“We didn’t have the manpower and
the manpower for the other side was like a real war. And that’s what it was a
war.” – Seymour Pine, New York City Police Commanding officer the night of the
raid on the Stonewall Inn
“This was the Rosa Parks moment:
gay people stood up and said, ‘No.’ And once that happened the whole house of
cards that was the system of oppression of gay people started to crumble.” --
Lucian Truscott IV, one of two Village Voice Reporters to witness the first
night of Stonewall
“In the civil rights movement we
ran from the police, in the peace movement we ran from the police, that night
the police ran from us, the lowliest of the low and it was fantastic!” – an
unidentified participant interviewed in Stonewall Uprising
1969: it was a hell-of-a year!
Let’s see: Richard Nixon gets possession of the atomic football and ratchets up
the war in Vietnam prompting an escalating series of demonstrations including
the first candlelight vigils; the Woodstock Music and Art Fair succeeded and
failed on such a colossal scale that for three mad days it was New York’s
second largest city; acid rock, most particularly trippy midnight shows by the
Jefferson Airplane, was showcased weekly at Manhattan’s Fillmore East;
what was possibly the worst professional baseball team ever: “the amazing” New
York Mets won the world series; man walked on the moon, an event that is
probably the most emblematic for filmmakers trying to capture the essence of
that year; and, oh yes, thousands of gay men and women from every possible
spectrum on the gender scale rebelled, rioted and taunted New York’s finest for
six days in and around the Stonewall Inn in Sheridan Square. As a
twenty-five-year-old New Yorker I was vitally involved in the first five top
stories of the year and profoundly ignorant of the last: Stonewall.
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A powerful new documentary (opening
Friday at Landmark Theatres), Stonewall Uprising, goes a long way to explaining
why this news I could have used wouldn’t reach me for several years, almost
like light from a distant planet. The first act of Stonewall Uprising illustrates
the downright Orwellian nature and intensity of anti-queer propaganda emanating
from virtually all media organs pre-1969, culminating in an infamous 1966 CBS
News TV special that used hidden cameras to capture gay men having sexual
encounters in public restrooms, hinting that these sad creatures posed a threat
to the moral fiber of the nation almost equal to that of Godless Communism.
“Two out of three Americans
look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort or fear. The CBS News survey
indicates that sentiment is against permitting homosexual relationships between
consenting adults without legal punishment.” In 1966 the legendary Mike Wallace
spoke those words on what was then America’s most trusted broadcast news
service. Three years later Lucian Truscott IV would get into trouble for
language in a Village Voice article that was generally positive in tone towards
the Stonewall demonstrations.
“I famously used the word fag
in the lead sentence, I said, ‘The forces of faggotry,’ and the first gay power
demonstration, to my knowledge, was against my story and The Village Voice started
using the word gay.” That same week gay liberation protestors seriously
considered burning down the Voice’s Greenwich Village offices.
Drawing on David Carter’s
meticulously documented book sorting through the myths that have attached
themselves to queer America’s Boston Tea Party, filmmakers Kate David and
David Heilbroner let the words of the men and women who fought back that night
tell a story that more than compensates for the absence of TV cameras. First
describing the unadulterated pleasure of razing the cops with a conga like
dance formation, a gray haired Stonewall veteran fights back tears. “It
was the only time I was in a gladiatorial sport and I stood up, I was proud, I
was a man.”
Stonewall demonstrator Jerry Hoose
describes why this Mafia run bar became a community center for queerdom’s
dispossessed. “The open gay people who hung out on the streets were basically
the have nothing to lose types, which I was. A lot of them had been thrown out
of their families and that crowd between Howard Johnson’s and Mama’s Chicken
Rib was like the basic crowd of the gay community at that time in the Village.
You got to remember the Stonewall bar was just down the street from there. It
was right in the center of where we all were.”
In his book Stonewall, David
Carter asserts that the uprising at Stonewall was neither accidental nor
co-incidental, but represented a perverse kind of inevitability based on
historical forces that had been building for years and that would find their
logical expression at the historic center of queer life, in the heart of
America’s bohemia, where nine subway lines, a commuter railroad and the
grapevine for describing the changes rocking the nation in the 60’s all
intersected. As Carter notes San Francisco had experienced potentially equally
significant episodes of queer rage at Compton’s Cafeteria and American Hall,
but these were largely ignored by the agenda setting media like the fabled New
York Times which in those days promised “All the News That’s Fit To Print.”
Ultimately Stonewall Uprising –
employing an amazing collage of archival photos and stock film – demonstrates
how we as a community came to be considered fit for print or ready for prime
time.
The filmmakers do unfortunately
make at least one confusing narrative jump cut: conveying the impression that
New York’s historic 1970 gay rights parade somehow magically evolved out of the
embers of Stonewall, without detailing the messy process where almost warring
factions: The Gay Liberation Front and the more moderate Gay Activist Alliance
wrestled over the agenda for this newly born people.