'Stonewall Plus Forty' (New Yorker)

Stonewall Plus Forty

by Hendrik Hertzberg

The most improbable of America’s mass movements for civil rights—improbable at the time, inevitable in retrospect—got its start at a most improbable hour in a most improbable place. The hour: two in the morning, forty years ago. The place: the sidewalk in front of the Stonewall Inn, a questionable bar (as it might then have been called by persons of delicate sensibilities) on Christopher Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village. Like most such establishments, the Stonewall was more or less openly run by the Mafia; it served prodigious quantities of watered-down booze, though it had no liquor license; it dealt in cash and seldom paid taxes, unless you counted the envelopes regularly provided to representatives of the local police precinct. But none of these was the ultimate reason that the N.Y.P.D. vice squad raided the Stonewall that night. The reason was that its customers were homosexuals.

This was, so to speak, normal: such raids were a routine hazard of gay nightlife. Normally, patrons who weren’t quick enough to escape unnoticed would submit meekly to arrest or humiliation. This time, they resisted. No one can say for sure why Saturday, June 28, 1969, was different, but the botched bust at the Stonewall touched off not only four nights of raucous, riotous demonstrations but also, in short order, a sustained burst of political activity aimed at making minority sexual orientation, like left-handedness or dark skin, a legally, morally, and socially neutral condition, not an impediment to full membership in the human family.

Even in the legendarily liberated nineteen-sixties, mainstream attitudes toward homosexuality were benighted to a degree that is difficult to exaggerate. “Sodomy” between consenting adults was against the law almost everywhere. “Perversion” was a firing offense throughout the federal government, not just in the military. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic” mental disorder. In the Daily News, gays were “homos.” In 1966, three years before Stonewall, Time, then the voice of middlebrow, middle-class respectability, published a long essay on “The Homosexual in America.” The magazine, while acknowledging that “homosexuals are present in every walk of life,” concluded that homosexuality.....

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