The first PRIDE was a riot

 It took a lot of lugging, but I finally finished David Carter's Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. (It wasn't a slog, but it was a very involved recounting of 1968-1972. It was also recommended as the better of the two books that have the most recognition on the subject.)

So, there are several bases that need covered here, the book itself, my takeaways, and a few comments on the Goodreads reviews of this book. 

We'll start with the book itself. It covers in some detail the geography and history of Greenwich Village on the Lower East Side, in particular Christopher Street and Christopher Park where the Stonewall stands. We hear of the history of the building prior to a Syndicate boss buying the property and likely spiting his father with the purchase of a designated Gay Bar. We learn how Mafia owned gay bars of the era operated (without a license, usually "members only", most of the drinks being watered down well liquor poured into top shelf bottles, no sanitation, no fire exit, and raided fairly frequently. And paying off the police quite a bit.) 

We learn of Ed "the Skull" who operated at Stonewall, and tended to be the last one some of the young hustlers were seen with. We hear of NYC politics in the late 60's and how morality raids seemed to increase in city election years. We get a really sad quote about how Corruption was the only source of hope for gay people in the city at the time, since gay bars couldn't get a liquor license. We get Mattachine New York doing the demonstration that I still find amusing, wherein they went to bars, announced the were homosexuals and wanted a drink, which was enough to shut down a gay bar at the time. The straight bars didn't care and served them, with one or two exception (one was already losing its license, another closed, rather than deal with the press.) 

The riots happen June 28th, 1969. By the time we start, we have a really broad overview of the known players. (We'll come back to this later. While certain personalities were known at the riots, the mass of people didn't take a head count or get everyone's names.) What we know for certain is that Captain Pine planned the raid because of the Mafia payoffs. What happened was not something he expected, nor should we assume he held animus towards the GLBTQ+ community. While we can rightfully assume some of those under him did, there's a very long argument in the conclusions as to why Carter is likely telling the truth about that. We see people getting removed from the bar, and instead of dispersing, standing around and watching. We hear about the police keeping the transvestites in the back. (The general rule of the era was that you had to have on at least 3 items of clothing for your assigned at birth gender to not run afoul of public decency laws. And given it was 1969, and unisex clothing was all the rage...) And then comes the arrest of the unknown lesbian, who got in and out of the wagon 3 times before shouting her challenge to the lingering crowd. By this point the first wagon had left, with what was assumed to be employees and managers of the bar. The police were unprepared for a riot, the 6th Precinct ignored calls for help, and the crowd had turned, going from camp catcalls to throwing pennies and other change to a few folks digging up loose cobblestones and throwing them. The cops retreated into the bar, at which point trash cans started getting set on fire and thrown at the barred windows. (Rumors abounded that the drag queens were being held captive in the back room.) The first cries of "Gay Pride" were heard. We see the arrival of the riot police, and how the geography of the area and bravery of the street queens pretty much allowed the rioters to outmaneuver the police the first and second nights. Lest we forget them in the name of brevity, we should mention the street kids doing kick lines and chanting to keep the focus of the riot police as long as they could. (We won't reprint the chants here, since I try to keep a "G" rating on public blogs, but they are pretty funny. A Google search should bring them up for the curious.)

The riots broke up around dawn Saturday, and started up again, with more people, Saturday night. (We hear tales of people who weren't in Stonewall during the raid, who got called to the scene during the outbreak. We also hear of curiosity bring people to the area Saturday night, and a second night of riots. By the accounts we have, Sunday through Tuesday were fairly dead, what with the police presence and Stonewall trying to reopen as a juice bar. Wednesday, however....

 Anyway, the upshot is that several gay groups formed in the wake of the rioting, eventually replacing the more sedate and milquetoast predecessors. The first was the Gay Liberation Front, which seems to have splintered off based on internal fighting of how to proceed, and later, the Gay Activist Alliance. Much of the last chapters deal with this, as well as the Snake Pit Riots, wherein a Venezuelan man on an expired visa was taken into custody and wound up impaled on a fence outside the station house. 

Carter's conclusion chapter goes about exploring different parts of the legends that have sprung up around the riots and presenting what his research found in terms of proof positive or negative about them, Captain Pine's veracity and whether or not Judy Garland;s death played a role in the anger being among those. He concludes that Pine was telling the truth, given his story hasn't changed in the intervening years, and that any mentions of Garland's death in connections with the riots seem to point to it not being at all related. Indeed, it could be argued with the materials presented that Garland's death heralded the end of the gay scene that adored her and set the stage for the new scene born from the riots.We'll also mention he does mention different events on the West Coast that also loosened restrictions on gay folks, but since most of those that precede Stonewall didn't have quite the national impact that Stonewall had. (As an aside, I'd love to read books about the different regional movements that were going on. I mean, other than an old collection of Gay Sunshine magazine articles, I have yet to really see much that particularly explores the history that lead to the national movement. I mean, some of it is out there, but usually it's a footnote in relation to something else.)

As for my conclusions from the book,. the one thing that really struck me, and Carter does briefly touch on it towards the end, is that the rank and file of the rioters: the street kids, the non middle class gays who didn't really have a quiet closet to exist in, the flamboyant, the drag queens; they didn't get the benefit of a place at the table in the new movement. While some outreach was evidently made, it didn't get far. Honestly, and you'll forgive me for dragging musical theater into this, I almost felt like the best reflection of the new movement could be found in the students of Les Miserables or perhaps the confrontation between Mark and the Homeless Lady in RENT. People in a better place trying to improve the lives of people they on some level consider beneath them. Which is an ugly thought, but one I fond myself considering quite a bit. 

Now, I mentioned I'd discuss the reviews on Goodreads, which accuse Carter of idolizing cis-white and ignoring less colorful and less binary people involved in the riots. In particular, one reviewer gave it one star because it gives no credit to one Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha, who in modern life considers herself Transgender, was at the time, mostly considered a drag queen, and she did go around in her male persona on occasion. By the accounts of her contemporaries, she was exceedingly nice as a woman, but downright evil as a man. Also, most mentions of her presence at Stonewall were the second night of rioting. Accounts from the time record the first stones thrown as by a red head weaving in and out of the crowd, who no one identified. Second, Carter uses the terminology of the era, which would likely be how the folks identified themselves at the time. Indeed, one of the transsexuals interviewed had her 18th birthday the night of the riots, and had a man who was going to pay for her operation. Fifty years on, she'd likely identify as transgender and not worry as much about the other labels so prevalent at the time. One also needs to consider how much terminology changes over time, even over the course of a decade, to the point of what in 1969 was called Scare Queens would today be Skag Drag. Or the fact that Queen referred less to a particular shade or performer and more a catch all term for any gay man of the era. While there are indeed several folks of color mentioned in the rioting, there were also quite a few white boys participating. (What pictures of the riots exist show a nice mixtures of shades and tones, so it wasn't exactly an all white or all darker shades party.) I ran into this problem reading Blossom of Bone earlier this year, in which trying to apply modern labels to people who didn't identify as such at the time is mostly guesswork. And with the riots being 51 years old and on the other side of a pandemic that really killed a large amount of people from the era, it's a heck of a lot harder to get accurate information from sources that aren't using archaic forms. (I'll point out here that The Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley and Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood will also show how much has drifted over time.) By reading this through a modern lens, after legends have grown up out of it, we also risk letting a good story that vindicates our worldviews make us reject the less legendary truth that lies beneath the story. 

I'll leave it at this. I enjoyed it, thought it was well researched, and most of the detail matched up with what the few survivors of the era I have the privilege of knowing have confirmed from their memories.