From Mafia to Marriage in 50 Years

There was a time not so long ago that bars were the center of the gay cultural universe. Well into the 1980s in America’s large cities, and even later in our smaller towns, gay bars provided what was in many cases the only social space available to lesbians and gay men.

In New York as elsewhere, gay bars were typically run by organized crime figures who vigorously loathed gay people. The bars operated largely outside of the law, and conditions inside were poor. But the bars were what we had. We weren’t welcome to be ourselves in heterosexual society – not at work, not at school, most certainly not in church, not even in our families – but we were welcome to each other in the bars.

The original Stonewall Inn was a Prohibition-era speakeasy on Seventh Avenue South. It was raided and closed, but was relocated to Christopher Street and re-opened in 1934, after the end of Prohibition. It operated as a restaurant and bar for 30 years, until fire destroyed its interior. In 1966, three Mafiosi from the Genovese crime family bought the building and re-opened it as a gay bar in 1967.

The Stonewall was a seedy place. There was no running water behind the bar, so glasses were rinsed in tubs and re-used. There were no fire exits. The bathrooms were filthy. The bar had no liquor license. The pre-Serpico New York Police Department dispatched an officer to the bar each week to pick up a cash bribe, in exchange for which the NYPD overlooked legal violations and tipped off the Stonewall’s management when police raids were coming.

Some historians maintain that the Stonewall’s owners extorted its wealthier patrons by threatening to expose their homosexuality – to the point that the Stonewall may have made more money from extortion than from liquor sales. It’s not like the customers could complain to the police, or to the State Liquor Authority, or to their elected representatives.

Still, the Stonewall was one of the only gay men’s bars in New York that permitted dancing, and it was one of the largest gay bars in the city, so it was popular.

Police raids of gay bars were routine in the 1960s. A typical police raid went like this:

Police entered the bar, the lights were turned on, and patrons were lined up and asked for identification. Anyone dressed counter to the sex shown on his or her identification was arrested, and the rule for women was excruciatingly specific: any woman not wearing three items of “feminine clothing” was arrested. Any two members of the same sex seen touching or dancing were arrested. Bar employees were arrested, liquor was confiscated, and the bar was closed. Arrestees were packed off in paddy wagons and booked. Most quickly pleaded guilty to whatever the police chose to charge, taking the option least likely to lead to public exposure and social ostracism, including loss of employment and banishment by family. Most arrestees could look to nobody, absolutely nobody, for sympathy or support – and certainly not to the police or the judges, not even to defense lawyers.

New York Mayor Robert Wagner notoriously sent the NYPD on a bar-closing binge in 1964, to “clean up” the city for World’s Fair tourists. It was a fact of gay life; if you were gay in New York in the 1960s, you got used to being the filth that had to be swept out whenever the city needed a little spiffing up for visitors.

The Stonewall Inn’s regular payoffs to the police usually bought the owners advance notice of police raids, and raids were usually conducted early in the evening so the bar could clean up and re-open after the raid was over. So it’s not clear why the police raided the Stonewall late on the night of June 27-28, 1969, without notice to the owners. One historian has concluded that the police take from the Stonewall’s extortion racket had dropped off, so they decided to close the place.

In any event, the police raided the Stonewall Inn 50 years ago this month, on June 28, 1969, at 1:30 a.m. The raid began as raids typically began. The lights were turned on, the music was turned off, and the police blocked the exit. The patrons, just over 200 of them, were ordered to line up and hand over their IDs, except for the men in drag, who were ordered to the bathrooms for sex verification inspections by female police officers.

But something snapped that night. The burden of a lifetime of humiliations became too great to bear. Some of the customers refused to produce identification and were arrested. But the paddy wagons hadn’t arrived yet, so there was a short wait. Meanwhile, those not arrested were forcibly ejected from the bar – but they didn’t scurry away in shame as they were supposed to. They gathered in the street outside the bar, taunting the police. Scuffles ensued, the critical one by some reports being between a lesbian and her arresting officer, who hit her on the head with his baton after she complained that the handcuffs were too tight. She turned to the crowd and demanded, “Why won’t you guys do something?”

The crowd exploded in violence. When they tried to overturn a police wagon, some of the police fled in their vehicles. The rest barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall, along with a reporter from the Village Voice, which had offices across the street. The mob threw garbage, rocks, anything they could grab, breaking the Stonewall’s windows. They pulled up a parking meter and used it as a battering ram against the barricaded door.

Forty-five minutes into the melee, police reinforcements arrived, but were unable to restore order until 4 a.m. That morning, witnesses reported a sense of wonder at what felt like a great blow struck for justice and humanity. On Sunday, June 29, the New York Times ran a one-column story about the incident on page 33, its headline revealing its bias: “4 Policemen Hurt in ‘Village’ Raid.” Violence continued sporadically outside the Stonewall and in the neighborhood for six days.

The Stonewall riot was not the first time that gay and lesbian bar patrons had resisted police raids. But the Stonewall riot was the one that ignited the modern gay rights movement, not just in New York, not just in the United States, but world-wide.

Before Stonewall, the prevailing approach to gay protests was that advocated by the great pioneering gay activist, Frank Kameny. Kameny’s strategy was to present lesbians and gay men as “people just like you,” to persuade heterosexuals that we deserve the same rights as you. At Kameny’s protests, male protesters wore suits and ties; female protesters wore skirts and blouses. No same-sex touching was permitted, because the “sex” part of homosexuality reminded heterosexuals all too viscerally that, in the end, we are not quite exactly like you.

Stonewall introduced a more militant approach to gay activism, and the movement became more demanding and less polite. Nobody could possibly have expected how fast change would come. Fifty years later, it’s hard to remember how long ago 1969 was.

On the first anniversary of the Stonewall riot, on June 28, 1970, activists in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles staged Christopher Street Liberation Day commemorations, the first gay pride marches in American history. The Times covered the New York march, this time on the front page, under the headline “Thousands of Homosexuals Hold A Protest Rally in Central Park.” (Times reporters weren’t allowed to call us “gay” until 1987, and then only as an adjective, not a noun; openly gay people were “admitted homosexuals” or “avowed homosexuals” until the mid-1990s.)

By the second anniversary of the riots, gay rights advocacy organizations were operating in every major American city and in Australia, Canada and Western Europe. Kameny remembered that, at the time of Stonewall, there were 50 or 60 gay rights advocacy organizations in the country, but two years later there were at least 2,500.

In 1986, the New York City Council adopted legislation prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. The New York State legislature followed in 2002. In 1980, the New York Court of Appeals struck down the state’s law criminalizing gay and lesbian sex; the U.S. Supreme Court followed in 2003. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. New York followed in 2011, and the Supreme Court invalidated same-sex marriage prohibitions nationwide in 2015. Today, same-sex marriages are recognized in 30 countries on six continents.

The entire month of June is semi-officially designated LGBT Pride Month, not just in the United States but in much of the world. New York uses it as a tourist draw, and New York’s 50th anniversary commemoration of the Stonewall riots on June 30 will probably command attendance in the millions. The Times coverage of Pride Month constitutes a virtual anthology, running the full range from “The Fight is Still Happening for the Rest of Us,” a sobering review of the continuing struggles of LGBT Americans in the more conservative communities of the Midwest, to “Pride Events: Here’s How to Celebrate,” a festive listing of “over 25 options for commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and celebrating Pride Month.”

The Mafia-owned iteration of the Stonewall Inn closed for good a few weeks after the riots. The Stonewall has re-opened and re-closed several times since then, most recently re-opening in 2007. It’s still a gay bar, and it’s still called the Stonewall, although it’s a lot nicer now than 50 years ago, and not Mafia-owned, and it rents out space for wedding receptions.

The building became a national historic landmark in 2000, in 2015 it was designated a New York City landmark, and in 2016 it became a New York State historic site. Christopher Park, a small triangular park across the street from the Stonewall, is home to two same-sex couples sculpted by George Segal and installed in 1992. Christopher Park was designated a national monument by President Barack Obama on June 24, 2016, under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. These were the first New York City, New York State, and federal designations based on a site’s significance to LGBT history.

I don’t mean to suggest that hatred of LGBT people, ostracism of LGBT people, violence against LGBT people, or discrimination against LGBT people is over. But today, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riot, I think it’s worth taking a moment to marvel at the distance we’ve traveled, and, in the scheme of things, at the remarkably short time we took to travel it.