration was organized by a group called Personal Rights in Defense and Education, or PRIDE.
But in the way that history works, the riot in New York took on special resonance. As we have told and re-told the story of the Stonewall Rebellion, it has increased its symbolic power. A movement that had been building gradually for decades, and would continue for decades after, had found a convenient date: a point in time, a before and an after, against which we can measure progress.
50 years.
I was born in August of 1962. I’m a little older than Stonewall. I was six, almost seven years old at the end of June, 1969.
I would have been enjoying my summer vacation between first grade and second grade. A happy, tow-headed, boy, living with my family in Santa Monica. Far away from New York and far from the man I’ve become in the world that we have made 50 years later.
What I remember from that summer of 1969 was that on July 20, Neil Armstrong, stepped foot on the moon. I remember watching the coverage of that tip to the moon on the television in our basement. That was amazing.
I remember nightly coverage of the war in Vietnam.
Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April the year before. Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated in June the year before. I have no direct memory of either of those events.
The summer of love had been a year before that. 1967. I was five that summer about to start Kindergarten. What I knew of hippie culture was what I saw on “Laugh-In”, which aired on NBC from 1967 to 1973. I loved it. Bright colors. Go Go Dancing. Silliness. In the fall of 1968 I was introduced to my first grade teacher, Mrs. Levin. For weeks I thought her name was Mrs. Love-In.
My first feelings that I now recognize as homosexual occurred about the same time. I remember being fascinated by a teen-age boy who lived next door and would work on his car in the driveway. In school, Mrs. Levin paired each of her students with a kid from another teacher’s sixth grade class. The sixth grade students would sit with us and we would practice our reading by reading out loud to each other. I was so excited about the attention paid to me by the sixth grade boy assigned to me, and so proud that he was impressed with my reading. I was strongly attracted to a couple of adult male friends of my parents. I never felt that way about any of their female friends. On television it was Robert Conrad on the Wild Wild West that I had a crush on, not any of the actresses.
At first I thought that my attraction was simply my feeling that I wanted to be like these men, when I grew up. Later, I realized that I also wanted to be with them.
The first Pride parades took place in 1970 on the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.
The potential of the riots to create a lasting political statement occurred to a group of gay activists in November of 1969. Mobilizing gay rights organizations already in place, they were able to come together, seize the moment and the energy and create a response. At a meeting in Philadelphia of the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations (“Homophile” means supportive of same-sex relations), several delegates of organizations in New York City proposed nationwide parades to mark the anniversary of the riots. The called it Christopher Street Liberation Day, named after the address of the Stonewall Inn, 53 Christopher Street.
Los Angeles, the home of the Mattachine Society, the PRIDE newspaper (which later became the Advocate) and the birthplace of the Metropolitan Community Church, which had been founded the year before, was well positioned to respond to the national call. Los Angeles created an organization called Christopher Street West to plan their parade. Securing a parade permit required the intervention of the ACLU, the California Superior Court and an eleventh hour appeal to the California Supreme Court. About 2,000 persons paraded on Hollywood Boulevard. From the very beginning, the parade was part political action and part celebration.
In Unitarian Universalism, impressively, our action for LGBT equality began simultaneously with the Gay Liberation movement. In other words, as soon as LGBT people were sufficiently organized to ask for our rights, the Unitarian Universalist Association said, “What can we do to help?”
In 1970, the same year as the first gay liberation parades, The UUA General Assembly passed a resolution urging the Unitarian Universalist Association to work to end discrimination against homosexuals and bisexuals. In 1971, Rev. Richard Nash and Elgin Blair co-founded the UU Gay Caucus and started lobbying for an office of gay affairs.
Gay issues were included in the Unitarian Universalist sex education curriculum, called About Your Sexuality, in 1971.
A UUA Office of Gay Affairs was established in 1974, now called the LGBTQ Ministries.
Two openly gay ministers were called to congregations in 1979: Rev. Mark Belletini, and Rev. Doug Strong. The first openly trans minister was ordained in 1988. The first openly trans minister called to a congregation was Rev. Sean Dennison, called to the South Valley UU Society in Salt Lake City in 2002
In 1984, a GA resolution affirmed our ministers who conducted services of union for same-sex couples. In 1996, a GA resolution supported full civil marriage equality. The first same-sex persons to be legally married in the United States were a lesbian couple, Julie and Hillary Goodridge, married in May of 2004, in Massachusetts. Hillary Goodridge was, and still is, the Program Director of the UU Funding Program at the UUA.
I named myself as gay for the first time, early in 1976. I was thirteen. Stonewall had happened fewer than 6 years earlier, the first Pride parades fewer than 5 years earlier.
At the time, I didn’t know any openly gay person. There were no out gay and lesbian actors on television or in the movies. It was hard to find a TV show or movie that included a gay character or told a gay story line. There was a movie called That Certain Summer staring Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen as gay lovers that came out in 1972. And the sitcom Soap would introduce a gay character named Jodie played by Billy Crystal in 1977. There were no openly gay or lesbian athletes. Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova wouldn’t come out until the early 1980s. Even Elton John didn’t come out as gay until 1988. Harvey Milk made history as the first openly gay men to be elected to public office when he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977.
Now there are dozens of out LGBTQ actors, in movies and on major television shows. The movie “Moonlight” about a gay black boy won the Best Picture Oscar in 2017. Gus Kenworthy and Adam Rippon were the darlings of the winter Olympics a year ago. There are LGBTQ politicians everywhere: 10 currently serving in the US Congress. The Mayor of Long Beach is gay. And, Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay Mayor of South Bend, Indiana is running for President.
What’s amazing to me is that all of this progress, all of this visibility, all of this social and legal acceptance of LGBTQ persons has happened in my lifetime.
I’ve met Rev. Mark Belletini. Rev. Doug Strong was the Interim Minister at the Santa Monica church in the early 1990s, which was the first UU church I ever attended, and Rev. Strong’s example of being an openly gay UU minister was part of what made me think I could do this job, too.
If I were the age I am now, living in the year that I was born, 1962, my life would be unrecognizable. I couldn’t be open about my sexuality. I couldn’t be a minister, even in a Unitarian Universalist church. I wouldn’t be married to my husband, or even open about our relationship, except perhaps to a few close friends. If it were known that Jim was gay he would lose his job as a teacher. I couldn’t put my hand on his knee when we sit together at the opera. We couldn’t kiss even at a gay bar without fear of the cops coming in and arresting us for public lewdness.
Every social justice movement remains incomplete. Each step of justice achieved opens the way for the next injustice to be recognized. And even justice wins that seem long resolved can suddenly be reversed, as we’ve recently seen with abortion rights, or the ability of trans persons to serve in the military.
In many ways the civil rights achievements of black persons in the 1950s and 60s, made possible the women’s rights, and gay and lesbian rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. The work for anti-discrimination protections for Americans with disabilities in the 80s and 90s, resulted also in fuller recognition of the health and humanity of gays and lesbians in the 1990s and 2000s, which then opened forward into a more urgent push for the still neglected protections needed for trans people today.
But though one movement opens the way to the next, it isn’t the case that the work is ever done for the earlier groups. Racism is still very much with us despite the gains of earlier decades. Women’s rights to control their own bodies, or to be compensated equally to men for similar work are still unmet goals. 28 states today don’t include sexual orientation or gender identity in their workplace anti-discrimination laws.
In May, the US House of Representatives passed legislation called The Equality Act, which amends the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act, to confirm that discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is unlawful discrimination based on sex. The Act would extend protections to employment, housing, loan applications, education, public accommodations and other areas. The bill passed the house on a vote of 236 to 173, with 8 Republicans joining the Democrats. Mitch McConnell refuses to introduce the bill in the Senate. President Trump opposes it.
But this isn’t a sermon about how far we still have to go. This is a sermon about how far we have come.
In Pew Research Center polling from 2004, the year that same-sex marriage first became legal in one US state, Americans opposed same-sex marriage by a margin of 60% to 31%.
An older woman in the church that I served in 2004, our congregation in Santa Clarita, who has an adult gay son about my age, told me that she was sure that eventually the US would have marriage equality for same-sex couples nationwide. She was sure it would happen, but not in her lifetime, she told me.
The US Supreme Court affirmed marriage equality nationwide through its ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges in June of 2015. Today, the number of Americans who support same-sex marriage has exactly reversed from 15 years earlier. 61% of Americans now support same-sex marriage, while 31% oppose it.
And that woman from the Santa Clarita church? She is alive and well. I saw her in March when I was a guest preacher at her church.
“Step by step the longest march can be won, can be won.”
This isn’t a sermon about the end of the gay rights movement. This is a sermon about the beginning of the gay rights movement. The first 50 years. What a beginning we have made. What a great, good, gay, beginning.