Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
S01E07 - The STONEWALL Uprising 1969 & The Christopher Street Liberation Day March 1970
70 Plays3 months ago
In Season 1 Episode 6, we discussed how the police and state liquor authorities worked to repress Gay nightlife in America throughout the 20th Century, and how the political activism that developed in response to this repression achieved significant legal reforms that enabled Gay people to congregate socially. Despite a steady expansion of the Gay Rights movement during this period, the situation was far from ideal by the end of the 1960s. Gay bars and nightclubs were still subject to regular police raids and the relative invisibility of LGBT people in public life meant there was lack of protection from both the state authorities and the criminal underworld.
Vulnerability to harassment and liquor licence revocation allowed the New York City Mafia, ever the entrepreneurs, and corrupt police authorities to stake their claim to exploiting Gay bars in the City for profit. The Mafia created members-only ‘bottle clubs’, thereby avoiding the legal requirement to obtain a liquor licence, with the deliberate strategy of attracting Gay patrons who could meet and socialize in a private and, supposedly, safe environment. Protection payments remained necessary to keep local police away or at least to allow for advance notification of planned phony inspections.
The Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in the West Village was one of the few Gay venues in New York where dancing was permitted by the owners, and actively encouraged. The oddness of a Gay nightclub where dancing was the central activity underlines how nascent the notion of Gay nightclubs and discotheques was at this point in time, and the extent to which social dancing had been effectively reserved as a solely heterosexual entitlement in America. During an unexpected raid on 28 June 1969 simmering tensions at The Stonewall escalated, prompting full scale riots that stretched across several nights. Eventually celebrated as ‘The Stonewall Uprising’, the riots served as an indicator of the growing dissatisfaction of Gay people with being marginalised and denied equality in their own society. This collective willingness not just to be tolerated but to express and celebrate Gay culture would drive the emergent Disco movement and permanently revolutionize dance music, culture, and wider American Society.
Organisations formed in the wake of Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA), were committed to transforming, rather than being subsumed within, conventional society. These organisations started their own dance nights at grassroots Gay community centres like Alternative University in Greenwich Village and the Firehouse at Wooster Street in SoHo, serving as the gateway for many entering into the new nightlife facilitated by legendary disco venues such as The Sanctuary, The Loft, The Gallery, and later the Paradise Garage.
Recommended
Transcript
20th Century Repression and Activism
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Season 1, Episode 7 of Real Gone. In the last episode we looked at how the police and state liquor authorities worked to repress gay nightlife in America through the 20th century, and how the political activism that had developed in response to this repression achieved significant legal reforms that enabled gay people to congregate socially. However, despite a steady expansion of the gay rights movement during this period, the situation was far from ideal by the end of the 1960s.
00:00:27
Speaker
Gebars and nightclubs were still subject to regular police raids and the relative invisibility of LGBT people in public life meant there was a lack of protection from both the state authorities and the criminal underworld. Vulnerability to harassment and liquor license revocation allowed the New York City Mafia, ever the entrepreneurs and corrupt police authorities to stake their claim to exploiting Gebars in the city for profit.
00:00:53
Speaker
The Mafia also created members-only bottle clubs, thereby avoiding the legal requirement to obtain a liquor license, with the deliberate strategy of attracting gay patrons who could meet and socialise in private, in a supposedly safe environment.
00:01:08
Speaker
The and NYPD had disregarded the January 1968 ruling by State Judge Kenneth Keating, establishing the legality of close dancing between homosexuals. Protection payments remain necessary to keep local police away, or at least to allow for advanced notification of planned phony inspections.
00:01:26
Speaker
The State Liquor Authority's discriminatory motivations had essentially disincentivised regular bar owners from serving gay people, although it was now legal to do so, and driven them into the arms of organised crime, where they were subject to extortion and further shameful humiliation by way of continued police harassment and extortion.
Mafia Exploitation and Activist Opposition
00:01:46
Speaker
The clandestine nature of these arrangements did not exactly encourage high quality service or much adherence to health and safety. Many bottle clubs lacked proper fire exits, functional heating or proper sanitation. The owners seemingly unconcerned about bad reviews, safe from the knowledge that customers were more concerned about the secrecy of their activities.
00:02:06
Speaker
The fact that the and NYPD and the State Liquor Authority officers derived personal financial benefits from such protection rackets by way of bribery was highly perverse, especially when one considers the number of plainclothes policemen sent to actively police local gay bars to maximise illegal entrapment. Illicit activity was acceptable only so long as it was financially beneficial to the corrupt local authorities.
00:02:31
Speaker
Gay activist Craig Rodwell, who he mentioned previously as having founded the Homophile Youth Movement in Neighbourhood, its magazine The New York Hymnal and the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, had grown frustrated with the gay bar seen in New York, specifically with mafia control over these gay social spaces.
00:02:48
Speaker
the contempt shown to gay customers, police raids, overpriced and watered down drinks, and the forced secretive atmosphere. His anger was fed by stories, his friend Don Hampton told him about working at a gay bar named the Stonewall Inn on 53 Christopher Street in the West Village, where its mafia owners made no secret of the contempt in which they held their customers. For Craig, the Stonewall represented everything that was wrong with the gay bar scene, in his view, a real dive, an awful sleazy place.
00:03:18
Speaker
The bar had no running water, and empty glasses were rinsed in a vat of dirty water before drinks were poured for the next customer. Even at that, for many, the Stonewall functioned as a kind of sanctuary. It's very clientele, including many local black and Hispanic gay LGBT people and street queens who hustled for money in the village and 42nd Street off, Times Square in Midtown.
00:03:40
Speaker
Other gay bars in the area such as Washington Square on Broadway and 3rd Street, Tony Pastors and the Purple Onion and Greenwich Village owned by the gallow crime family stonewall and the nearby tenth of always were owned by the family. crime family. It may come as no surprise to hear that many of the Mafia men involved in the local gay bar scene were themselves secretly gay. The New York Mafia well known for its lavender streak.
00:04:04
Speaker
Because of infrequent police raids, liquor and beer bottles were kept in a nearby car and brought into the bar as and when replenishment was necessary. This allowed the owners to avoid taking a more severe financial hit when liquor was confiscated and for the bars to open again for business the day after raids with minimal disruption. The Stonewall was one of the few gay venues in New York where dancing was permitted by the owners and actively encouraged.
00:04:30
Speaker
This was in stark contrast to other venues such as the 10th of Always, where the chandelier being lit up was acknowledged by patrons as a warning to stop dancing and sit down. Alice Eccles' book, Hot Stuff, Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, references the quote, unrestrained dancing at Stonewall as fostering the articulation of gay sexual desire.
00:04:50
Speaker
This goes to the heart of the true intentions of authorities such as the State Liquor Authority and more broadly, Conservative America. Free assembly of gay people could be legally tolerated, but it was the articulation of their desire, leading to love, friendship, community, strength and expansion which was feared. The oddness of a gay nightclub where dancing was the central activity. Underlines how nascent the notion of gay nightclubs and discotheques was at this point in time.
00:05:15
Speaker
and the extent to which social dancing had been effectively reserved as a solely heterosexual entitlement in America. By 1966, management of the Stonewall Inn was taken over by three mafia figures, Mario Zuchi and Fat Tony Luria. Its jukebox, which played a variety of chart hits and Motown classics,
00:05:35
Speaker
and its cigarette machine were leased from the local Don, Maddie the Horsey and Ello, who controlled the district and took a hefty cut from business operations. Despite the regular protection payments of $2,000 per week being made by the owners to local police, Stonewall was still raided on a regular basis.
Stonewall Riots Erupt
00:05:52
Speaker
Just days before the famous 1969 riots, police had arrested bar staff and confiscated liquor.
00:05:59
Speaker
During an unexpected raid on 20 June 1969, simmering tensions escalated. The reason for the raid is historically disputed. Some have suggested that a protection payment to local police was missed, but the composition of the officers that charged into the bar indicates that the raid happened due to the involvement of federal authorities. Supposedly the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had been made aware of the sale of bottles of alcohol at the Stonewall, which did not carry the federal stamp, meaning they were possibly bootlegged directly from the local breweries.
00:06:32
Speaker
The federal officers involved the local and NYPD 6th Precinct in the raid at the last minute, apparently to keep them in the dark so as to prevent the owners being tipped off about the plan to raid the bar. The local police would have had some incentive to keep the cash cow that was the Stonewall in operation, so there is some logic in the argument that it would not have been their intention to stage a genuine raid without notifying the owners or the bar staff in advance.
00:06:55
Speaker
Eight plainclothes detectives from the local First Division and officers from the and NYPD 6th Precinct descended on the Stonewall Inn at 1am without any advance warning. They served the manager with a warrant for selling liquor without a license. Staff and the 200 customers inside were asked to produce their ID. Those without ID would, as per usual, be arrested and booked at the local precinct. While being brought out of the bar, those under arrest noticed a large crowd had gathered at Christopher Street.
00:07:25
Speaker
Many of those in attendance were gay people from the area, eager to voice their annoyance at the continuing tactics of harassment by the local police against gay bars and gay people in the city. The camper patrons exiting the stonewall began striking poses, inviting cheering and applause from the onlookers. When the police wagon pulled up outside the bar, the atmosphere changed into into something more serious and palpably tense. The crowd started to boo local police, loading arrested customers into the police vans, some pressed against the park van.
00:07:54
Speaker
and police reacted angrily, pressing the crowd back. Supposedly, one of the drag queens who had been arrested and loaded into the van reacted to harsh treatment from the police and began on throwing punches and kicks.
00:08:06
Speaker
One of those was arrested was a lesbian wearing men's clothes, who police deemed to have breached the city's law mandating that at least three pieces of clothing appropriate to one's gender must be worn at all times. According to Harry Beard, one of the Stonewall Bar staff, this woman had been struck with a nightstick by police when she complained about her handcuffs being fixed too tight. There are conflicting versions of events and reports as the High Matters escalated.
00:08:30
Speaker
but it has been reported that, in response to this assault, the crowd of onlookers began pelting the police with bottles and coins. This was the spark for a full-scale riot that stretched over three days.
00:08:43
Speaker
When the first police finally left the scene with their prisoners, Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine ordered them to return as soon as possible. People in the crowd outside the Stonewall Inn had begun to confront police demanding answers as to why they continued to be harassed at this and other gay bars in the area. Soon enough, coins, bottles, cans and bricks from a nearby construction site started raining down heavily on the police outside the bar. A nearby trash can was set on fire.
00:09:09
Speaker
and sent sailing through the air into the front window of the stone wall, shattering glass all over the street and those outside. The police soon retreated inside the bar leaving the incense crowding control of Christopher Street.
00:09:23
Speaker
Bizarrely, local folk singer Dave Van Runk, who the Coen brothers inside Lewin Davis was based on, had been walking past the bar unsuspecting when he was dragged inside and beaten badly by police who had mistaken him for one of the offending gay rioters. Soon after, someone spread lighter fluid through the smash window of the bar and lit a match sparking a fire inside. Greg Rodwell, who had been watching events from across the street, rushed to a nearby phone booth to report events to the three daily newspapers, the Times, the Post and the News, imploring them to get down to Christopher Street as soon as possible. At 3am, the Tactical Police Force ride control units were making their way to the Stonewall.
00:10:06
Speaker
The TPF were trained in breaking up street protests such as those held in protest of the Vietnam War and were equipped with tear gas, billy clubs and assorted weapons. On site of the riot police, the crowd at the Stonewall retreated but did not disperse. Part of the crowd that did retreat from the advance by the TPF circled back around through side streets and managed to surround them. Bottles and bricks continued to be thrown and more trash cans were set on fire.
00:10:31
Speaker
The police eventually succeeded in clearing the streets for that night only at around 4am. A considerable number of people had been injured by the police and the T.P.F. The police themselves had suffered injuries and a number of patrol cars had been destroyed in the riot.
00:10:47
Speaker
13 people were booked in the local precinct, including parole Dave Van Ronck, along with seven Stonewall employees, for a range of charges including harassment, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. It transpired that, while taking refuge inside the bar, the police had deliberately wrecked the inside of the Stonewall, smashing mirrors, jukeboxes and telephones. All cash had been pillaged from the cash registers, jukebox and cigarette machines, and the security staff had been stolen.
00:11:15
Speaker
News of the riot had spread among the gay community on Saturday. The daily newspapers published stories of the events the night before at the Stonewall. The coverage on television and local radio brought visitors to Christopher Street. Everyone was eager to sneak a pic at the location where the police had been faced down by the hyped up crowd. On the exterior of the protective hoarding at the bar, anonymous protesters had scrawled a message. They invaded our rights. There was all college boys and girls in here, legalized gay bars, support gay power.
00:11:48
Speaker
Craig Rodwell woke early on Saturday with the intention of circulating a flyer about the previous night's events. His plans were overtaken by events on Saturday night. By nightfall, a crowd had gathered on front of the stone wall that resembled something close to a block party. Many who had taken part in the riot the night before had returned to Christopher Street to tell stories and sing songs with their friends, basking in the jubilant atmosphere. The festivities would not last for long.
00:12:15
Speaker
The and NYPD and the tactical patrol force reappeared in numbers, determined to prevent a repeat of the previous night's humiliation. The T.P.F. lined up across the street from the Stonewall Inn, riot shields and battens at the ready, when the singing crowd failed to disperse. The T.P.F. moved in and began assaulting anyone who refused to move out of their way. The authorities quickly realized that the crowd was too large to control as they planned.
00:12:40
Speaker
Thousands of people were on Christopher Street by this point, including a sizable number of straight passers-by and assorted street people, only too eager to join in the developing mischief. Any car owners that attempted to drive past were terrified into retreating when the crowds began rocking their vehicles back and forth.
00:12:58
Speaker
Things escalated quickly after the windshield of a police vehicle was smashed, reportedly by legendary activist Marsha P. Johnson, who had been a regular at the Stonewall.
Community Debates and Post-Riot Liberation
00:13:07
Speaker
From the park side of Sheridan Square, a seemingly endless number of bottles and bricks were been thrown, injuring police, but mainly the civilian onlookers. Police broke ranks several times and charged into the crowds, attacking people with their nightsticks and clubbing them to the ground.
00:13:22
Speaker
This lasted until 4am when the police finally withdrew their units from the area. The New York Times reported on the second night of the riots a public assertion of real anger that was just electric.
00:13:35
Speaker
Writing on behalf of the Homophile Youth Movement and its paper Hymn, Greg Rodwell prepared a flyer entitled Get the Mafia and Cops out of gay bars, and went on to accuse the police of colluding with the Mafia to prevent gay business people from opening decent gay bars with a healthy social atmosphere, as opposed to the quote hellhole atmosphere of places typified by Stonewall. He had thousands of flyers in circulation by Sunday afternoon.
00:14:00
Speaker
Many older and more conservative gay people in the city saw the Stonewall riots as regrettable, while many younger activists were galvanized by the events of the previous two nights. Some Mattachine members, like Randy Wicker, pronounced the rats as horrible and were eager to distance themselves from those involved, who he saw as, quote, a bunch of drag queens in the village acting disorderly and tacky and cheap. On Sunday evening, Mattachine Society members had even placed a placard on the front of the Stonewall Inn, urging their Cromrads to maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the village.
00:14:34
Speaker
A feature of the many immediate discussions within the gay activist groups about Stonewall was the gulf and experience between the more affluent middle class and working class members and those street people like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, a group dedicated to helping homeless young drag queens, gay youth and trans women.
00:14:56
Speaker
who were most heavily affected and physically jeopardized by the prejudices against homosexual and other queer people in the United States. Certain Mattachine members may have found the drag queens and hustlers at Stonewall on 42nd Street distasteful, but these were some of the people most in need of the recognition and protection that the gay rights movement was supposedly trying to achieve, including protection from police brutality. By the evening of Sunday 30th of June 1969, some of the wreckage inside the Stonewall Inn had been cleared up but a crowd had again gathered at the front of the bar signifying more trouble was to come. The police appear to be spoiling for a fight and were seen to be taunting anyone in the vicinity of Christopher Street they perceived to be gay. The tactical patrol force conducted a sweep of the neighborhood which proved to be uneventful.
00:15:41
Speaker
The crowd soon dissolved without any major disturbance. Possibly due to the heavy rain, Monday and mondayundan Tuesday they were quiet with only a few random confrontations here and there. Wednesday saw a return to large-scale protests after the village voice ran two articles that day reporting on the events which occurred at the weekend.
00:16:00
Speaker
Large crowds of onlookers had descended upon Christopher Street. Again, trash cans were lit on fire, bottles and beer cans were thrown, and verbal abuse from the crowd made it clear that the local police were the intended target of this aggression. The tactical patrol force again stormed through the area, assaulting onlookers in their path and savagely beating people who failed to disperse. Four people were carted off to jail on charges of harassment, bringing the final night of the Stonewall rats to a close.
00:16:30
Speaker
Eventually designated as the Stonewall Uprising, the riot served as an indicator of the growing dissatisfaction of gay people with being marginalised and denied equality in their own society. This collective willingness not just to be tolerated, but to express and celebrate gay culture.
00:16:45
Speaker
would drive the emerging disco movement and permanently revolutionize dance music, culture and wider American society. After Stonewall, the and NYPD and the State Liquor Authority became less enthusiastic in their raids and crackdowns. Police officers remarked how the submissiveness of gay people seemed to have been diminished after the Stonewall riots.
00:17:04
Speaker
The wider sense of liberation was noticeable, even to the local authorities. Even the crime syndicates began to lose their control over gay-friendly venues. The Stonewall Inn closed its stores in 1969. However, with less regulatory enforcement, there was an exponential growth in gay bars, dances and demand for public disco texts in New York. Bathhouses and discos became the focal point for what Andrew Copkin called the sensational glue for gay congregation in the city.
00:17:31
Speaker
In July 2024, house music artist and DJ Honey Dijon created an exhibition at the Stonewall Inn Visitor Centre, now an official national monument at the site of the original bar on Christopher Street, celebrating the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. The exhibition features a replica of the original jukebox that was destroyed while it was playing at the Stonewall Inn during the raid by police in the early hours of June 28, 1969.
00:17:55
Speaker
The tracks featured in the exhibit, Motown classics like Herded Through the Grapevine by Marvin Gaye, and other legendary performers like Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, The Ilee Brothers and Sly Stone give a flavour of the type of music that was popular at the venue, songs of joy, sadness, celebration and hope. This is You Came You Saw You Conquered by Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes, one of the most popular Stonewall anthems from 1969.
00:18:53
Speaker
Although Stonewall became known as a significant historical moment in terms of gay representation and visibility, there were various divergent viewpoints on how this could or should be progressed. New York's Mattachine Society, one of its first gay rights groups, who had organized a sip in protests, viewed venues such as Stonewall as exploitative of gay people and had discouraged others from attending similar mob-run venues. The Homophile Movement, of which the Mattachine Society was a significant part,
00:19:22
Speaker
had been active for decades, but the events at Stonewall led to a wider mobilization of gay people in the city and elsewhere in the United States.
Emergence of New Activist Groups
00:19:30
Speaker
Many younger gay people were opposed to being grouped with the drag queens at Stonewall, dismissive of the historical misconception that all gay men were inverts, somehow internally female. Feminists critiqued how drag queens fetishised what they saw as oppressive accessories such as corsets and feather boas.
00:19:47
Speaker
Whereas many older gay activists push for conformity within mainstream America as the means of achieving wider acceptance for gay people, younger activists such as those within the Gay Liberation Front formed in July 1969 and the Gay Activist Alliance were committed to transforming rather than being subsumed within conventional society.
00:20:07
Speaker
The energy and outward confidence of these new gay rights groups, consisting mostly of younger people, was in stark contrast to the conservatism of the older activists such as those within the Mattachine Society. One week after Stonewall, at a homophile demonstration at Philadelphia's Independence Hall,
00:20:23
Speaker
Two lesbian activists had the courage to walk the picket line hand in hand. This was radical behaviour, even within the homophile movement, which had traditionally espoused a more cautious and non-confrontational approach. Public displays of affection by gay people were discouraged, out of concern they would be deemed provocative to straight America's sense of propriety, and therefore counterproductive to the homophile cause.
00:20:47
Speaker
The more senior gay activist Frank Kameny separated the two young women's hands in doing so highlighting the generational schism that would soon manifest itself within the gay rights movement.
00:21:00
Speaker
As a compromise to accommodate young gay radicals, Dick Leach set up the Mattachine Action Committee. Activist Michael Brown brought Stephen Donaldson into the committee. Donaldson had been one of the founders of the Columbia University Homophile League in 1967.
00:21:15
Speaker
125 people attended the first meeting of the committee on 9th July 1969, where it was held at Freedom House on West 40th Street. This was where the Mattachine Society held its monthly lecture series. It became known subsequently that at least two persons in attendance were paid police and formers, sent to gather information on the activities of the organization.
00:21:37
Speaker
The importance of the Stonewall Riots was discussed at the meeting, but the only proposal for further action was the suggestion to hold a silent vigil at Washington Square Park in the coming week, subject to the approval of the local authorities. Before the second meeting of the committee, Michael Brown and others posted notices for further demonstration to protest continued police harassment.
00:21:57
Speaker
and to demonstrate support for the Black Panther Party members jailed in the Women's House of Detention, the huge state prison situated in the West Village. Michael Brown and his friends formed a new organization named the Gay Liberation Front, partly as a tribute to the ongoing liberation struggles in Algeria and Vietnam.
00:22:15
Speaker
Activist Craig Rodwell did not ultimately join the Gay Liberation Front. He became critical of its aggressive approach and its lack of cohesive structure. Foster felt the organization should focus exclusively on gay rights issues and not dilute its energy or the effectiveness of its approach by supporting other organizations, which he saw as unrelated to the LGBT cause.
00:22:35
Speaker
This was the main reason many supporters defected from the GLF to join a new organization known as the Gay Activist Alliance devoted exclusively to achieving gay rights progress.
00:22:47
Speaker
On 21st December 1969, the new constitution for the GAA was created. Its content demonstrated that the Gay Activist Alliance was completely dedicated to securing basic rights for homosexuals. The GAA was entirely willing to take to the streets and to employ militant confrontational tactics to win acceptance for gay people within the country's institutional structure, but not with the intent of toppling those structures, as was expressed to be an objective of the Gay Liberation Front The Gay Activist Alliance was more assertive than the wider gay rights organizations in affirming the validity of the gay lifestyle and emphasized the need for building pride and subcultural differences. Its intention was to organize a tactical bloc to demand equal rights. The GAA's motto was, out of the closet and into the streets, that pioneered direct action techniques including zapping protests and were successful in campaigning for the removal of antiquated laws that regulated homosexual admission ratios at New York nightclubs bars and restaurants.
00:23:46
Speaker
The publication of newspapers, including Get Power, Come Out and GAY, commenced within nine months of Stonewall to champion the cause of these organisations in seeking fair treatment an end todi discrimination and in the cessation of brutality and harassment.
00:24:03
Speaker
The purpose of the ZAP protests was to create lightning-quick confrontations with offending institutions, organizations and individuals. There were, for example, protests at branch offices of household finance for refusing to grant mortgage loans to known homosexuals. Mayor John Lindsay was ZAP while attending reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was confronted with questions as to how his administration would secure civil rights for gay people living in New York City.
00:24:31
Speaker
In November 1969, the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations had sanctioned the formation of the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee. Greg Rodwell notified all of Urquo's constituent groups about plans for a celebration of the Stonewall Uprising on its first anniversary.
00:24:49
Speaker
The Gay Liberation Front lent its support at an early stage, while the Gay Activist Alliance and Mattachine Society joined the committee only weeks before the planned commemoration, a march through New York City led by its gay rights activists.
First Gay Pride March and Cultural Shifts
00:25:02
Speaker
Craig recruited recruited organizers and some funding from the customers at his Oscar Wilde Memorial bookstore, who formed the backbone of the committee.
00:25:09
Speaker
There were meager contributions from more well-known care rights groups, indicating that the significance of the events at Stonewall had not yet set in within the consciousness of the wider movement. Craig managed to organise the march for around $1,000. Graphic designer Michael Sabenauch, later famous for designing the cover art for Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, designed all of the posters, announcements and buttons for the march free of charge.
00:25:35
Speaker
By April 1970, the committee was focused on the March for Freedom through midtown up to Central Park, where a number of social events were planned. The aspiration was that gay and lesbian organizations throughout the United States would organize similar events in their own cities.
00:25:49
Speaker
This did transpire in Los Angeles and Chicago, albeit with smaller numbers. Despite the best efforts of local police to stifle the planned marches by imposing prohibitively expensive security bonds that were overturned by the local courts just in time for the marches to go ahead as planned. Sunday 20th of June 1970 was the scheduled date for the Christopher Street Liberation Day March in New York City.
00:26:13
Speaker
The Gay Liberation Front held an open house at Washington Square Methodist Church on West 4th Street in Greenwich Village the night before the march that offered food, information and housing and gay literature. The Church of Holy Apostles on 28th Street and 9th Avenue hosted a similar set of events for women and promised that those attending the march would have a place there to stay over the weekend. Alternative University in Greenwich Village Hosted an instruction session for volunteer stewards where the Quaker project on community conflict advised volunteers how to deal with aggressive police and hostile onlookers. On the day of the march the permit from local police arrived just as Craig Rodwell was leaving his apartment for the assembly point at Washington Place between 6th and 7th avenues. The number of attendees was slow to build but the marchers set off at 2.15
00:27:03
Speaker
By the time the march had reached the Macy's department store on 34th Street, the size of the crowd had doubled to 2,000 people. This figure was verified by undercover FBI agents who had been surveilling the event and reporting to Director J Edgar Hoover himself.
00:27:17
Speaker
By the time the marchers reached Central Park, there was a celebratory and joyous atmosphere. Craig Rodwell and the other activists and marchers were exhilarated by the openness of the celebration. And by the following year, similar public celebrations for gay people commemorating the anniversary of Stonewall were held in London and Paris, growing in size and significance throughout the world year by year to the present day.
00:27:39
Speaker
The gay movement of the early 1970s can be seen as an extension of the 1960s counterculture. It was a definite intention by many within the movement to subvert commercialized forms of leisure and entertainment, and to create an alternative to conventional bar culture, along with the more traditionally capitalist social organizations of retail health and party politics. Along with food co-ops, feminist bookstores, political workshops, free sexual health centers, the gay liberation groups throughout the US began to organize their own dances,
00:28:11
Speaker
The Dantzler encouraged greater sexual expressiveness and this form of expression would accelerate in the early 1970s. West End Records owner Mel Sheeran describes how, in the aftermath of Stonewall, gay life and gay nightlife in New York seemed to explode. The Gay Activist Alliance fought laws regulating nightlife, including the prohibition against same-sex dancing, which helped clear the lane for the birth of disco.
00:28:36
Speaker
as homosexual sociability was effectively decriminalized. In New York, the Gay Liberation Front used the Alternative University, a free counter-cultural school and leftist political organizing center in Greenwich Village for many of its activities through the 1970s. It had several classrooms and a former dance studio on the second floor of 69 West 14th Street at the corner of 6th Avenue. The GLF sponsored weekly dances at Alternative U which featured mainly psychedelic rock,
00:29:06
Speaker
Admission fees and alcohol on sale were cheap.
Gender and Racial Challenges in Activism
00:29:10
Speaker
In keeping with the educational ethos of the venue, where classes were given on subjects such as civil rights, the organization of protest and demonstration, racism, gay history and literature, these events were intended to foster love and community for LGBT attendees, with the organizers often pushing to creating hippie-style circle dances. However,
00:29:29
Speaker
The intensity of the primarily male sexual energy transformed the tone of these events into something more visceral and unexpected by the organizers. The GLF had from its formation organized around affinity cells, encouraging those with mutual interests in specific areas to work together. It also held a large weekly meeting on Sundays, deliberately absent of any formal structure or fixed leadership to promote the spontaneous discussion of its members' ideas.
00:29:59
Speaker
However, these meetings quickly became antagonistic, where the GLF's revolutionary-minded activists engaged in heated debates with its more moderate members. For many, the intense and protracted debates seemed detrimental to achieving any resolution on how the organization would address its goals and to the personal relationships of those within the GLF. Gender norms soon crept in, with male attendees often monopolizing the discussions, pushing female attendees into more submissive positions on how the organization should deal with the issues at hand.
00:30:29
Speaker
Rita Mae Brown was a lesbian activist who had become well known for her celebrated autobiographical novel, Ruby Fruit Jungle, released in 1973. She had been a member of the Columbia University Student Homophile League and would later write for the GLF's newspaper Come Out.
00:30:45
Speaker
She had, during the 1960s, worked to raise consciousness among the American feminist movement about lesbianism, and with other activists, had encouraged other lesbians within the GLF to form feminist consciousness-raising groups. However, equal footing for female activists would prove difficult to achieve within the gay liberation front, their numbers representing only 10-20% of the overall membership. The mounding frustration came to a head over discussions about separate women's dances being held, using the organization's funds.
00:31:17
Speaker
At Alternative U, many women had contributed to the success of the weekly dances. However, outnumbered five to one, women expressed concerns over the push by GLF men to pack as many dancers into the venue as possible, which made finding other women in the venue even more difficult at these overwhelmingly male events. The GLF women planned to stage dances of their own. They demanded that one of the larger rooms at Alternative U should be sectioned off for women only, and that a certain portion of the GLF treasury should be ring-fenced to finance separate women's dances.
00:31:47
Speaker
Some GLF men denounced this proposal as divisive, while others were fully supportive. The GLF membership ultimately voted in favour of allocating funds exclusively for separate women's dances, the first of which was held on 4th April 1970. The main purpose of the women's dances was to create a space free of male domination, but also as an alternative to the lesbian bar seen then in existence.
00:32:11
Speaker
After the sea colony closed in 1968, Cookies on West 14th Street and Gianni's on West 19th Street were reportedly the only two lesbian bars in Manhattan by 1970. Both bars had a reputation for watered down beer and a hostile atmosphere.
00:32:26
Speaker
When the GLF women attempted to leaflet cookies to inform customers about their dance at alternative view, the bar's fierce heterosexual female owner, Cookie herself, had her male doorman forcibly remove them from the premises. When they continued to leaflet outside near the bar, the bouncers were sent outside to threaten retaliation.
00:32:45
Speaker
The GLF women were understandably nervous at the night of the first women-only dance, even though impressive numbers were in attendance. At 3am, several large men with guns appeared at the doorway of alternative view, presenting themselves as police officers seeking to inspect the premises, following a report that liquor was being sold without a proper license.
00:33:05
Speaker
The immediate suspicion was that these men were hired goons, sent by Coogie to snuff out any new competition in the area. When they were refused entry to the premises, they soon became physically aggressive to the GLF organizers and other women at the venue. Have an expected trouble on the night.
00:33:20
Speaker
The organizers had taken advice from lesbian lawyer Flo Kennedy who they had called to report the events They were advised to call the police and media who promptly arrived at alternative view causing the aggressive goons to disperse After that night the popular women only dances became a regular event and on August 30th, 1971, women from the GLF and daughters of Bilitis, together with men and women from the Gay Activist Alliance, picketed in front of cookies to protest its exploitative policies of refusing service to lesbians who work for gay liberation, overcharging and physically threatening customers, and also its affiliation with the Mafia.
00:34:00
Speaker
Separate to the GLF, the Gay Activist Alliance began sponsoring Saturday Night Dances in May 1971, one year after its formation, at a time when Gay Disco was already taken off in downtown Manhattan. The GEA held dances in an abandoned Soho Firehouse at 99 Worcester Street in Soho.
00:34:18
Speaker
which the group at least to operate its gay lesbian community centre, the first of its kind in Manhattan. This building, constructed in 1881, would be the location of many intense debates and political meetings on the strategy of the gay rights movement held on weekdays. The firehouse quickly became known as the political and cultural headquarters for the gay movement in New York City. The weekend disco dances were presided over by DJ Barry Lederer,
00:34:42
Speaker
who pled records to around 1,500 people. Litter was eventually replaced by DJ Richie Rivera, who became a well-known DJ at some of the larger discos that would emerge in the coming years. Some of the firehouse dances were attended by people who went on to be hugely influential in dance music, including Mel Sheeran and his boyfriend Michael Brody, the future owner of the Paradise Garage. By 1973, the Gay Activist Alliance had come under heavy criticism for becoming overwhelmingly white,
00:35:10
Speaker
for marginalising their lesbian contingent and for their overzealous targeting of Mayor John Lindsay, who is generally seen as a favourable figure among the LGBT community. The firehouse dances lasted until 1973, when the venue was destroyed in what remains an unsolved arson attack.
00:35:31
Speaker
In the 1970s, activist Yvonne Flowers had been a member of various groups, including the National Black Feminist Organization. Yvonne had attended the GAA firehouse dances, but the scarcity of black people at the events affirmed her belief that the gay movement had failed to draw, or had neglected to properly attempt to draw in, people of colour to their cause.
Cultural Acceptance and Influence
00:35:51
Speaker
With the formation of the GLF and GAA, the gay movement would become more integrated.
00:35:56
Speaker
However, black people within the movement were often left feeling at a place within the organizations created to advance gay rights and representation. A parallel can be drawn with a viewpoint of black women within the feminist movement of the 1970s. Gay history writer Martin Duberman, and founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York, writes that Yvonne Flowers was hardly alone in the late 60s or the early 1970s in feeling caught between the extreme sexism or homophobia of the black struggle and the pervasive racism of the feminist and gay ones. This was one of the reasons that many GLF members were reluctant to ally with other activist groups such as the Black Panthers, who did have a reputation for male chauvinism. Similarly, the proposal to support Castro's revolution in Cuba it was complicated by the homophobia stemming from the Catholicism of many of its revolutionaries. Discussions about overcoming problems such as these were held at the firehouse every Sunday, with the Black Lesbian Caucus held their meetings.
00:36:54
Speaker
Eventually these meetings would cease and the members of the caucus would vacate the firehouse uncomfortable with how the environment had turned in their view into what was called a white boy's playhouse. The presence of racial division seen at the firehouse would manifest itself repeatedly throughout the disco venues that sprung up in New York throughout the 1970s.
00:37:14
Speaker
and even well into the 1980s where venues like the Paradise Garage struggled to cater effectively for all the ethnic groups that attended the venues and other dance parties such as the 10th Floor. There was a deliberate intention on the part of its owners to create a venue that would serve an exclusively gay white male crowd.
00:37:32
Speaker
The Gay Activist the Alliance Dance Nights at the Far House, an alternative to university dances hosted by the GLF, signify the link between gay liberation and the cultural development that would ultimately be classified as disco. It's misleading to describe the emergence of disco dancing as being directly attributable to the Stonewall Riots, but there is a consensus that the intensification of gay activism coupled with a rapid increase in the number of venues that allowed for dance or congregation in the period following Stonewall contributed to the confidence and direction within the LGBT community and ultimately wider social acceptance of gay people. By establishing their own culture and eventually their own music, gay society became not only tolerable but desirable to straight America. And by challenging the prohibition of same-sex dancing, gay activists and organizations like the Gay Activist Alliance
00:38:20
Speaker
helped to develop the environment that enabled the growth of disco in the 1970s, the center point for which was again, New York City.