Originally published in the Times Literary Supplement on June 28, 2019
Fifty years ago this weekend, a group of pissed-off queers resisted routine police harassment at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City, leading to thirteen arrests and days of street protests. Ever since, Stonewall has been a rallying point for the LGBTQ movement, a secular shrine with a weekend cover charge, and the occasion for endless debate over who did what, when, and how they should be remembered. The confusion is to be expected – the events of June 28, 1969 took place in the early hours, on a dark street, and were poorly documented – and, as is usual in queer history, the story has survived primarily through a game of telephone, moving sideways from person to person, leaving ample opportunity for loss, distortion and mistake. Given that Stonewall is such an iconic moment in queer history, it also shouldn’t be surprising that a number of important members of the community have been shoehorned into the telling, regardless of whether they were present.
Until recently, readers had only two full-length studies to turn to: Martin Duberman’s Stonewall (1994) was followed, in 2004, by David Carter’s book of the same title. (The former has now been reissued with a ponderous subtitle, “The definitive story of the LGBTQ rights uprising that changed America”.) Both are filled with little-known stories. Duberman, for example, closely follows Yvonne Flowers, a queer black woman not present at Stonewall, but who was a “jazz fanatic, a devotee of nightlife, an occupational therapist, and one of the founders of the Salsa Soul Sisters” (an early group for queer women of colour). This implicitly decentres the events of June 28, 1969, emphasizing instead the hothouse nature of queer Greenwich Village life at the time. Carter, meanwhile, presents the most deeply researched examination of the bar itself, and in particular its mafia connections. Most queer bars were, he points out, owned or operated by the mob, which “set up a scenario for police corruption and the exploitation of the bars’ customers”.
Both books are products of their times, and nowhere is this clearer than in the discussion of transgender people. Duberman, for example, refers to the young activist Sylvia Rivera with male pronouns, later switching to female ones, as though to suggest that one becomes trans only after a certain amount of experience or medical intervention. Most scholars at the time embraced ideas and ways of talking about trans identities that would not fly today.
The years since these titles were published have been momentous, and they present intriguing parallels to the period immediately preceding Stonewall. While the 1960s saw mass movements for black power, women’s liberation and gay pride, today we have Black Lives Matter, a resurgent feminism and, in May 2014, Time magazine declaring a “transgender tipping point”, representing the “next civil rights frontier”. (The frontier is a bloody one. Following the murders of two black trans women in Dallas earlier this month, the same magazine described a “disturbing pattern” in the “epidemic of violence against the transgender community”, which “disproportionately affects trans women of color”.) Unsurprisingly, a new generation of historians is now telling the story of Stonewall differently.
Marc Stein’s The Stonewall Riots: A documentary history and the New York Public Library’s Stonewall Reader take a similar approach, anthologizing a wide range of first-hand accounts, including interviews with Stonewall veterans and articles from obscure underground newspapers such as the Berkeley Barb. Both are divided into before, during and after June 1969, building a kaleidoscopic picture that extends far beyond one night at one bar. The books are resolutely anti-interpretation, resisting the urge to smooth primary sources into a cohesive narrative.
Stein’s book is the heftier, seemingly designed for use in schools or by scholars, and his introduction provides a balanced overview of the uprising. He explains historians’ four main theoretical approaches, weighing up whether the riots are best understood as “an outgrowth of a much longer tradition of bar-based resistance practices”, beginning in the days of Prohibition; as “the culmination of two decades of organized LGBT movement activism”; as “inspired and influenced by other social movements”; or, simply, as a “spontaneous eruption of anger”. (To say a little of each seems fair.) Beyond this, readers are offered little guidance as they peruse the assembled articles, mostly excerpted from queer, American publications, starting in 1965 (when Stein says the movement began to radicalize). While the decision to focus on these sources was partially driven by economics – the cost of republishing articles from Time or Newsweek was prohibitive, Stein admits – the result is “a greater diversity of LGBT views”, which also spares readers “the hostile and hateful language” of the period’s mainstream media.
Voices from the community also form the backbone of The Stonewall Reader, as Jason Baumann, the collection’s editor and co-ordinator of the New York Public Library’s LGBTQ initiative, explains in an introduction: “I have endeavored to shift the narrative to a wider context and to expand what does and doesn’t count as a Stonewall memory”. Baumann’s is an activist, rather than a strictly historical, project, and it shows in the assembled texts, many of which were created decades after the uprising. Among them are extracts from the work of Joan Nestle, John Rechy and Edmund White, who also contributes a foreword to the collection. Women, trans people and people of colour feature far more than in earlier accounts. In the “Before Stonewall” section, for example, comes an extract from Audre Lorde’s autobiographical novel Zami, which, although published in 1982, begins in the 1930s Harlem of the author’s birth. Later, we meet the trans icon Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, who describes survival skills passed on between queer people. “I had learned from some friends in Chicago, if you’re ever in a situation with a cop, do something to piss him off enough to knock you out. ‘Cause if they don’t knock you out, they will continue to beat your ass till they break bones in your body.” These lessons for the powerless helped to bolster the resistance, but in the words of Martin Boyce – another veteran whose story is collected here – it wasn’t until that night in 1969 that the community “put together the powers [they] did have”. Stonewall is a moment of realization for many of the book’s narrators, who discovered both the rage in themselves and the strength in their community.
The variety of voices in the Reader yields an exciting – if messy – impression, with stories contradicting and corroborating each other. In one interview, for instance, Marsha P. Johnson – a trans woman of colour whose decades of activism are now being recognized with a permanent monument in Greenwich Village – explains that she and Rivera didn’t get to Stonewall “until about two o’clock … [when] the place was already on fire”; in the next interview, Rivera talks about being in the bar when the police arrived. What to do with this apparent contradiction is left to the reader to decide. Some might complain that to present instead of interpreting, let alone verifying, sidesteps the work of the historian, but these palimpsestuous narratives capture a truth about the canon-less nature of queer history, which is rarely taught in the kinds of institutions – schools, churches, families – that pass down knowledge in a top-down, codified manner. By embracing unknowability, these books challenge not only our understanding of Stonewall, but of how to do history in the first place.
Photographs of Stonewall and its immediate aftermath are few and far between, meanwhile, and two new books attempt to fill the gaps by diving into the work of individual photographers. As the first staff photographer on the Village Voice, Fred W. McDarrah was the only photojournalist at the uprising. Six of the nineteen pictures he took that night comprise the heart of Pride: Photographs after Stonewall (originally published in 1994). McDarrah’s shot of a multiracial crowd of young people, camping it up outside the scorched bar on the first night of the clashes, is perhaps the image most closely associated with Stonewall, capturing the emotional charge of gay liberation in a way no text could. His lesser-known photographs of early pride parades and New York’s LGBTQ luminaries – among them important but little remembered activists such as the lesbian separatist Jill Johnston (the author of Lesbian Nation, 1973, extracted in the Reader) – are thrilling. In an introduction, Hilton Als (who worked with McDarrah at the Voice) lauds the “love and respect” that animates these images, and the way in which McDarrah “saw the person before he saw anything else”. The collection as a whole feels, nevertheless, like an outsider’s view of the queer community. Even the intimate portraits – of the activist and actor Jim Fouratt resting on some steps, or of W. H. Auden smoking in his apartment – feel self- conscious. At a time when media depictions of LGBTQ people were uniformly negative, it may have been too much – in spite of McDarrah’s good intentions – to expect subjects to let their hair down in front of a straight journalist.
Insider status is the defining force in Love and Resistance: Out of the closet and into the Stonewall era (also edited by Baumann, with an introduction by Roxane Gay), which places in dialogue the photographs of Kay (Tobin) Lahusen and Diana Davies. Lahusen’s pioneering portraits of queer women – facing the camera proudly – transformed the look of the Ladder, one of the earliest US publications for queer women. Davies is best known for documenting post-Stonewall liberation politics, for publications ranging from the New York Times to Come Out!, the journal produced by the Gay Liberation Front in the immediate aftermath of June 1969. The photographers’ roles in the movement allowed them to capture intimate moments, even in public (two men kissing on the sidelines of a march, for example, or women smiling on the porch of their shared home). “We thrive because we resist”, Gay writes in the book’s introduction, but also because “we live joyfully”.
Love and Resistance contains no photographs from Stonewall – not because Stonewall doesn’t matter but because the community was bound to erupt at some point, and the conditions undergirding that inevitability are of more importance to the edition than the eruption itself. It is also the only book here to focus primarily on queer women, whose contributions to gay liberation are often minimized when the focus is on Stonewall (the bar was primarily for white, cisgender men). Instead, we find personal portraits leading up to, surrounding, and following on from the events of that summer – we see, for example, the activist Barbara Gittings, Lahusen’s partner, in a respectable dress, picketing for anti-discrimination ordinances in the 1960s; giggling as she peeks around a shower curtain; and at an American Psychiatric Association panel in 1972, with a man wearing a mask and using the pseudonym “Dr H. Anonymous”, arguing for homosexuality to be removed from the Association’s list of mental disorders. There are, then, fifty years on, still other voices to be heard crackling on the line.