Re-Release: The Stonewall Uprising

In honor of Pride Month and revolutions past, present, and future, we're re-releasing our episode on the Stonewall Uprising. Let the sunshine in.

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Transcript

Sarah: Also, the fact that people are whipping pennies at people suggest to me that there are more Philadelphians in this crowd.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show, oh my God, I have nothing. I thought something would come to me, but it is just not there. Oh, I know, I remember it. Okay. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we celebrate pride without corporate sponsorship. 

Mike: Oooh, that's pretty good actually. 

Sarah: No Absolut vodka ads in this show.

Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post.     

Sarah: I’m Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic.

Mike: And if you want to support the show, we're on Patreon at Patreon.com/yourewrongabout.

Sarah: And if you prefer to send us good vibes, we accept those also. 

Mike: Ooh yes. And today we are talking about Stonewall.

Sarah: Which we're both pretty anxious about.

Mike: So anxious. Oh my God, all week. 

Sarah: Tell me about your anxiety little buddy.

Mike:  This, I mean, this is a part of my own history in this weird, inchoate sense. It's a history that people feel a huge sense of ownership over them. And there is a way in which everything in gay history, all the debates in the gay rights movement for 50 years, have been shoved into this one event in June of 1969. And so a lot of the debates over Stonewall are much larger debates about the direction of the gay rights movement, the legacy of the gay rights movement. I might have gone a little bit overboard for this episode. I have read two books, I interviewed four historians. I talked to someone who was there. I have like really, really, really tried to get this one, right. 

Sarah: You put more effort into doing an episode of this show than some people do when they write entire books. You've read the I read two books, books. I know I have, a lot of them are on Sociology. 

Mike: I also know because the history is so contested that there will be many people who will listen to this episode and there is a detail of the night of Stonewall that is really important to them and I'm not going to include it. Just because there is so many details, there is so many sources, the details of the event change so much over time. I am more nervous for this episode that I'm really going to hurt somebody's feelings and like not include something that makes people's hearts full. And I am worried about that.

Sarah: You know what we're all going to be okay. I think this really speaks to the problem with creating works of History and American culture, which is that we really are enamored of the idea of like one person is going to do the complete story, the complete version and individuals can't do that work, which is why we have to work collaboratively. And once again, I've looped this all back to socialism. This is when people onto something that is bigger than all of us. 

Mike: Well, I mean, one of the historians that I interviewed, Eric Gonzaba said something really interesting that basically one of the reasons why Stonewall get so contested is because it's the only event that straight people kind of recognized for decades. Right? It was the only piece of gay history that anybody showed any interest in. And so there's always been this movement to sort of anything you wanted to see in the gay rights movement, you would put it into Stonewall because otherwise nobody would notice it. Nobody would talk about it.

Sarah: Because people in dominant American culture like to finish early when it comes to the histories of any populations, but themselves. So, we are like gay history, Stonewall, civil rights, Rosa Parks, and we're done. 

Mike: It is one of those things that like any marginalized population is going to have trouble telling its own history because it is like you are fighting for recognition from the dominant culture. And then of course, there is going to be infighting within your own coalition of, what do we want the dominant culture to know about us? What do we want to have recognized? 

Sarah: Right. And we know that we only have one shot because they are lazy. So how do we make it count? 

Mike: Yeah. One of the things that the other historian said too, was that Stonewall has become almost this credential, right. That you are like, I was there at Stonewall.

Sarah: Yeah. Well, it's like how, the number of people who almost got on the Titanic was mathematically impossible.

Mike: Because we cast Stonewall as sort of like the big bang before there was nothing. And afterwards there was the gay rights movement. It's almost things aren't important in the less they happened at Stonewall and if they happened at Stonewall, they were important. When some of the historians I talked to were like, dude, some people had food poisoning that weekend and they weren't there. And also there were people that did stuff and things that happened at Stonewall that kind of weren't all that important in the long run or sort of threads that never really got pulled.

And that's fine, too. There is the Stonewall event and then there is the gay rights movement, and they overlap, but they're also distinct things. And we are kind of finally at the point of history where we can say that's okay. Another thing Gonzaba said was that it was a turning point in the gay rights movement, but it was a turning point, right?

Like we cannot talk about it as like these perfect little milestones, every couple of years. It's like there were lots of turning points. Any movement for social rights is going to have a lot of milestones, a lot of things that are overlooked. And we are now finally looking back kind of circling back to these things and finding not only the interesting elements of Stonewall that we haven't looked at before, but also events that aren't in the history books, right?

There is a lot of stuff that happened in early gay rights movement that have never gotten any attention. And so it is now sort of letting Stonewall be Stonewall, but also adding other events to the narrative of Stonewall to take away from this big bang, nothing. And then everything style narrative. God that was a really long preamble, I'm really sorry. 

Sarah: No, do not apologize. 

Mike: This entire episode is going to be about me feeling weird about doing it.

Sarah:  It is a good look on you, it’s fine. I think that this is important though because we're looking at the story of an event, but we're also looking at the story of how communities get to tell their own histories, and what kind of history will be listened to.

Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Sarah: Okay. Where do we begin? 

Mike: So I think the best way to do this is just a walk through the event. And then we can get into all of the Hobbesian, nightmarish, I feel weird about it stuff afterwards. All the layer tiramisu debunking that is going to come after, like immediately after. I mean, one of the revelations of this is that people have been fighting about Stonewall and the legacy of Stonewall since literally the day after it happened.

Sarah: Sounds about right. 

Mike: So, me feeling weird about Stonewall is like, a Stonewall tradition. 

Sarah: Yeah. You are linking hands with a vast community of ancestors and family who also feel weird. 

Mike: So do you want to tell me your description of the night? What do you know about what actually happened on June 27th, 1969?

Sarah: I mean my sense, and I feel like the sort of sidebar and straight history textbooks version that I know is that the police raided the Stonewall Inn, which was in Greenwich Village. And in the same way that I was taught in the seventh grade, that Rosa Parks did not move to the back of the bus that day, because she just didn't feel like it, which is absolutely not true.

I have what I feel is probably an erroneous sense that this was the night that people fought back against the cops and someone threw a brick and a riot in a mass protest ensued. And you said this is my vague knowledge of it is that it was this big bang moment where suddenly resistance appeared.

And the way that we seem to like doing we as mainstream, straight Americans have told a story where gay rights just happened because one day it was, it was too much, and they happened and no one consciously thought about it or had a plan or had been doing anything before. My guess is that what I know is untrue along those lines. 

Mike: That was actually a pretty good overview, Sarah. I mean, there is this thing where it's like nothing, nothing, nothing, Stonewall, Stonewall, Stonewall, and then we fast forward and then there was pride as if like there was this big riot. And then the mayor of New York was all of a sudden, “We should have a Pride Parade.”

Sarah: Like the end of Newsies when all the Newsies and the other kid workers show up and protest and Pulitzer is like, well, there is a lot of kids yelling. I have to just give them what they want. Which gave all of us very inaccurate ideas about how protesting works. 

Mike: Yes. The actual event itself is extremely important, but then also of course, all the tedious stuff that they did afterwards, like printing out leaflets, getting donations, all that stuff is also extremely important.

Sarah: Labor is erased from these histories, I feel like.

Mike: Always. Yeah, yeah, totally. But I think we should start with the actual bar and just sort of what was going on in New York in 1969. So I know you research this for the Kitty Genovese episode. You know about the context of the raids and about the lack of liquor licenses. So, do you want to walk us through that a little bit?

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, my understanding from that is that essentially, if you ran a queer establishment, then you were vulnerable to police shakedowns at any given moment. You know and that essentially people could not meet each other, spend time with each other in public, or, you know, really in private to a great extent without the sense of you know, any second now the cops are going to come.

Mike: Yeah. And also, there's all these different layers of shittiness going on that in New York, the state liquor control board wouldn't give liquor licenses to gay establishments because they just figured gayness is illegal because sodomy is illegal. So, if you are catering to a gay clientele, you shouldn't be allowed to have a liquor license.

Sarah: Your like aiding and abetting a crime you are guilty of conspiracy.

Mike: Exactly. And so the only people that would create bars and sort of fill this market niche were the mafia who were running illegal bars anyway.

Sarah: Good ole mafia. 

Mike: So, one of the things that I think is so interesting is a lot of the anger at Stonewall, one of the reasons why the riot exploded that night, was not just anger at the cops.  It obviously was angry at the cops too, but it was also anger at why do we have to drink in these establishments that hate us? Why do we have to eat at places that show active contempt for us when 10 of us go to a restaurant, they ask us to leave because they do not want to lose their liquor license.

We are not doing anything particularly controversial. We just want to hang out and do what everybody else is doing, but they are turning us into criminals. 

Sarah: Yeah. And then if you get treated as a criminal, then it's very hard not to see yourself the way the world sees you. And also, I learned when I was doing my Kitty Genovese research, that there was a sip in, in bars, in New York City, in the mid-sixties where men from the Madisonian Society would go and say, hello, we're gay, serve us drinks.  And that this was this radical act at the time. It's awful and amazing. 

Mike: It is totally unfathomable to us. I mean, this is a theme that runs throughout the story of that there is so many things that are considered so radical at the time. That to us are just like what? 

Sarah: And it is a Madisonian Society essentially like the first or one of the first gay rights organizations in the United States.

Mike: I believe it's the first, I think it was founded in either, depending on what you read either 1950 or 1951. And there is also the lesbian counterpart is called the Daughters of Bilitis or the Daughters of Bilitis.  I've heard it both ways and that's founded in 1955. So very early on, although the gay rights movement is sort of, I mean, that's almost an oxymoron at this time because it's so small, they do a couple of protests, but it appears the protests are getting maybe 15-55 people around that. 

It's very small protests and the whole debate at the time is about the respectability that the Madisonian Society and the Daughters of Bilitis both insist on everybody in the protests has to dress nicely. So, the men are wearing suits and hats, the women are wearing dresses and heels. Their whole thing is trying to dispel the notion that like we are weirdos or we're sex workers. They are trying to just get, hey, some of us are respectable into the public realm. And that at the time is actually really radical. 

Sarah: That feels to me like a beaten wife, like cooking a really nice dinner for her abusive husband and being like, can you just be nice to me?  Please just stop beating me for a night, look at all this nice stuff I can do for you. And of course, the answer was no, and so people had to do other stuff. 

Mike: It's also, I mean, to me, reading back through all these old documents, what's so interesting is that gayness structurally makes it very difficult to build a movement because it's a trade that crosses racial boundaries, religious boundaries, wealth boundaries.

And so you've got a political movement made up of people that are like literally homeless 15 year old and corporate hedge fund managers. And there is this one little thing that is linking them together. But other than that, they have nothing in common. And so, a coalition like that is just always going to have more infighting, more debates about tactics and strategy than a group that is more homogenous in the things that it is asking for.

Sarah: It is like this logical paradox where society is so cruel to you that you cannot imagine announcing yourself as yourself. It is so hard for me to imagine coming out at this time and you must come out to demand rights. 

Mike: Yes. 

Sarah: But the world has to be less horrible to you before you can come out for your rights. You know, just like you must make yourself vulnerable in a way that your life might depend on avoiding in order to try and make the world less awful.

Mike: Totally and one of the things I didn't know, until I started researching this was that in the Madisonian Society, in their meetings, nobody used their real names.

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Mike: Even within the activists, you didn't want your real life and your gay activism intersecting at all. And it was a huge deal when this activist Craig Rodwell, who we will meet later, used his real name at the meetings of the Madisonian Society. It was like, holy shit, what is this guy doing?

Sarah: Yeah. Like if you are living your life in such secrecy, that even the people that you were organizing with have to be in the dark about who you are.

Mike: It's rough. Another source of gay anger, especially in the sixties, as there starts to be more gay establishments, is that because they're all run by the mafia. Most of them are kind of shitholes. So one of the things that people say about the Stonewall is that because it's kind of in a gray legal zone anyway, there's no reason to have any like sanitation standards or like fire exits. The Stonewall did not have any running water. 

Sarah: What?

Mike: Yeah. It had like a bucket behind the bar that like they would wash the glasses in this like bucket of water. They would just sort of rinse the glass and dry it off and then give it to the next person. 

Sarah: So like you're getting beaten by the police or you're getting food poisoning.

Mike: Yeah. The other thing that the Stonewall, when this slop bucket would get so dirty that they had to replace it. They would just pour it out in the toilets because they did not have a drain. They did not have any system of drainage. And then the toilets would overflow. And so the bathroom would have like an inch of water throughout.

Sarah: That's so gross.

Mike: Yes. 

Sarah: And you know, I've been to the Stonewall Inn and it is hella bougie today. There should really be some sort of middle ground.

Mike: There is also this thing, this weird, ridiculous legal fiction where, because it's illegal to have a gay bar and they don't have a liquor license. The Stonewall had to run on this fiction that it was a members only club that was like a four to five door with like a little slit in it. And when you came up, there was a doorman that would ask you, you know, who are you, kind of basically to make sure you were not an undercover cop.

So he would ask you to describe the inside of the bar. They would always hire gay people as bouncers because oftentimes when the cops came, they would arrest the people working there. So the owners of the bar would never actually be there, and they would hire gay employees to make sure that they would have some like patsies that they could just let them get arrested and then replace them with another bouncer and other bartender the next week.

Sarah: Wow. Yeah, and it's funny because I think my overly simplistic just assumed version of all, this was like the Stonewall Inn was a perfectly nice gay bar and everyone was having a nice time. And then the police showed up and it's like, no, everything was terrible in different ways.

Mike: A lot of the people that worked at the bars would also, when the raids started, they would jump to the other side of the bar and pretend to be patrons, so that the cops would not be able to arrest them for being responsible for the bar. And some of them would like steal money because they just kept money in a cigar box. Cause they did not want to pay for cash register. So at times like the Drag Queens that worked there would just steal the cigar box full of money, be like, oh the cops got it, I'm so sorry and then make like 1500 bucks. 

So there's also a lot of creativity within it. And also from all accounts, don't always super funk. Like it sounds like an actual blast, it was a dive bar, and it was pretty awesome. I mean, one of the other debates that is still going on now is basically like what kind of clientele did the Stonewall serve? Who was there that night? And based on both of the books that I read, you know, there's various academic articles. The dude that I spoke to who was there, it sounds like it was mostly CIS white dudes. But what is really interesting about it is one of the main reasons why, those were the people in the bar is because the bouncer was also doing door checks for people of color, people who were gender nonconforming, younger people for people.

For people they just didn't want him there because they didn't have the right look.  There's debate on how much this took place. One of the historians I talked to says that everyone he talked to that went to the Stonewall was like people of color ran the jukebox. There were some queens who knew the managers of the bar and were able to get in. And then there were also men that got in at the door and then they would go to the bathroom and then they would like to put on a wig, put on makeup, sort of become gender nonconforming once they got into the bar. 

Sarah: So we also have that thing that happens in any marginalized community where there's the self-policing.

Mike: Oh, totally. Yeah, people talked about how the Stonewall was less shitty on that score than other bars around like some of the other bars were just like full on like whites, only types of policies. But Stonewall was more inclusive, but it still was not completely inclusive. And so that was also a disincentive for people of color, poor people to even go to Greenwich Village at all, because they knew that most of the bars down there wouldn't let them in.

So they just did other stuff, and this was another thing that I learned researching This. was the extent to which these divisions within the gay community and the exclusion in the gay community that we still have now was also there from day one. 

Sarah: Yeah. And that we always see in these movements where, you know, there's factions at war within between, we need to curry favor with the dominant culture. Don't make us look bad. And then the people who are able to think this way are forced to think this way, because passing is never going to be an option of just like, no, fuck you. I'm not going to try to blend in or try to behave the way that I'm being asked to behave. That just seems eternal.

Mike: Yeah. This is a quote from Sylvia Rivera who becomes important later. She is what we would now consider a trans woman, but that word transgender was not actually coined, I believe until the early nineties. And so a lot of the trans women at the time would have called themselves queens or transvestites. Those were like the terms that people used to identify themselves. And so, what she says in an interview later, she says, 

“I am the straight persons stereotype of the gay community. They don't want their children to be exposed to someone like me, even my own community, the gay community doesn't want to be bothered with people like me. You get beaten up by your own and that hurts. We are the low trash of life.”

 So, this sucks, this is already this double victimization. This is an excerpt from Martin Duberman, Stonewall, which is a book that is published in 1993. 

“The queens considered Stonewall and Washington Square, the most congenial downtown bars. If they pass muster at the Stonewall door, they could buy or cajole drinks, exchange cosmetics and perfumes, admire or deplore somebody's latest wig, make fun of six-foot transsexual lens size 12 women's shoes, move constantly in and out of the ladies room and, dance in a feverish sweat till closing time at 4:00 AM.” 

Sarah: The fever sweat part sounds nice.

Mike: So there are people in the bar that are various categories of queens, the term queen meant people that we would consider now to be trans women, people that were living as women and people that dressed up as women for the night for fun. And men who acted extremely femininely. There is also something called Scare Queens. One of the historians I interviewed said he talked to a lot of folks that would have identified this way back then they would say, we would put on just enough makeup to freak people out and then go to the museum. It's not clear if those people are necessarily identifying as trans or just like trying to fuck with their parents' generation and like freak people out. So it's difficult reading these old accounts because when they say queens, they could mean any one of those categories or all three.

Sarah: Are there any lesbians at Stonewall like that night, or in general?

Mike: It seems like very few, every once in a while, straight cis women will get in with their gay male friend or there are some sort of dragking lesbians that do get in because they know the owner. It seems like, but most of the sources say that it's 95-98% men. 

Sarah: Isn't it amazing how much our concept of what gender can be and how it can be described changes every 45 minutes.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, all this stuff is fascinating. 

Sarah: We were at a time when the, the best words that we had for gender nonconformity were based not on how you felt, but on what you were wearing.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now we get to June 27th, which is really June 28th because it's after midnight. So it's Saturday morning slash Friday night of 1969. The cop that carries out the raid is named Seymour Pine. He's a former World War II soldier that was actually at the Battle of the Bulge, which is nuts. What's different about the raid the night of Stonewall and one of the reasons why it becomes a riot when raids before hadn't, is typically bar raids were really carried out to get a handout. They were not really done to shut down the bars. What Pine says is they had an, a monthly quota of arrests to fill and gay people were really easy because gay people didn't put up a fight. And so you can get like three or four arrests. 

Sarah: So it's just like easy pickings for like money and quotas. 

Mike: Yes. And typically, they did it also at like 9:00, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00 PM at night early, before people were too drunk before the bar was too crowded, they would go in, they'd give some tickets, they ticket some people they'd let other people go. They would check everybody's ID and just sort of leave before the bar really started making any real money and the bar would just continue to operate that night.

Sarah: So it had achieved this kind of etiquette. It's like, hello, just so you know, you're living under a reign of terror, well, bye. 

Mike: Yeah. They've gone back and looked at the books and it turns out the Stonewall was paying inflation adjusted $10,000 a month to the local precinct for sort of this deal. It's about once a month, you come, you arrest a couple people. We have a red light that flashes in the dance floor to tell people to calm down. 

Sarah: So you're paying protection so that you got shaken down nicely. 

Mike: And so they don't actually shut you down, right? So they come in and then maybe they'll put a padlock on the door for the night, but then the next day you can just open as normal. It's not really it is just the cost of doing business basically.

Sarah:  This is why there needs to be a gay rights godfather 2. I know I've talked about this before, but if anyone out there is listening, you know, free idea.

Mike: Yeah. It also seems that the Stonewall was running a blackmail ring out of the second floor. It's a two-story building and it seems like they would have prostitutes on the second floor. And then when Wall Street guys or rich guys would go up there and use prostitutes, they would steal their wallets, check their IDs. And then if they seemed wealthy, they would then start threatening them with blackmail and then get income streams that way.

Sarah: They're running a gay sex work and extortion ring. 

Mike: Yes. It's literally run by a guy named Fat Tony. But so the raid that happens the night of the Stonewall riots is different. First of all, it's much later, it doesn't happen until 1:20 AM when everybody's already drunk and sort of having a good time and in the middle of it. They also intend to shut down the bar. So, he is in a morals squad, like a separate thing that the precinct is starting to do, where they actually want to get rid of VICE in Greenwich Village. So he is part of a new effort by the cops to get rid of the mafia. He died in 2010, but he gave a lot of interviews after this happened, where he talks about how his views on gay rights have changed.

And he is sorry that he was homophobic at the time. He sorry for the language that he used. And he talks about, look for me as a cop, I was told we had to crack down on the mafia. I considered it a mafia raid, not necessarily homosexual raid and, to be fair, they were running a prostitution and extortion ring off the second floor.

Sarah: It was both. You know, if you see the act of existing as a gay person, as a criminal act, which it was at the time, then like gayness can become a function of organized crime and that worldview, I can see that. 

Mike: Well, that’s the thing it's, I mean, I don't necessarily believe him that the raids were not motivated by homophobia.  I think that a lot of red conning goes on when social change happens.  I never felt that way, but I also think it's all mixed in together, right? It's like an easy target, it is the gays who, you know, aren't going to fight back, it's the mafia who everybody hates anyway. And it's a way to sort of appeal to the mayor and saying like we're cracking down on VICE.

Sarah: Bottom line, I think, is that people in positions of power or complicit with systems of power, just don't think that hard about the communities that they're dehumanizing. You know, if you're reckoning and being like, I was thinking of it as a mafia establishment. It is probably you just weren't even thinking about it at all. You were like told to go to your job and you do not sit around thinking about the humanity of the people that you are raiding and extorting and beating. You just accept that they're somehow less than human and you don't give it that much more thought. That's what makes these behaviors so sustainable. 

Mike: What is so interesting about a lot of the news coverage after the Stonewall riots from, you know, establishment pretty homophobic press at the time is. Sort of a, both sides narrative where it's like, well, the gays were breaking the law, so it makes sense for the cops to go in.

Sarah: Well yeah, they were breaking the law by existing, so sure, fine. 

Mike: That is the thing, it becomes this justification for almost anything. Once you've made it illegal for people to gather, then you can say, oh, well you were gathering, and you should've thought about that before you break the law. It's actually okay for us to do anything basically. And this becomes like the establishment narrative of Stonewall afterwards of like, well, you know, we can't have people breaking laws. 

Sarah: Yeah. Never mind that all of us break the law every single day by texting while driving or smoking weed or jaywalking or whatever. But I think it's his such a part of our national belief system that if a person who mainstreams from American society has it out for anyway and would like to see as less than human anyway.

Then you can find some law that they're breaking or invent a law for them to break, and then he can do whatever you want to them. And he can have this nation of citizens just being like, well, I was raised to believe that lawbreaking means that you deserve whatever you get and the system that is hurting these people is also keeping me safe because of my alleged law-abidingness.  So, this all seems fine, it's a very dangerous, legal faith that we've invented. 

Mike: Yeah. But one thing that's really weird about this raid is that before they raid at 1:20 am they send in four undercover cops to sort of case the joint, two men and two women, which is a very weird strategic choice.  He sends two men and two women, the two men come out like an hour later and they're like, yep, they're serving alcohol. 

Sarah: And it took me an hour to figure that out.

Mike: Exactly. I had to get three hand jobs and then I don't really understand why, but the women don't come out. Pine and the other four male cops are waiting outside and then they decide, well, whatever, it's 1:20 let's just go in. And so, what happens is they do the thing, they knock on the door, police, blah, blah, blah. The bar flashes the red light. They turn on the lights on the dance floor. They turn off the music, everyone just sort of like uncouples from whatever they were doing. And it just like stands around. They are already kind of pissed because they're like, we're in the middle of this, this isn't 9:00 PM. This isn't how it's supposed to be done. 

Sarah: We had a deal about how we consent to be terrorized and this breaks that.

Mike: So then what happens, and I feel like this totally has been edited out of the Stonewall narrative. The way that these raids work is typically, the cops officially want the employees of the bar and the owners of the bar. So usually when they do any bar raid, they come in, they check everybody's ID and they basically let everybody go. They are not trying to arrest every single person who's drinking there, but this process is super discriminatory because people of color are less likely to have IDs and trans women often have IDs that show them as male. And so the cops use this as a pretext to bust them for female impersonation, which is a crime at the time.

Sarah: Oh my God.

Mike: There's this weird informal standard that the cops use that you have to be wearing at least three articles of clothing that match your gender. 

Sarah: Oh my God. And obviously the police should be in charge of making that distinction, which is very like cut and dry and clear. 

Mike: And so, I mean, in the rate of Stonewall, they do this, they come in. It is really crowded there. Something like 200 people inside, they start checking everybody's ID and immediately, and this is something that Pine doesn't apologize for later. He immediately targets the trans women and pulls them aside and basically says, we know your sex workers, get in the bathroom.

Sarah: So they're applying the most force to the most vulnerable population. 

Mike: This is the thing I think, I mean, one of the big debates within the gay rights movement during this time, after this time is sort of, where to put gender identity and where to put issues like race and wealth and age and all these other sorts of interacting discriminations. And the argument that the gay rights movement makes at the time is that we are the gay movement. We should be looking at sexual orientation. We should be looking at gayness as one variable only. And what is really interesting is when you look over these old accounts of bar raids and legal discrimination, there was never a time when it was only about gayness.

Sarah: Yeah. Isn't it interesting how people who don't experience intersectionality are the ones who think that it shouldn't be a factor in how a movement function? 

Mike: Yes. And one of the things that is really interesting is, I mean, the amount of abuse that people of color, trans women, homeless people, sex workers, I mean, it was on a completely different scale that oftentimes. Cops would look around bars and if you looked like an upstanding citizen, we both know what they mean by that. They would kind of let you go, you're fine, go back to your wife, whatever. But I mean, trans women talk later about how they are arrested by the cops on suspicion of sex work with no evidence, just because they exist.

And then they will take them to jail, shave their heads, if they have long hair. They would force them to give oral sex, they were often raped. If they were put in jail with men, they would often be raped in jail and the cops would not stop it. Even, you know, men acting femininely, that's a group that is, that gets it much worse than quote unquote straight acting gay men.

Those people were discriminated against, not because of who they were having sex with. They were discriminated against because people find it very threatening when men act in a way that's coded as women. And so really, I mean, there really was never a time when these extra dimensions were irrelevant. And so, all the cops go through the crowd, they're checking everybody's IDs. Basically, they decide we're going to keep these trans women and then we're going to let everybody else go because most of them have IDs or we don't really care. On the way out, they started like checking people, they start checking people's ID and looking up their information and like looking through their wallets.

And so, people start getting let out of the bar slowly, like one every minute or so. There's like a single file line sort of coming out of the bar. The cops are expecting everyone to just slink home. Like what usually happens in these things is it like break it up, you fairies. And then everyone just puts their hat on looks down and then just like walks to the nearest bus stop. But what happens with this one is partly because it's later at night, partly because people want to wait outside for their friends to come out. Partly because it is on Christopher Street, which is just a bustling street at this time of the night. When people come out, they just wait right outside.

Sarah: Huh. Because presumably you would have people in there who you wanted to see if they got out to and were okay. And if the cops are going to pull any other random maneuvers that they have never tried before, like we can get used to a lot of harassment. If we feel that there are understandable rules and like things that you can and can't do, and everyone knows how it works. But like once it gets unpredictable, that sense of complacency can go away. 

Mike: Yeah. I mean also there's the political aspect and then there's the logistical aspects of politically they're like, well, this is bullshit. But then logistically they are like, I think the bar's going to reopen in 30 minutes and I just want to go on and keep dancing, with both things going on. 

Sarah: I want to protect my friends and, or I need another fucking drink tonight. 

Mike: Yeah. So as this crowd starts forming outside, of course the other people walking up and down Christopher Street also start saying, well, what's going on? There is now cops outside with lights flashing. So there starts to be like a hubbub outside and the crowd outside starts getting bigger.

Sarah: And people in the neighborhood can tell that something weird is going on and are kind of congregating.

Mike: Yeah. And one of my favorite things of this is that there's this crowd waiting outside, and people are still trickling out one by one. And so, as people come out, the crowd starts clapping for them and is like, hey, welcome back. And so eventually, as people start exiting the bar, they start striking poses and voguing and blue steel as they're coming out of the bar.

Sarah: Yeah. Sashay away. 

Mike: Yes. This is also very like drag Queenie that as people come out, they start saying things and one of them says she like walks out and she like puts her hand to her head. She is looking at something on the horizon and she says, have you seen Maxine? Where's my wife? I told her not to go far. It just so campy and wonderful. 

Sarah: Well, I'm just like, I don't know. It is that you have to show that your spirit is not broken, thank you very much.

Mike: Then what happens is a patty wagon arrives. It's like a van where they can put everybody in that they're arresting. So this all sort of adds to the hubbub, right? There's just something going on outside of this bar. And this starts to attract more and more people, but then what is interesting about this stage of the evening is that it's all kind of fun. People are like singing, everybody is super drunk. They are chatting with their friends. Nobody sees this as this huge injustice yet. They're just kind of making the best of it. 

Sarah: Yeah. I guess like finding a way to have the upper hand by laughing about it and by, you know, showing some dignity. You fall down the stairs and then you take a bow. 

Mike: Yeah, yeah. And there's also this, this guy, Craig Rodwell, who's an early gay activist. It appears that it was his idea to have the annual reminder marches on Independence Day, every year in Philadelphia. He just says, they're like a reminder that gay people don't have rights.

Sarah: I love that Philly was one of the first places where that was happening. God bless Philly, beautiful gritty city of contrarians. 

Mike: And he's somebody who is in the Madisonian Society and annoyed that they're not more radical. 

Sarah: That sounds like a guy from Philly. 

Mike: But he's walking home from playing bridge. He sees this crowd growing outside of Stonewall and he is with his partner or friend at the time. And he's like, this might a thing. 

Sarah: So there's like a lot of people who are just like, have a sense that this is something they need to keep an eye on. 

Mike: Yes. He at some point during this sort of jubilant stage yells gay power, but nobody really starts to chant. That's not really the vibe at that time. So what starts happening now is Pine starts boxing up all the liquor in the Stonewall. He starts bringing out all the employees that he can find. And a lot of these trans women like in handcuffs. And so, he starts perp walking, all of these people that are being arrested outside into the patty wagons. And the crowd is like 500 people at this point.  It is a big crowd and so he is looking at this, this doesn't look great.

Sarah: I feel kind of outnumbered. 

Mike: Yeah. This is a big thing, what he says later is, he's never seen them stay before. He's like this isn't how it works; you're supposed to go home and feel ashamed. You're not supposed to still be here.

Sarah:  You're supposed to go cry in a shower.

Mike: Yeah. So he starts walking people out and starts putting them in this patty wagon. And this is where the crowd starts to get pissed off. One of the people that he walks out is a middle aged straight black dude who is the bathroom attendant. And this guy is getting arrested because he works there. 

Sarah: Of course, of course, of course.

Mike: I mean this is when we start to get to a much more tense vibe in the crowd.  As some of the trans women are being marched out of Stonewall, one of them hits the cop with her purse and he's like, be fucking polite to me that doesn't spark anything, but it just sort of plants the seed that this is an option. The tension start rising, the cops start to notice this is getting more tense. And so, this, I sort of hate this part. This is where we get to the question of who threw the first brick at Stonewall.

Sarah: Is this like one of those moments that we are putting too much pressure on today because we have constructed a narrative where this is a little act of fishing that starts the big bang, and it doesn't really boil down to this brick. It doesn't matter as much as we want it to matter who threw the first brick because it matters that everyone who was there did what they did and had been moving toward this for years. And that's bigger than a brick, but we put too much pressure on the brick by wanting it to be about a brick. 

Mike: This is like that was just a huge spoiler Sarah. That's basically what we're getting. 

Sarah: Sorry, I'm sorry that I've learned about history before.

Mike: Because I mean, one of the main candidates is a woman named Sylvia Rivera who is a trans woman who is extremely important in the gay liberation front and all of the activism that happens in the years after Stonewall. In 2001, she says, I didn't throw the first Molotov cocktail at Stonewall, I threw the second Molotov cocktail at Stonewall. And this sort of becomes part of the narrative of this woman who is extremely important. She was, her mother committed suicide when she was four. She went to live with her grandmother, she, got kicked out of the house at 11 because she was dressing in women's clothes.

Sarah: Oh my God.

Mike: She ended up doing it, appears sex work as young as 13. She was 17 at the time of Stonewall. 

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Mike: And she didn't have an ID according to her friends. So there's debates about whether or not she was in Stonewall. It doesn't seem like she was and David Carter who wrote the book called Stonewall in 2004, says that nobody reports seeing her at the Stonewall riots. And Marsha P Johnson, who we will get to in a second, says that she was asleep during the early parts of the riots and that she wasn't there that night. 

Sarah: But it's also, it feels like something where if we create a narrative where you had to be literally there to be one of the mothers or the fathers or the, what have use of gay liberation, then you had to be literally at that spot.  And if you weren't, then you're not part of that and if we create that binary, then even if you weren't there, literally you were there figuratively. If you were one of the four mothers, one of the parents of the movement. 

Mike: Yeah. And I mean, you see the same thing with Marsha P Johnson, who is now getting a much-deserved rediscovery as a really important figure in the early gay rights movement. There was a story that Marsha P. Johnson was inside the bar and as the raid started, she picked up a shot glass and threw it against the mirror and broke the mirror and was like, fuck this. And that sort of started this revolutionary spirit. It's not clear where that story came from. She herself says that she did not get to the riots until at least 2:00 AM.

So, after everybody was already being, let out of the bar, she's also someone who is wildly important to the movement, she was also a sex worker. She was 23 at the time, which I just marvel at how young all these kids were. She took her last name from the Howard Johnson on 42nd street that she used to hang out at end the P in her name, she would say pay it no mind when people would ask her what gender she was. She was there for the gay liberation front. She was there for every single gay riot after Stonewall. She was someone that really pushed the movement to accept gender diversity and like gender identity as a huge part of the LGBTQ community. And so she is like a towering figure in the gay rights movement in the 1970s. But there isn't really any evidence that she through the first brick. 

Sarah: You know, it's like when we say through the first brick or was it Stonewall then that’s what the language of history allows us to conceptualize as being at the start of a movement. So, it makes sense that we, that feels like the most legitimizing way to acknowledge her. 

Mike: Oh, totally. And yeah, and I think a lot of comes from a very real sense of frustration of how her and Sylvia end thousands of nameless, trans women have been completely erased from the story.  That one of the historical records points out that they built a monument to Stonewall in, I forget when it was, I think in the 1990s and it's two white dudes and two thin, attractive lesbians. 

Sarah: Right. And they are George Segal statues, so they're really white, they're like, all white. 

Mike: You know the guy, his name is Mark Siegel, he is now the editor of the Philly Gay News who was there that night, and he was a friend of Marsha. Says that the people who were rioting that night, there's the rioters and there's the onlookers. Right? So, if you say there's around a thousand people, total only a 100- 200 people were actually like doing stuff like throwing things, shouting breaking windows.

A lot of the rest were just sort of there and were onlookers or were shouting but weren't really participating. And what he said was, look who are the people who are doing the actual uprising? It's people with nothing to lose. It's people who are 17, it's people who are trans women who are living on the streets and have nowhere to go and are getting the worst forms of police abuse, the most anger at the police. 

Sarah: And I who have no rights for society to revoke as it is.

Mike: Exactly. And so I think a lot of this putting Sylvia and Marsha back into the Stonewall narrative is completely understandable because they are much more representative of Stonewall, then the hot white 2% body fat people that have typically been celebrated for this kind of event. 

Sarah: Right.

Mike: The place that I sort of came down in the, you know, the insight that I stole from the historians I interviewed was that it can be true that somebody wasn't there at Stonewall or wasn't integral to the events of Stonewall and they were integral to the gay rights movement. Those two things can both be true. As the historians that I interviewed said, the goal now is sort of not necessarily putting trans women into these historical events that are already celebrated. It's finding events that were led by trans women, other marginalized groups that aren't even in the history books at all. 

Like there's this actually extremely charming uprising that happens at this place called Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco in 1966, where it's another cafe that hates their gay clientele. They constantly call the cops on their gay clientele. Cops come in one night, it's all trans women of color, it is all sex workers.

That's like the Denny's where they go after they're done working like dead of night, cops come in, start harassing them. One of them stands up, throws coffee in the cop's face. And then they talk about it like this explosion that everyone else in there in unison is just like, yep, picks up like sugar shakers and like throws them out the window and just starts like an actual street brawl with the cops. They set a shack on fire across the street.

Sarah: It's a food fight. 

Mike: This is something that is sort of in the gaylore of San Francisco but isn't as well known nationally. And so, the move now is to be like, there is a lot of these kinds of events that we can shine a much brighter spotlight on. 

Sarah: Right. It's like, yeah, this idea that we need to legitimize the work and the struggle of trans women and women of color and trans women of color and sex workers historically; by making places for them and the narratives that we already acknowledged by you know, being like, oh, look, there's a spot for you over here. It is like, yes, that's important but we can also go there, we can go to them.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. I mean, one thing that I can't get over and I still find really haunting is that after all this, despite how important they were, Sylvia and Marsha started a trans rights NGO that basically saved street kids like trans street kids and give them a place to live.  They were extremely important in this more revolutionary turn in the early 1970s. They both died destitute. You see, as a movement forms, there start to be NGOs. There starts to be this institutionalization where you start to get funding, you start to get more of an infrastructure and that infrastructure was non-existent for the gay rights movement.

For years, I don't want to act like everyone got super rich off of this. Look at somebody like Craig Rodwell, who, you know, white, young, conventionally attractive. He starts at bookstore; he ends up basically living a middle-class life. And then Sylvia, she works in food service, her whole life. She ends up, in 1994, she is homeless for another 18 months. And Marsha is bouncing in and out of homelessness, she's got severe mental illness.  That is part of their legacy as well, there was never any infrastructure to reward them for what they did. 

Sarah: Yes. So I think there's also something that happens where if you live in a marginalized group, then you get used to a sense of scarcity. That scarcity mentality means that you replicate the ways that you have been abused by those in power and turn that on people who are less powerful than you. And it's one of the greatest and most insidious tools of any mainstream society that it is abusing and keeping people down who don't fit with its demands.

Mike: Right. And also I've read some really interesting work by Susan Striker who’s a trans historian who wrote this really good book called Transgender History. And she talks about also that we want to be true to the people who were there, and we don't want to take away from people who really were there and really did cool stuff. So the closest thing to a first brick that we have is a woman who everyone refers to as the butch lesbian.

Sarah:  So, she's like the man with no name, she showed up long enough to throw a brick and then disappeared into the desert. 

Mike: Yes, I mean, this woman has we'll get into it, but like this woman has never been identified.

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: Nearly everybody who was front row in the crowd describes this scene. So this is something that people are pretty agreed on. That there is a woman who, this is how she's described in David Carter's book, tall and stout with a short-managed haircut. She was wearing pants and what one witness described as fancy go-to bar drag for a Butch Dyke.

Sarah: Ooh. I like to think that there is a mysterious butch lesbian who's traveling through time setting history, right. And like a butch lesbian quantum leap.

Mike: Apparently, they're bringing her out and like, you know, that scene and Norma Rae. Where they're trying to get Sally Field into the car and she's struggling, like a gymnast, just like completely twisting and kicking. It sounds like that's what's happening. And this, it appears is the thing that really kicks up the crowd that they are seeing, how hard she's struggling. Like it's super bullshit that she's being put in the van and it sort of opens up the option, oh wait, we can fight back too. And so, to the extent that there's a first brick, it appears to be this butch lesbian, who interestingly has never been identified.

There's some talk that it's a woman called Storme’ DeLarverie, which I'm probably mispronouncing, who is relatively famous in the gay rights movement at the time, such as it exists, that she's an activist. But it's not clear that it was her because, she is so well known that it's weird that people would just call her the butch lesbian rather than Storme’ because everyone sort of knew her. And she says for decades that it wasn't her, and then in 2008, she says that it was her. 

Sarah: It feels like history is communicating something to us with the fact that the insider of this night turning has not been identified or is fundamentally unidentifiable. That tells us that, you know, trying to name the one person is somewhat missing the point.

Mike: Oh, totally and also, I mean, I was at the WTO Riots in 1999 and if you're in a big crowd, there's lots of things happening at once and you can only look at one of them at a time. And if we're talking about a crowd of a thousand people, I don't think more than, I don't know, 60 would have been able to see the lesbian being put in the van.  And there were probably other things happening in the crowd too. 

Sarah: There narrow streets, right? So there's not a lot of places where you would have a good viewpoint of what's going on. And a lot of people would be like physically far away from the bar itself, if that many, if it's a thousand people by then.

Mike: Yeah. And there's also the line between a crowd and a riot is very poorest. Right? It's not like this binary switch that flipped. 

Sarah: Yes. That's why I never go to black Friday sales. 

Mike: So there' also reports that, it is mostly like street kids, really angry, like 17-year-olds who just hate the cops start throwing pennies and throwing coins at the cops while this is happening, because it's like, take your payout.  You're here for the handout, aren't you? 

Sarah: Hmm. Little punks before there were words for punks. 

Mike: One thing Craig Rodwell says later is a number of incidents were happening simultaneously. There was no one thing that happened, or one person there was just a flash of mass anger. This is the most convincing thing that I hear that the lesbian thing did happen. The kids throwing coins did happen. Maybe Marsha or Sylvia did throw a bottle. There were a million things happening. And so, however it gets triggered, this becomes basically a riot. 

Sarah: No matter who made the spark, the tinder was ready. It was inside everyone to do that. 

Mike: Yes. And so, this basically just turns into like full blown, people throwing things, people are picking up rocks from the ground. It doesn't appear that they were bricks. People say that the first brick at Stonewall, but like there is some reports that there never were bricks. I mean, people say there's a construction site, a couple blocks away. But then the guy that I interviewed who was there, he's like, who runs a couple of blocks away to get bricks and runs back during a riot. You throw whatever's there. 

Sarah: You throw what you have. 

Mike: Yeah. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, who knows. But anyway, people just start throwing stuff. My favorite part of this is as this chaos breaks out the patty wagon, people are sitting in the patty wagon and the doors are open. So as this reign of coins and things start coming down on the cops, two of the dudes in the patty wagon who are handcuffed together.

Sarah: Wow.

Mike: Are like, fuck this we're out. And so they just leave the patty wagon and runaway and the cops can't really catch them, but they're handcuffed together. 

Sarah: Oh my God.

Mike: So they walk around Greenwich Village until they find somebody who's like in the SNM Community who has a handcuff key.

Sarah: I want a movie about that because two handcuffs together guys walking around for like looking for a leather shop workers, where are the kinksters? They will have the know how to set us free. That's beautiful. 

Mike: And then basically what is weird is that the cops at this point completely give up on like trying to do any cop stuff.  The patty wagon drives away with the remaining people in it. And then you've basically just got, the cops are still in the bar. And so the cops barricade themselves into the Stonewall. 

Sarah: And they are like this is the only place where we can feel safe. Oh, the irony. 

Mike: It's also funny that then the assault becomes on the gay bar. Right, because people are mad at the cops, but the cops happened to be in the gay bar. So, then there's people who, I still don't know how they did this. They picked up a parking meter. I think they like rocked it back and forth until it came loose. And then four of them lifted it up and they start using it as a battering ram.

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: On the door. This becomes like a helms deep shit of trying to break in and get to these cops. So, what I mean, I want to read you because I think this is like really important of the emotional state of people. 

Sarah: I love it when you read to me. 

Mike: This is very moving to me and the feelings in the crowd are something new. And one of the guys that was there and was throwing shit in the crowd says, 

“Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back, it was the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had been taken from us, all kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was just total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined. We felt that we had freedom at last or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We didn't have the freedom totally, but we weren't going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around. It's like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way. That's what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom, a long time overdue, and we were going to fight for it. It took different forms, but the bottom line was we weren't going to go away, and we didn't.”

That's sort of what Stonewall was, right. And that's still what it was about is this feeling of, I'm not just going to put my hat on and walk into the night, I'm going to stay and I'm going to throw fucking pennies at you.  

Sarah: Well, I guess straight culture America at large, New York City, the NYPD, et cetera, you know, everybody had been feeding and feeding and feeding this fire that they didn't even know that they had created because they weren't thinking about the humanity of the people that they were abusing and terrorizing. They didn't know because they never bothered thinking about it. As far as I can tell that they were creating this outrage and this hurt and this fury, and this need for recognition. 

Mike: And that is an extremely important moment. I mean, you know, if you remember in the obesity epidemic episode, we talked about, you want to interview this researcher who said the process of coming out, isn't about telling other people that you're gay it's about telling them you're not going to apologize for it. It seems like that really wasn't an option before.

And I don't want to slip back into the big bang thing with Stonewall that like no one had ever thought of that before. The term gay power had showed up in fliers in LA in 1966, these ideas had been bouncing around, but for the people at Stonewall, and I think for people reading about it afterwards, it sort of opened up this idea that like fighting back is an option.

Sarah: Yeah. And it speaks to the power of protest, you know, and to the power of being uncivil. Right. Because if you see someone who is agitating on their own behalf, for the same reasons that you have been hiding, then you can suddenly realize that you are worth fighting for too, you are worth fighting for yourself and for your community and we model behavior for each other, we're social animals. We learn these things by observing each other. 

Mike: Yeah. And there's power in a collective, right? Like together, we have much more power than separately and doing this meek softly, please respect me good sir type of thing. You're not going to build power like that. That doesn't feel like power to people it's too cerebral. Whereas like let's all get together and throw rocks at cops barricaded inside of a bar, feels like power.

Sarah: Yeah. If you treat us this way, there will be consequences. 

Mike: Yeah. And what Mark says later on is that you completely rejiggered the relationship between the cops and the gay community, that the cops, it was now an option that gay people were going to fight back. And so there were actually a bunch of riots after Stonewall to where they would demonstrate outside of the police precinct. They would throw shit at other bars, there was a huge riot one year after Stonewall. 

Sarah: I had no idea.

Mike: It is this kind of like, we can do this. We can actually take power back that framing that reframing of the gay rights movement was extremely important. And of course, it's not only stolen, you have to give all these caveats that it's like Stonewall did not inevitably lead to.

Sarah: Oh no, everything is fine now, right? 

Mike: You know, what is amazing is this riot keeps going, the cops are locked inside. The crowd starts trying to light the Stonewall on fire. So, they start, it's not clear if they were Molotov cocktails, because I think Molotov cocktails are a specific thing and you need like gasoline. 

Sarah: You need stuff. Yeah.

Mike:  But people have lighter fluid, what you put in a lighter, like a Zippo. So, they start squirting that to the stone wall and lighting it, or like maybe they're squirting it into bottles. The cops are losing their fucking minds. The cops are terrified inside. To his great credit Seymour Pine that cop that had organized the raid goes down the line of every single cop and he tells them we are not going to shoot the protesters. This is not a crime that merits any show of force.

Sarah: Wow. I feel like Seymour Pine is like exactly the kind of person that you encounter, you know, in history where you let in all the complexity where he made bad choices and then he made some good ones, and both were true. And there was stuff that he was able to reckon with morally and stuff that he didn’t, and he is so recognizable as this is how humans behave. This is how we are capable of moments of grace. If we are complicit and abusive systems, this is our complexity embodied. 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. So there's actually weirdly, there's a village voice reporter inside of the bar at this point. Cause he likes snuck into the bar once he saw the raid was happening. I was like I don't want to be in here anymore.

Sarah: He's like Bronson Pinchot in True Romance. 

Mike: And of course, he doesn't have a gun, so when Pine comes over to him and is like, how you holding up, buddy? He's like, can I have your gun? And Pine is like absolutely not. So basically, the cops don't really know what to do. They try to train a firehose on the protesters, but it is not a fire hose, it's a normal hose. You just spray like a garden hose out the door. 

Sarah:  So they just water them, moisten them. 

Mike: And the crowd thinks this is funny and starts like getting their shirts wet and like dancing and partying. No one takes it remotely seriously. 

Sarah: Like, oh fuck, we've made them sexier.

Mike: And then somehow one of the cops, I think it's one of the women because she's a little bit smaller. She sneaks out the window or ventilation duct or something. Somehow, she gets out the back, she then calls the tactical squad, basically the SWAT team to come. And this is how the whole thing ends. The cops are so barricaded inside, they call the SWAT team. The SWAT team comes, gets the cops out. Another patty wagon comes, the cops dive into this van, the van pulls away. And then it is basically the protestors versus the SWAT team. And it's like riot cops, everything you've seen from like Billy Elliot, right?

With the shields and the helmets and the nightsticks. But then basically this whole thing becomes like a skirmish between the SWAT team and a thousand protesters. So because there's narrow streets in Greenwich Village, the cops will sort of advance on the protestors and then the protesters will just run around the block.

They show up behind the SWAT team and this goes on for hours, the SWAT team advances on people. And then they form a chorus line, and they start doing like rocket kicks and like taunting them. I mean, this to me, it's seen as this like explosion of camp. Within this violent scene, but it's also just like, that's a form of power.

Sarah: Yes. 

Mike: Right? You're taunting these people; you're feeling like you can get away with this now they're calling them the girls in blue and lily law. And they're like, come on, sweetie. This is people realizing the power numbers that they have. And so that is really cool.

Sarah: How has this never been made into a musical or has it? 

Mike: Just one abysmal movie? So the cops are feeling humiliated. This actually gets pretty ugly; the cops just start like beating people with nightsticks. 

Sarah: Yeah. You know, if you're a cop and someone calls you a girl in blue, one time in your whole life, you have no choice, but to wail on them, right. It's like this feels like such a theme, when the police intervene in these situations with communities that are used to being belittled and harassed and beaten and profiled every single fucking day. They reveal their unbelievably low tolerance for any degree of disrespect. 

Mike: Totally. This is what one of the, one of the writers says to David Carter for his book in 2004. “The cops are totally humiliated. This never, ever happened. They were angrier than they had ever been because everybody else had rioted. Everybody in America who had a beef had already rioted, but the fairies were not supposed to riot and nobody else had ever won. The cops realized that just by having to call in reinforcements, by barricaded the door, no other group had ever forced the cops to retreat before, so their anger was enormous.”

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: And this is really interesting in that, another misconception about Stonewall is that Stonewall by coincidence did happen on the day of the funeral of Judy Garland. 

Sarah: Oh yeah. 

Mike: This was part of the explanation that like sort of gay togetherness sisterhood was in the air that day, because like we are celebrating Judy Garland. And so, when I talked to Mark about this, who was at the Stonewall dancing that night, he's like, punk, we didn't listen to Judy Garland, that's our parents' music. We were listening to Let the Sunshine in, like that was his jam. 

Sarah: Which isn't much better riot incitement song. If you are sitting around listening to Judy Garland, you're just going to be like softly, weeping into your brandy all night.

Mike: Yes and also this Judy Garland myth starts in a really homophobic column. 

Sarah: Oh really? I can't imagine that that's possible. 

Mike: Exactly. This homophobic columnist for the New York Daily News, who is like you know, these homos, they are going to the funeral of like their hero and then they want a riot. And no one gets in a rioting mood at a funeral.

Sarah: And also, it's like, normally they would have been fine with this, but the death of Judy Garland pushed them over. Right, there were no other problems. It's like, if Judy were still around, everyone would have been perfectly happy with the way they were being treated. 

Mike: Yeah. And also, other riots, one thing I love from that quote about the cops is that, you know, every other group in America had already rioted. And that's really important to why Stonewall happened is that they're watching the civil rights movement. They're watching the Black Panthers, they're watching, you know, women are getting much more radicalized at that point. Rioting is like a thing that happens a lot in the late 1960s, right, the DNC. 

Sarah: And protesting, which I think it is important to recognize that there's a very poorest line between protesting and what we call rioting. 

Mike: Absolutely. 

Sarah: Riot is a great word to imply that the behavior, the so-called rioters are exhibiting is disproportionate. 

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. One of the historians that I interviewed, Hugh Ryan talks about how overlooking the Stonewall is a women’s’ house of detention.

Sarah: Oh, right. 

Mike: It's a lot of people of color, it's a lot of political prisoners, it's a lot of like Black Panthers. 

Sarah: It is where Andrea Dworkin got the pelvic exams that medicalized her. 

Mike: Exactly, totally.  And we're Angela Davis was there too later on. And so the women in the prison are watching Stonewall happened and they start lighting their stuff on fire and pushing it out the windows and they start chanting gay power.

Sarah: Oh God bless the women prisoners.

Mike: So, Tupac Shakur's mother, Afeni Shakur, who was really important in the Black Panther Movement. Over the course of this summer, the following year, she sees more of these gay power demonstrations, and she starts going up to her fellow prisoners and saying, tell me about being a lesbian, tell me about your sexuality. And once she is out, she starts then fighting within the Black Panther Movement for them to do much more work on misogyny and homophobia. 

Sarah: That's so wonderful. She's looking out through the bars, right? And she's like, this is a teachable moment. I need to think about my revolutionary methodology.

Mike: And this is also happening both ways. So that what this Judy Garland myth totally ignores is like gay people are noticing Vietnam War protesters, they are pulling from these other movements. It's not a singer that their parents were into who died.

Sarah: I mean, you know, Judy Garland was great, but we can't give her credit for everything. 

Mike: So that's basically it, you know, that skirmish between the SWAT team and the rioters goes on it eventually peters out, it's 4:00 AM by that point, everyone kind of goes home. But then Mark, this guy that I interviewed who was there, says one of the people, I think it was one of the owners of Stonewall, gave him a piece of chalk and was like go around Greenwich Village and write on every single flat surface tomorrow night Stonewall protest. So, the night after Stonewall, there's 2000 people. Because again, this is like woken up something in people, and then there's five nights of riots after Stonewall. 

Sarah: Wow.

Mike: So this is a thing now.

Sarah: (Singing) Let it go, let it go, don't hold it back anymore. 

No I lost it, but right. It was always, it was there. It's just that now that it's out, it can't go back in.

Mike: And also, Craig Rodwell, this guy that started the annual reminder parades during Stonewall. He leaves to go get his camera because he knows this is going to be historic. Although none of the photos come out, which is like a national tragedy. 

Sarah: That is terrible. Yeah.

Mike: And he calls the New York Times, The New York Daily News and the Village Voice. And he's like, something is happening. You need to get down here. And so, there's all this amplification that happens, there's all this political organizing that happens.

Sarah: They're also like we need to force the issue that this is in fact news. 

Mike: Yes, exactly. That was very smart, it gets written up in all the papers.

Sarah: I mean, this is something that the civil rights movement was also very strategic about, and that is still something that I think mainstream society hasn't accepted. And that we, you know, today will like use to discredit a movement or a protest or whatever that, oh, they wanted to be in the paper. They wanted media attention and it's like, yes, that's how you force change. That is how you bring light to injustice.

Mike: I mean, one of things I think is so interesting, there's this really great article about why did Stonewall blow up? Why was Stonewall a thing? And they talk about, it was bigger. It was in New York, which had more of an established media, but also before Stonewall, there wasn't any infrastructure to make a story like this national. There weren't gay publications.

There wasn't enough gay rights stuff happening in different cities for them to communicate with each other. But between 1965 and 1969, that infrastructure was being built. So, the advocate, which I believe is the first gay publication in America had 28,000 subscribers by 1969. And that's not a lot, but that's enough to get the word out nationally that like, look at this uprising.

Sarah: Yeah. Look at what we can do. 

Mike: Yeah. And so, Craig Rodwell there, you know, there's a lot of other people that basically dedicate themselves to let's make Stonewall a thing. And this is where we get gay pride that they decide on the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots. They're going to have the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade.

Sarah: Right. There's just so much invisible labor within social media. And I think it's also so important to remember that like humans aren't naturally good at remembering what got us where we are. People have to put a lot of time and work into, into organizing act of remembrance. 

Mike: There is a thing where Sylvia Rivera climbs the walls of city hall, wearing a dress and high heel to protest a closed-door meeting about a Civil Rights Bill that they're thinking of passing and heals.

Sarah: In heels, my God.

Mike: There's also their stories of people using their work printers to make like 500 copies of gay leaflets. There's a lot of this sort of quiet stuff happening and this you have Stonewall was this galvanizing force that all of a sudden there's trans rights groups that form out of this there's youth groups, because youth had been excluded from the Madisonian Society before they didn't want people under 21. But if you know sex workers, it's all these groups that have been excluded from the sort of establishment gay rights groups that all of a sudden were like, well, we can organize. So, they formed the gay liberation front, which is the much more radical side of things. And what's really interesting is all of the debates about respectability, everything that was happening all the infighting before Stonewall continued. So the Madisonian Society didn't want to celebrate Stonewall.

Sarah: Right? Of course, because if you still think the police might be nice to you someday, then you want to be like, no, I don't think anyone should whip pennies at you.

Mike: That's the thing. I mean, there' a really good paragraph in Martin Duberman’s book where he says, 

“Not all gays were pleased about the eruption at Stonewall, those satisfied by, or at least habituated to the status quo, preferred to minimize or dismiss what was happening. Many wealthier gaze sunning at fire Island or in the Hamptons for the weekend, either heard about the writing and ignored it or caught up with the news belatedly. When they did, they tended to characterize the events of Stonewall as regrettable as the demented carryings on of stoned tacky queens, precisely the elements in the gay world, from whom they had long since dissociated themselves.”

Sarah: Stoned, tacky queens.

Mike: Thank the Lord for the stone tacky queens.  I feel like that's the main. 

Sarah: The stone tacky queens are the ones secretly running this joint. 

Mike: Yes, and this is sort of, again, this is an element of Stonewall that sort of overlooked now, is that eventually everything sort of reverts back to that. By 1973, the gay liberation front is defacto defunked. It's splintered off, it's not really essentially organized. There's something called the Gay Activist Alliance, which emerges to replace it. And then the Gay Activist Alliance takes this tone of, we only want to work on gay rights. We're not going to work on all these other issues, the Civil Rights Bill that Sylvia climbed the city hall to protest. That passed, but it didn't include anything about gender expression.

So there was like a brief moment where the sort of the radicals were in charge and then it just sort of drifted back to this kind of respectability, let's make the parade family-friendly like, let's make sure we're doing everything by the book, let's get all our permits, etc.

Sarah: And then the gay community was like, you know, as long as we never need like a lot of money or research funding, or care or recognition from the straight communities, holding the purse strings for, you know, medical research or what have you, that's not going to happen.  We'll be, we can, it's fine.

Mike: I mean, yeah. I don't know, I mean, I think there's this old quote that I forget where I got it from, but it's talking about respect for the dead. And it says to the living one owes respect to the dead one owes only truth. And I think it's very important to just be honest about what was happening. And the thing is, I don't think that it's like every single person who was involved in gay rights at that time was like a racist prick. A lot of them were like radical socialists and like wanting to create a wildly equal society. And we're also doing Black Panther stuff, there was a lot of crossover between all of the civil rights movements.

 And one of the things that Hugh Ryan, the Historian that I interviewed mentioned is like all of the groups deradicalized during this period, like from 1970 to 1975 was a really bad period for radicalization. Most of these movements were deradicalizing at this time because the Christian Right was mobilizing and cops as there became more infrastructure for movements to organize around the country, there was also more infrastructure for cops to mobilize around the country. And this sort of increasing militarization, it is like the beginning of the mass incarceration move.

Sarah: Yes. This is the beginning of the law-and-order years. People have more to be afraid of like new and more dire consequences are being invented for social radicals. I mean, I think it's important to acknowledge that there is no correct way to change society. We're all going to be shaped by our own fears and the ways that we were raised, and everyone was doing their best. And like the point is not pillorying people who we can now with like decades of hindsight, see behaved in ways that were maybe harmful or ineffectual in the long run. Because no one can know that about what they're doing. And the central injustice is that you have to do it at all. 

Mike: Oh yeah, absolutely. The debate over the tactics and strategy that the gay rights movement used in the 1960s and 1970s will never end and it's fundamentally unknowable. We don't know in a counterfactual world, what could have been different. We do know that we could have taken a lot better care of Marsha and Sylvia and the people like them that we've completely forgotten about.

We can be clear on that, but I think also people at the time were pissed off about them getting erased too. It wasn't monolithically, let's get rid of Marsha and Sylvia. There were people that were fighting for their inclusion. There were people that ended up leaving New York City because they were really pissed off about the way that it was going.

All of the divisions and diversity that we have within the gay population now were there then. And so, you don't want to paint anything with too broad of a brush, the legacy of the Stonewall riots, it is like, you know, you interview enough historians. And you become just like totally insufferable about making any bold statements about anything.

Sarah: I think that's in suffer ability. I think that's a good thing. 

Mike: I think that Stonewall was really important and a lot of other stuff was really important too. And so I think that the big bang narrative of Stonewall is a bit oversimplified, but it's also not completely bullshit either. Stonewall was different and still was bigger. And Stonewall was the first event like this to get national attention and to drive a feeling within people that can be different.

Sarah:  This reminds me of my favorite queen, Thomas Jefferson. The opening of the Declaration of Independence. My paraphrase of it is bitch, it is already over. If another country treats a country, the way you have treated us, like you don't notice anymore.  That's it, you don't. And the radical nature of that statement is something that I cherish as that you can make your rights real. You can manifest your rights by saying them. And at the same time, I can see the root of so much of the straight male capitalist, great man theory of history that we will have ideas and we will get them right the first time. 

And then we will be done. And it's like, no, you can have a really great radical idea and then you have to keep working at it every single day. And you have to keep thinking about the fact that it doesn't speak for everyone and that you are initiating endless work and endless learning. And, you know, as Americans, we are so enamored of the idea that we can get big ideas, right the first time and never have to revise anything. Yeah, both of these things can be true. Stonewall can have been this momentous moment that did change the world. And that did say, you know, it is already over. We can't, we can't be treated this way anymore. And by saying it, we are ushering in a new world and also, we still have to keep working on, on making that world real every day. 

Mike: Yeah. Can I end with the best moment that I had from any of my interviews? 

Sarah: Yes.

Mike: So this guy Mark, who was at the Stonewall riots, he was telling me about the year after the Stonewall riots, all of the work that they were doing, right. The phone calls, the leaflets, kids were arriving as young as 13 years old in New York City, he would put them up on his couch. He said nobody had training. There was no such thing as any infrastructure to care for these kids or to care for each other. And as he's telling me this, I said, you know, it sounds like there's just layer like a wedding cake of trauma everybody's dealing with.

It must've been so hard. And he said, you know what? It was one of the best years of my life. He was driving a cab to make enough money to do this at night. He felt like it was the first time that he could actually fight for a better world. And that was extremely empowering, and it made everybody really happy. And I think that's really important too, that it wasn't all trauma and misery, it was fun. And it was people spending time in each other's houses and brainstorming the insane projects that they wanted to work on. You know, having a parade full of gay people, which was a completely ludicrous idea at the time. And then they made these ludicrous ideas happen. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And just the knowledge, the point is not to take decisive action and get your rights and be done because A that's impossible and B it's by struggling and communally recognizing what we have been through and what we need to do and finding language for our experiences that's how we come to know each other. That is how we build community. That's how we experience intimacy. You know, as Emma Goldman never actually said, but it spiritually feels like her kind of statement the same way that Marsha P Johnson spiritually through a shot glass. If I can't dance, it's not my revolution. 

Mike: And if somebody doesn't let you dance, whip some pennies at them.