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The Road to Stonewall

During the 1950s and 1960s, the organized movement for gay rights gained a massive amount of momentum. Where previous collective efforts mainly raised awareness of the existence of LGBTQ+ identities and offered selfhelp, LGBTQ+ people soon began to demand more, specifically the public stamp of legitimacy and validation of the community’s legal rights.

FROM THE STAGE TO THE VOTING BOOTH

In the early 1950s, a young Latino man named José Sarria started performing in drag and soon changed the face of San Francisco politics. A veteran of World War II, Sarria had returned to San Francisco, his hometown, to teach at a local college. But shortly after getting hired, he was arrested in the men’s bathroom of a local hotel on a charge of solicitation. Now with a record as a sex criminal, he was let go from his job and unable to find work as a teacher.

A drag queen friend suggested Sarria apply to work at a local tavern called the Black Cat Café, known for its gay clientele and female impersonation shows. At first, he started out waiting tables before trying out onstage. Sarria was a hit. Soon he was performing three times a night. He became a fixture of the club and helped transform the café into a center for LGBTQ+ socializing and organizing.

In 1961, he ran for the office of city supervisor under the slogan “Gay is good!” He didn’t actually plan to win. The goal was to promote voter solidarity among gay men and lesbians. No one in city government expected a gay Latino who performed in drag and had no political experience to have a chance of winning.

But on the final day to apply to run, city officials made a shocking discovery: they had five seats on the Board of Supervisors to fill but fewer than five candidates. It wouldn’t matter how many votes Sarria got because without any other candidates, this gay Latino who performed in drag and had no political experiences would be, technically, unopposed.

In a panic, city officials scrambled to get people to apply to run. A total of thirty-four candidates ran for Board of Supervisors, 90 percent of whom were last-minute additions. While they did manage to block Sarria from joining the board, he came in ninth with about six thousand votes, beating out twenty-five other candidates. Suddenly, the LGBTQ+ voters were a demographic with rising power. José Sarria may not have won his campaign, but he helped pave the way for LGBTQ+ inclusion in San Francisco politics.

Harvey Milk (1930-1978) talks to the media in San Francisco on October 20, 1978. José Sarria’s 1961 run for office as an openly gay candidate paved the way for Milk to become the first openly gay elected official in 1978.

STANDING UP AND COMING OUT

In the 1940s, the gay population of Seattle began to grow as airplane manufacturing brought in large numbers of men to work assembling fighter planes and bombers. Then, when the men were sent to war, the women came in and filled the jobs they left behind. Both communities were homosocial, with same-sex living arrangements, socializing, and work communities. After the war, many of the people who’d migrated from elsewhere in the country stayed.

At the time of Sarria’s campaign, George Christopher (pictured) was the mayor of San Francisco. He was the last Republican mayor of that city.

By the late 1950s, two of the city’s most prominent gay bars were the Blue Note and the Madison Tavern. As in other cities, payoffs by establishments to police were a common thing, but that suddenly changed. When MacIver Wells, owner of the Madison Tavern, went to make his regular payoff to the police, he was told the deal was off and that no money could be taken while an investigation was ongoing.

Three weeks later, with no warning, police raids started up at both the Madison Tavern and the nearby Blue Note. The latter was owned by James G. Watson. The police told patrons of both bars to show identification and answer questions. The bars were sometimes raided twice in one night. Attendance dropped off, and the bars went from increasing profits to losing money.

Both owners were frustrated. Their businesses were suffering, and because they couldn’t make payoffs to avoid harassment, they had no recourse to protest the constant police raids—except one.

On October 9, 1958, Watson and Wells filed a lawsuit against the city of Seattle, claiming that the police were harassing their patrons without just cause and costing them revenue. As part of the suit, they demanded that the city reimburse them for the profits they had lost.

This was unheard of! Gay bars had been raided for decades and had never fought back in the courts. This had largely been because the majority of gay bars were owned by organized crime. But Wells and Watson owned their establishments outright; they were legitimate businessmen. As the proceedings went on, the city was unprepared to go to trial. It was unclear that the city could prove that the bar’s activities justified the police raids.

The city of Seattle agreed to settle out of court, and on November 19, the charges were dropped. The police would stay out of the Blue Note and the Madison Tavern unless they had a legitimate reason to investigate. The raids were officially over. In return, Wells and Watson dropped their request to be repaid for lost revenue.

THE ROAD TO STONEWALL

Much changed in America for LGBTQ+ people in the 1960s. Police raids of gay bars were slowly becoming less frequent. Homosexuality was becoming discussed not in hushed whispers but in professional dialogues. And most significantly, the number of gay and lesbian organizations was rapidly growing.

Many of the LGBTQ+ groups were additional chapters of existing groups such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, but there were a number of new groups popping up as well. Some of these groups were taking a different approach to the same message and goals, like the Janus Society. Others, like the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, focused on addressing gay issues in specific cultural areas. And it wasn’t just in the United States that the movement was gaining traction. The first Canadian homophile organization, the Association for Social Knowledge, started up in 1964. Mexico faced struggles in a different cultural context and would not begin to form homophile organizations until the late 1960s and early 1970s.

DESPITE SOCIAL PROGRESS...

Negative categorization of gay men and lesbians was still a battlefield. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) had published a book in 1952 called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The book offered a system of classification and categorization for diagnosing mental illnesses and disorders.

In the first edition, homosexuality was labeled as a sociopathic personality disorder, meaning that gay men and lesbians were unfit for social interaction within their existing culture. In the second edition of the DSM, released in 1968, homosexuality had been rebranded as a “non-psychotic mental disorder" What this meant was that gay men, lesbians, and bisexual people who were arrested could be labeled incompetent and lose some of their rights in legal proceedings ranging from criminal sentencing to divorce and custody suits. Years of protests finally led to homosexuality as a mental disorder being fully removed from the DSM in 1987.

New York City was undergoing a lot of progress. The city’s Civil Service Commission made public that it would not discriminate against gay men and lesbians in its hiring. The State Liquor Commission had stated on record that serving gay people drinks didn’t violate the law. The last straw to break to bring about the cessation of police raids on gay bars came when the city courts ruled that it was not illegal for same-sex partners to dance together.

All of this set the scene for the bar raid that would transform the gay rights movement and lead to the modern intersectional LGBTQ+ movement. On the night of June 27, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The Stonewall was owned by organized crime who ran the bar without a liquor license. The pretext of the raid was the bar’s many building code violations, but to the patrons inside it was harassment that they thought had been eradicated. What tipped the raid into a riot was that while patrons were being ejected, transgender patrons were being arrested. Cross-dressing was still criminalized under local law.

While the gay, bisexual, and transgender people outside the bar had begun pelting the police with pennies, it is believed that transgender women of color, by most accounts including African American Marsha P Johnson and Puerto Rican Sylvia Rivera, threw the first bottles. The police became overwhelmed as members of the LGBTQ+ community and their supporters amassed outside, and they eventually had to barricade themselves inside the bar. Conflicts between the police and the LGBTQ+ community lasted for three days. Craig Rodwell, an activist and participant in the riots, was quoted as saying, “People often ask what was special about that night—there was no one thing special about it. It was just everything coming together, one of those moments in history that is: you were there, you know this is it, this is what we’ve been waiting for.”

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On June 24, 2016, President Barack Obama designated the Stonewall Inn a national monument. The bar displays memorabilia commemorating the night of the riots.

A month after the riots, bisexual activist Brenda Howard organized a liberation march in the Stonewall neighborhood, celebrated as Christopher Street Liberation Day. The next year’s march is considered to be the nation’s first pride parade. Since then, LGBTQ+ pride has traditionally been celebrated on the last Sunday in June. The Stonewall uprising was the catalyzing event that began to unite transgender people, bisexuals, lesbians, and gay men together. It transformed their separate struggles and conflicts into the modern LGBTQ+ movement.

THE FORGOTTEN UPRISING

While the Stonewall uprising is considered to be the major turning point in LGBTQ+ history, it was not the first time the community had clashed with police.

A popular place for the transgender community in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district was Compton’s Cafeteria, part of a chain of inexpensive eateries in the city owned by Gene Compton. Transgender women and some gay men and women would use this particular location as a place to gather and socialize because the gay bars at the time did not allow transgender people admission. The owners of the restaurant were often hostile toward them as well and called the police.

In August 1966, the police were called in and began roughly handling transgender patrons. Suddenly, one of the women threw a cup of hot coffee in the face of an officer, and a fight broke out between the police and the LGBTQ+ patrons. Police officers were assaulted, windows were smashed, and a nearby newsstand was burned to the ground.

In the days that followed, protests against both the police and Compton’s Cafeteria were led by the recently formed activist group Vanguard, which supported transgender people and was also concerned with poverty and homelessness among LGBTQ+ people. The riot is considered a turning point for transgender activism. Unfortunately, it is often ignored in gay and lesbian histories, many of which choose to emphasize the Stonewall riots as the first time LGBTQ+ people collectively fought back against oppression.

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