BY JIM FOURATT | History was change that Saturday night in June beginning at 10:30 p.m. in front of 53 Christopher St, when a police officer took a mannish-looking woman out of the Stonewall Inn and placed her in his police vehicle and then went back inside. A small crowd had gathered. She managed to free herself, to cheers, and in that moment the modern lesbian and gay movement was born.
We who were actually there that first night and the three that followed know what really happened and why. I was present all four nights.
Stonewall was not a riot. It was a spontaneous rebellion against oppression ignited on Christopher St. in front of a mafia bar. The Stonewall Inn, to me, is a symbol of oppression and exploitation by organized crime with the complicity of the New York Police Department. Every bar in 1969 in the Village that served homosexuals or lesbians operated under this same relationship.
The Stonewall Rebellion ignited the repressed desire for freedom and visibility that is buried deep within every lesbian and gay person: a desire to integrate our erotic desire with physical expression and the integration of our full humanity and personhood in an expression of love.
I welcome the landmarking of not the Stonewall, but the street in front of 53 Christopher St. What changed history was not what happened inside the bar but what happened outside on the street. There is no need to landmark a building that has been a bar, a bagel shop, again a bar, and who knows what private business in the future?
Much of what happened that night has been distorted to read like a ’60s political watershed moment. It was and it wasn’t. It was gay, it was queer, and that is a significant difference in how people behaved. Police and hospital records do not support calling it riot. It was a spontaneous rebellion that first night, and over the next three nights was quietly directed by a small group of gay men — who unlike most of the other lesbian and gay participants — had been involved in the anti-Vietnam War and draft movement and were experienced at street politics.
Please teach history not as myth but as reality. Landmark the street location where history was made, not a bar that served and exploited us.
