It was 1:20
a.m. when eight cops stomped into the Stonewall Inn, a dive in
Manhattan's Greenwich Village district that had no liquor license but
served watery drinks to a mix of drag queens, street kids, gay
professionals and closeted and straight mafiosi (who ran the place).
Within two hours, the Village was bleeding and burning as hundreds
rioted.
How did the nightly saturnalia at Stonewall produce protests
that would kick start the modern gay-rights movement? The uprising was
inspirited by a potent cocktail of pent-up rage (raids of gay bars were
brutal and routine), overwrought emotions (hours earlier, thousands had
wept at the funeral of Judy Garland) and drugs. As a 17-year-old
cross-dresser was being led into the paddy wagon and got a shove from a
cop, she fought back. "[She] hit the cop and was so stoned, she didn't
know what she was doing—or didn't care," one of her friends later
told Martin Duberman, author of the history Stonewall.
Later,
the deputy police inspector in charge would explain that day's impact:
"For those of us in [the] public morals [division], things were
completely changed ... Suddenly they were not submissive anymore." Today
gays and lesbians memorialize that night each year with a weekend of
rallies, parades and parties—a spectacle as inspiring and raunchy
as the Stonewall itself.
TIME Cover
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