Stonewall: When the courageous stood up
Although I said in my last post that I was not really an advocate of gay marriage, I'm not an opponent, either. I am an advocate of equal rights for the GLBT community, however, and that would include the right to be married.
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the defining event that started the gay rights revolution.
The Stonewall Riots were all about gay rights, although I'm not sure the men and women who incited chaos in the early morning of June 28, 1969 thought they were necessarily making history at the time.
They were damn tired of being second-class citizens, however.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)kept lists of known homosexuals and their friends; the U.S. Postal Service kept track of addresses where material pertaining to homosexuality was mailed. In cities, bars catering to homosexuals were shut down by local police departments and customers were arrested and exposed in newspapers. Cities performed "witch hunts" to rid neighborhoods, parks, bars, and beaches of gays.
Very few places in the 1960s welcomed openly gay persons and those that did were often specialized bars that catered to an assortment of patrons. Raids by the police on these bars were very common in the 1960s. When the Stonewall Inn was raided by the cops, officers quickly lost control of the situation and attracted a crowd that was incited to riot.
In David Carter's book, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, one anonymous subject he quoted said, "When did you ever see a fag fight back?... Now, times were a-changin'. Tuesday night was the last night for bullshit.... Predominantly, the theme (w)as, "this shit has got to stop!"
Protests against the New York City police by the gays of Greenwich Village continued into the next evening and several days after. Over the coming months, gay rights organizations sprouted in the city and two years after the Stonewall riots, the first Gay Pride parade was held in 1970.
Today, Gay Pride events are held annually throughout the world toward the end of June to mark the Stonewall riots.
Forty years later, for the most part, the harassment has stopped. With the exception of well-publicized incidents such as the Matthew Shepard murder, gays, for the most part, are no longer beaten in public, gay bars are not raided simply because patrons inside are known homosexual and the postal system is allowing gay and lesbian reading material to be delivered.
But has much changed?
Although our day to day existence isn't challenged, we are somewhat tolerated, but I think that is about all. Gay couples don't have the rights that straight couples do and, really, don't even have the right to be called "couple." Marriage between same-sex couples (at the time of this blogging) is still illegal in all but two states, and even that luxury is being challenged.
The gay community now stands where blacks stood in the 1950s. They did not have the right to a seat on the bus or to use the same water fountains and we don't have the right to marry the person we love, or to openly serve in the military, thanks to Clinton's (Defense of Marriage Act)DOMA and(Don't Ask Don't Tell) DADT.
Without a doubt, gay folks helped elect Barack Obama, our nations' first black man to office. While Obama declared June 2009 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month, citing the riots as a reason to "commit to achieving equal justice under law for LGBT Americans," it remains to be seen whether he will come through for the gay community.
Obama himself is not a supporter of gay marriage.
As citizens of the land of opportunity, we need get up to speed on what happened at Stonewall 40 years ago, when courageous gays who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places.
