The Stonewall Rebellion. NY. 1969

On June 27, 1969, in New York's Greenwich Village, something unremarkable occurred. The police raided a gay bar, but that night, the patrons of the bar did something that would change history...They fought back.

The term ‘homosexuality’ was coined in the late 19th century by a German psychologist, Karoly Maria Benkert.The discussions about sexuality in general, and same-sex attraction in particular, have occasioned  discussion ranging from Plato's Symposium to contemporary queer theory. Since the history of cultural understandings of same-sex attraction is relevant to the philosophical issues raised by those understandings, it is necessary to review briefly some of the social history of homosexuality. Arising out of this history, at least in the West, is the idea of natural law and some interpretations of that law as forbidding homosexual sex. References to natural law still play an important role in contemporary debates about homosexuality in religion, politics, and even courtrooms. Finally, perhaps the most significant recent social change involving homosexuality is the emergence of the gay liberation movement in the West.

How have major civilizations of the last two millennia treated people who were attracted to their own sex? In the ancient world: Were there homosexual relationships in the ancient world that are similar to those being promoted in today’s culture? 

It would seem that there is evidence that suggests that the ancient world included homosexual relationships that were based on “love” and “commitment” in a way that would appear to be similar to of “monogamous homosexuality.” So what is the reference?

Plato’s Symposium.

Within the Phaedrus dialogue, a we find evidence of what appears to be advocacy for committed homosexual relationships. In fact, Plato was the first to suggest that military groups should be formed by same-sex lovers because it was assumed that lovers would fight to the death for each other. It reads,

“And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other’s side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger?”

 Furthermore, it’s also interesting to note that historians, both modern and ancient, also suggest that Homer’s Illiad gives us another example of romantic homosexual love between the mythological characters Achilles and Patroclus. Though this is fictional, it betrays a perspective that was shared in the ancient world: homosexual relationships were not simply activities of pagan ritual, prostitution, rape, or pederasty. Plato’s Symposium, Homer’s Illiad, and the Sacred Band of Thebes all mitigate against such a narrow perspective.

The history chronicles the lives and achievements of homosexual men and women alongside a darker history of persecution, as he compares the Christian West with the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, Arab Spain, imperial China, and pre-Meiji Japan.

Ancient Greek culture celebrated same-sex love in history, literature, and art, making high claims for its moral influence. By contrast, Jewish religious leaders in the sixth century B.C.E. branded male homosexuality as a capital offense and, later, blamed it for the destruction of the biblical city of Sodom. When these two traditions collided in Christian Rome during the late empire, the tragic repercussions were felt throughout Europe and the New World.

The Church-inspired mutilation, torture, and burning of “sodomites” in sixth-century Byzantium, medieval France, Renaissance Italy, and in Spain under the Inquisition. But Protestant authorities were equally committed to the execution of homosexuals in the Netherlands, Calvin’s Geneva, and Georgian England. The root cause was religious superstition, abetted by political ambition and sheer greed. Yet from this cauldron of fears and desires, homoerotic themes surfaced in the art of the Renaissance masters—Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Sodoma, Cellini, and Caravaggio—often intertwined with Christian motifs. Homosexuality also flourished in the court intrigues of Henry III of France, Queen Christina of Sweden, James I and William III of England, Queen Anne, and Frederick the Great.

Anti-homosexual atrocities committed in the West contrast starkly with the more tolerant traditions of pre-modern China and Japan, as revealed in poetry, fiction, and art and in the lives of emperors, shoguns, Buddhist priests, scholars, and actors. In the samurai tradition of Japan, the celebration of same-sex love rivalled that of ancient Greece.

The ancient Greeks did not have terms or concepts that correspond to the contemporary dichotomy of ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’. There is a wealth of material from ancient Greece pertinent to issues of sexuality, ranging from dialogues of Plato, such as the Symposium, to plays by Aristophanes, and Greek artwork and vases. Probably the most frequent assumption of sexual orientation is that persons can respond erotically to beauty in either sex.

Ancient Rome had many parallels in its understanding of same-sex attraction, and sexual issues more generally, to ancient Greece. This is especially true under the Republic. Yet under the Empire, Roman society slowly became more negative in its views towards sexuality, probably due to social and economic turmoil, even before Christianity became influential.

With the decline of the Roman Empire, and its replacement by various barbarian kingdoms, a general tolerance (with the sole exception of Visigothic Spain) of homosexual acts prevailed. European secular law contained few measures against homosexuality until the middle of the thirteenth century.

The latter part of the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries, however, saw a sharp rise in intolerance towards homosexual sex, alongside persecution of Jews, Muslims, heretics, and others. While the causes of this are somewhat unclear, it is likely that increased class conflict alongside the Gregorian reform movement in the Catholic Church were two important factors. The Church itself started to appeal to a conception of “nature” as the standard of morality, and drew it in such a way so as to forbid homosexual sex (as well as extramarital sex, no procreative sex within marriage, and often masturbation).

For the next several centuries in Europe, the laws against homosexual sex were severe in their penalties. Enforcement, however, was episodic. In some regions, decades would pass without any prosecutions.

 In the 19th century there was a significant reduction in the legal penalties for sodomy. The Napoleonic code decriminalized sodomy, and with Napoleon's conquests that Code spread. Furthermore, in many countries where homosexual sex remained a crime, the general movement at this time away from the death penalty usually meant that sodomy was removed from the list of capital offenses.

In the 18th and 19th centuries an overtly theological framework no longer dominated the discourse about same-sex attraction. Instead, secular arguments and interpretations became increasingly common. Probably the most important secular domain for discussions of homosexuality was in medicine, including psychology. 

In the 20th century sexual roles were redefined once again. For a variety of reasons, premarital intercourse slowly became more common and eventually acceptable. With the decline of prohibitions against sex for the sake of pleasure even outside of marriage, it became more difficult to argue against gay sex. These trends were especially strong in the 1960's, and it was in this context that the gay liberation movement took off. Although gay and lesbian rights groups had been around for decades, the low-key approach of the Mattachine Society (named after a medieval secret society) and the Daughters of Bilitis had not gained much ground. This changed in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, when the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, rioted after a police raid.

The Mattachine Society

Harry Hay along with other L.A. homosexuals created the Mattachine Society in 1950. Their objectives were to unify homosexuals, educate them, provide leadership, and assist “sexual deviants” with legal troubles. Since they were the first gay organization in the world, they were cautious of doing anything which would harm the movement for years to come. Deliberately choosing conservative clothing to highlight that gay citizens were average people; a method many people still believe is the best way to achieve acceptance over half a century later.

In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) as a mental disorder. A large-scale study of homosexuality in 1962 was used to justify inclusion of the disorder as a supposed pathological hidden fear of the opposite sex caused by traumatic parent–child relationships. This view was widely influential in the medical profession. In 1956, however, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker performed a study that compared the happiness and well-adjusted nature of self-identified homosexual men with heterosexual men and found no difference. Her study stunned the medical community, but homosexuality remained in the DSM until 1973.

Facing enormous opposition to its radical approach, in 1953 the Mattachine shifted their focus to assimilation and respectability. Soon after, several women in San Francisco met in their living rooms to form the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) for lesbians. As the DOB grew they developed similar goals to the Mattachine, and urged their members to assimilate into general society.

Early “homophile” groups in the U.S. sought to prove that gay people could be assimilated into society, and they favoured non-confrontational education for homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. The last years of the 1960s, however, were very contentious, as many social movements were active, including the African American Civil Rights Movement, the Counterculture of the 1960s, and anti-war demonstrations. These influences, along with the liberal environment of Greenwich Village, served as catalysts for the Stonewall riots.

The Compton’s Cafeteria Riots [San Francisco]

Drag queens (possibly transgender as such distinctions had yet to be made) arrested for female impersonation, 1960s NYC.

The U.S. military dishonourably discharged thousands of gay servicemen from the Pacific theatre in San Francisco during World War II (early 1940s) because of their sexuality. Many settled in the bay area, San Francisco and Sausalito.

In San Francisco an established gay community had begun in numerous areas including Polk Street, the Tenderloin and south of Market Street. The 1950s saw large amounts of families moving out to the suburbs in what became known as the “White flight”, leaving open large amounts of real estate and creating attractive locations for gay purchasers. By 1963, the Castro’s first gay bar was opened called the “Missouri Mule”.

The Castro’s age as a gay mecca began during the late 1960s with the Summer of Love in the neighbouring Haight-Ashbury district in 1967. The two neighbourhoods are separated by a large mountain, topped by Buena Vista Park. The hippie and free love movements had fostered communal living and free society ideas including housing of large groups of people in hippie communes. Androgyny became popular with men even in full beards as gay hippie men began to move into the area.

The 1967 gathering brought tens of thousands of middle-class youth from all over the United States to the Haight which saw its own exodus when well-organized individuals and collectives started to see the Castro as an oasis from the massive influx. Many of the hippies had no way to support themselves or places to shelter. The Haight became drug ridden and violent chasing off the gay population who looked for a more stable area to live. The gay community created an upscale, fashionable urban centre in the Castro District in the 1970s.

In a larger event in 1966 in San Francisco, drag queens, hustlers, and transvestites were sitting in Compton’s Cafeteria when the police arrived to arrest men dressed as women after the Compton’s Cafeteria staff began to call the police to crack down on transgender and transsexual individuals, who would frequent the restaurant. In response to police arrests, the transgender and transsexual community launched a picket of Compton’s Cafeteria.

Although the picket was unsuccessful, it was one of the first demonstrations against transgender and transsexual violence in San Francisco. On the first night of the riot, the management of Compton’s called the police when some transgender customers became raucous. In the 50’s and 60’s police officers were known to mistreat transgender people.

When one of these known officers attempted to arrest one of the Trans women, she threw her coffee in his face. At that point the riot began, dishes and furniture were thrown, and the restaurant’s plate-glass windows were smashed. Police called for reinforcements as the fighting spilled into the street, where a police car had all its windows broken out and a sidewalk newsstand was burned down. The exact date of the riot is unknown because 1960 police records no longer exist and the riot was not covered by newspapers.

The next night, more transgender people, hustlers, Tenderloin street people, and other members of the LGBT community joined in a picket of the cafeteria, which would not allow transgender people back in. The demonstration ended with the newly installed plate-glass windows being smashed again.

Gay Prohibition graffiti, NYC, 1960s

In 1965, Frank Kameny, founder of the Mattachine DC, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, organized a picket of the White House and other government buildings to protest employment discrimination. The pickets shocked many gay people, and upset some of the leadership of Mattachine and the DOB. At the same time, demonstrations in the Civil Rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War all grew in prominence, frequency, and severity throughout the 1960s, as did their confrontations with police forces.

In 1966, three members of the Mafia invested $3,500 to turn the Stonewall Inn into a gay bar, after it had been a restaurant and a nightclub for heterosexuals. Once a week a police officer would collect envelopes of cash as a payoff; the Stonewall Inn had no liquor license. It had no running water behind the bar—used glasses were run through tubs of water and immediately reused. There were no fire exits, and the toilets overran consistently.

Though the bar was not used for prostitution, drug sales and other “cash transactions” took place. It was the only bar for gay men in New York City where dancing was allowed; dancing was its main draw since its re-opening as a gay club. Alcohol served at the Stonewall Inn was often looted from trucks beforehand, and then watered down, making the mafia a lot of money.

Perpetual Raids & Rising Tensions – A routine raid in 1960s Christopher Street NYC

Police raids on gay bars were frequent—occurring on average once a month for each bar. Many bars kept extra liquor in a secret panel behind the bar, or in a car down the block, to facilitate resuming business as quickly as possible if alcohol was seized. Bar management usually knew about raids beforehand due to police tip-offs, and raids occurred early enough in the evening that business could commence after the police had finished. During a typical raid, the lights were turned on, and customers were lined up and their identification cards checked. “When the lights would flash, it meant you were about to be raided, so you either tried to get out of there or get ready to go to jail.”

Those without identification or dressed in full drag were arrested; others were allowed to leave. Drag queens and transgender patrons had their genitals checked in a bathroom or storage cupboard by a female officer, sometimes having their makeup washed off by dousing their head in a mop bucket.

Some of the men, including those in drag, used their draft cards as identification. Employees and management of the bars were also typically arrested.

Many lived double lives, keeping their private lives secret from their professional ones. This would continue until the 1980s, in which the AIDS epidemic often forced people out of the closet after being diagnosed or dying from AIDS related illnesses.

The bubbling oppression and resentment cultivated over centuries would soon come to its inevitable boil with the Stonewall riots.

The Stonewall Inn

Very few establishments welcomed openly gay people in the 1950s and 1960s. Those that did were often bars, although bar owners and managers were rarely gay. At the time, the Stonewall Inn was owned by the Mafia. It catered to an assortment of patrons and was known to be popular among the poorest and most marginalized people in the gay community: drag queens, representatives of the transgender community, effeminate young men, male prostitutes, and homeless youth.

By the early 1960s, a campaign to rid New York City of gay bars was in full effect by order of Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., who was concerned about the image of the city in preparation for the 1964 World’s Fair. The city revoked the liquor licenses of the bars, and undercover police officers worked to entrap as many homosexual men as possible.

Entrapment usually consisted of an undercover officer who found a man in a bar or public park, engaged him in conversation; if the conversation headed toward the possibility that they might leave together—or the officer bought the man a drink—he was arrested for solicitation.

One story in the New York Post described an arrest in a gym locker room, where the officer grabbed his crotch, moaning, and a man who asked him if he was all right was arrested. Few lawyers would defend cases as undesirable as these, and some of those lawyers kicked back their fees to the arresting officer.

The Mattachine Society succeeded in getting newly elected Mayor John Lindsay to end the campaign of police entrapment in New York City. They had a more difficult time with the New York State Liquor Authority (SLA). While no laws prohibited serving homosexuals, courts allowed the SLA discretion in approving and revoking liquor licenses for businesses that might become “disorderly”.

Despite the high population of gays and lesbians who called Greenwich Village home, very few places existed, other than bars, where they were able to congregate openly without being harassed or arrested.

Stonewall Uprising

Police raids on gay bars were routine in the 1960s, but officers quickly lost control of the situation at the Stonewall Inn. They attracted a crowd that was incited to riot. Tensions between New York City police and gay residents of Greenwich Village erupted into more protests the next evening, and again several nights later.

At 1:20 AM on Saturday, June 28, 1969, four plainclothes policemen in dark suits, two patrol officers in uniform, and Detective Charles Smythe and Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine arrived at the Stonewall Inn’s double doors and announced “Police! We’re taking the place!” Stonewall employees do not recall being tipped off that a raid was to occur that night, as was the custom.

The raid did not go as planned. Standard procedure was to line up the patrons, check their identification, and have female police officers take customers dressed as women to the bathroom to verify their sex, upon which any men dressed as women would be arrested. Those dressed as women that night refused to go with the officers. Men in line began to refuse to produce their identification. The police decided to take everyone present to the police station, after separating those cross-dressing in a room in the back of the bar.

Both patrons and police recalled that a sense of discomfort spread very quickly, spurred by police who began to assault some of the lesbians by “feeling some of them up inappropriately” while frisking them.

Those who were not arrested were released from the front door, but they did not leave quickly as usual. Instead, they stopped outside and a crowd began to grow and watch. Within minutes, between 100 and 150 people had congregated outside, some after they were released from inside the Stonewall, and some after noticing the police cars and the crowd.

Although the police forcefully pushed or kicked some patrons out of the bar, some customers released by the police performed for the crowd by posing and saluting the police in an exaggerated fashion. The crowd’s applause encouraged them further: “Wrists were limp, hair was primped, and reactions to the applause were classic.”

When the first patrol wagon arrived, Inspector Pine recalled that the crowd—most of whom were homosexual—had grown to at least ten times the number of people who were arrested, and they all became very quiet.

Confusion over radio communication delayed the arrival of a second wagon. The police began escorting Mafia members into the first wagon, to the cheers of the bystanders. Next, regular employees were loaded into the wagon. A bystander shouted, “Gay power!” someone began singing “We Shall Overcome”, and the crowd reacted with amusement and general good humour mixed with “growing and intensive hostility”.

The last straw came when a scuffle broke out when a woman in handcuffs was escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon several times. She escaped repeatedly and fought with four of the police, swearing and shouting, for about ten minutes.

Bystanders recalled that the woman, whose identity remains unknown, sparked the crowd to fight when she looked at bystanders and shouted, “Why don’t you guys do something?”

After an officer picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon, the crowd became a mob and went “berserk”: “It was at that moment that the scene became explosively violent.

The police tried to restrain some of the crowd, and knocked a few people down, which incited bystanders even more. Some of those handcuffed in the wagon escaped when police left them unattended (deliberately, according to some witnesses).

As the crowd tried to overturn the police wagon, two police cars and the wagon—with a few slashed tires—left immediately, with Inspector Pine urging them to return as soon as possible. The commotion attracted more people who learned what was happening. Someone in the crowd declared that the bar had been raided because “they didn’t pay off the cops”, to which someone else yelled “Let’s pay them off!”

Coins sailed through the air towards the police as the crowd shouted “Pigs!” and “F****t cops!” Beer cans were thrown and the police lashed out, dispersing some of the crowd, who found a construction site nearby with stacks of bricks. The police, outnumbered by between 500 and 600 people, grabbed several people, including folk singer Dave Van Ronk—who had been attracted to the revolt from a bar two doors away from the Stonewall. Though Van Ronk was not gay, he had experienced police violence when he participated in antiwar demonstrations: “As far as I was concerned, anybody who’d stand against the cops was all right with me, and that’s why I stayed in… Every time you turned around the cops were pulling some outrage or another.”

Ten police officers—including two policewomen—barricaded themselves, Van Ronk, Howard Smith (a writer for The Village Voice), and several handcuffed detainees inside the Stonewall Inn for their own safety.

Garbage cans, garbage, bottles, rocks, and bricks were hurled at the building, breaking the windows. Witnesses attest that “flame queens”, hustlers, and gay “street kids”—the most outcast people in the gay community—were responsible for the first volley of projectiles, as well as the uprooting of a parking meter used as a battering ram on the doors of the Stonewall Inn.

The mob lit garbage on fire and stuffed it through the broken windows as the police grabbed a fire hose. Because it had no water pressure, the hose was ineffective in dispersing the crowd, and seemed only to encourage them. When demonstrators broke through the windows—which had been covered by plywood by the bar owners to deter the police from raiding the bar—the police inside upholstered their pistols.

The doors flew open and officers pointed their weapons at the angry crowd, threatening to shoot. The Village Voice writer Howard Smith, in the bar with the police, took a wrench from the bar and stuffed it in his pants, unsure if he might have to use it against the mob or the police. He watched someone squirt lighter fluid into the bar; as it was lit and the police took aim, sirens were heard and fire trucks arrived.

The Tactical Police Force (TPF) of the New York City Police Department arrived to free the police trapped inside the Stonewall. One officer’s eye was cut, and a few others were bruised from being struck by flying debris.

The TPF formed a phalanx and attempted to clear the streets by marching slowly and pushing the crowd back. The mob openly mocked the police. The crowd cheered, started impromptu kick lines, and sang to the tune of The Howdy Doody Show theme song: “We are the Stonewall girls/ We wear our hair in curls/ We don’t wear underwear/ We show our pubic hairs.”

Bob Kohler, who was walking his dog by the Stonewall that night, saw the TPF arrive: “I had been in enough riots to know the fun was over… The cops were totally humiliated. This never, ever happened. They were angrier than I guess they had ever been, because everybody else had rioted… but the fairies were not supposed to riot… no group had ever forced cops to retreat before, so the anger was just enormous. I mean, they wanted to kill.”

With larger numbers, police detained anyone they could and put them in patrol wagons to go to jail, though Inspector Pine recalled, “Fights erupted with the transvestites, who wouldn’t go into the patrol wagon.” His recollection was corroborated by another witness across the street who said, “All I could see about who was fighting was that it was transvestites and they were fighting furiously.”

Craig Rodwell, owner of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, reported watching police chase participants through the crooked streets, only to see them appear around the next corner behind the police. Members of the mob stopped cars, overturning one of them to block Christopher Street. Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke, in their column printed in Screw, declared that “massive crowds of angry protesters chased [the police] for blocks screaming, ‘Catch them!’

By 4:00 in the morning the streets had nearly been cleared. Many people sat on stoops or gathered nearby in Christopher Park throughout the morning, dazed in disbelief at what had transpired. Many witnesses remembered the surreal and eerie quiet that descended upon Christopher Street, though there continued to be “electricity in the air”.

One commented: “There was a certain beauty in the aftermath of the riot… It was obvious, at least to me that a lot of people really were gay and, you know, this was our street.” Thirteen people had been arrested. Some in the crowd were hospitalized, and four police officers were injured. Almost everything in the Stonewall Inn was broken. Inspector Pine had intended to close and dismantle the Stonewall Inn that night. Pay phones, toilets, mirrors, jukeboxes, and cigarette machines were all smashed, possibly in the riot and possibly by the police.

Craig Rodwell and his partner Fred Sargeant took the opportunity the morning after the first riot to print and distribute 5,000 leaflets, one of them reading: “Get the Mafia and the Cops out of Gay Bars.” The leaflets called for gays to own their own establishments, for a boycott of the Stonewall and other Mafia-owned bars, and for public pressure on the mayor’s office to investigate the “intolerable situation”

The next night, rioting again surrounded Christopher Street; participants remember differently which night was more frantic or violent. Many of the same people returned from the previous evening—hustlers, street youths, and “queens”—but they were joined by “police provocateurs”, curious bystanders, and even tourists.

Remarkable too many was the sudden exhibition of homosexual affection in public, as described by one witness: “From going to places where you had to knock on a door and speak to someone through a peephole in order to get in. We were just out. We were in the streets.”

Thousands of people had gathered in front of the Stonewall, which had opened again, choking Christopher Street until the crowd spilled into adjoining blocks. The throng surrounded buses and cars, harassing the occupants unless they either admitted they were gay or indicated their support for the demonstrators.

Sylvia Rivera saw a friend of hers jump on a nearby car trying to drive through; the crowd rocked the car back and forth, terrifying its occupants. Another of Rivera’s friends, Marsha P. Johnson, climbed a lamppost and dropped a heavy bag onto the hood of a police car, shattering the windshield.

As on the previous evening, fires were started in garbage cans throughout the neighbourhood. More than a hundred police were present from the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Precincts, but after 2:00 a.m. the TPF arrived again. Kick lines and police chases waxed and waned; when police captured demonstrators, whom the majority of witnesses described as “sissies” or “swishes”, the crowd surged to recapture them. Street battling ensued again until 4:00 a.m.

Beat poet and long-time Greenwich Village resident Allen Ginsberg lived on Christopher Street, and happened upon the jubilant chaos. After he learned of the riot that had occurred the previous evening, he stated, “Gay power! Isn’t that great! It’s about time we did something to assert ourselves”, and visited the open Stonewall Inn for the first time. While walking home, he declared to Lucian Truscott, “You know, the guys there were so beautiful—they’ve lost that wounded look they all had 10 years ago.”

Sylvia Rivera, who was in full drag and had been in the Stonewall during the raid, remembered:

“You’ve been treating us like sh*t all these years? Uh-uh. Now it’s our turn! It was one of the greatest moments in my life.”

“The word is out. Christopher Street shall be liberated. The f*gs have had it with oppression.”

Gay Liberation Day NYC, 1970

Christopher Street Liberation Day on June 28, 1970 marked the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots with an assembly on Christopher Street; with simultaneous Gay Pride marches in Los Angeles and Chicago, these mark the first Gay Pride marches in U.S. history.

The next year, Gay Pride marches took place in Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee, London, Paris, West Berlin, and Stockholm. The New York Gay Pride march covered 51 blocks, from Christopher Street to Central Park. The march took less than half the scheduled time due to excitement, but also due to wariness about walking through the city with gay banners and signs. The New York Times reported (on the front page) that the marchers took up the entire street for 15 city blocks. The first parades were quite different from modern parades, as one original attendee recounted:

“On 5th avenue it wasn’t uncommon for people to throw things or shout things; it was a very activist thing just to show up. Often gay people would just stand on the curb and watch because they were too afraid to march, any time someone stepped off of the curb and joined the march you heard a huge, huge cheer because you understood someone had made a choice in their lives. Many people marched with bags over their heads because they were afraid of losing their jobs. There was usually a contingent of public school teachers who marched with brown paper bags over their heads so they wouldn’t be fired.”

During one of the early marches for Gay Liberation, a reporter asks Marsha P. Johnson, decked in full drag, “why are you here today?” – to which she bellowed back in her trademark “field” voice with; “DARLING, I WANT MY GAY RIGHTS NOW!”

Reflecting on the Riot’s a year earlier, Michael Fader said:

“We all had a collective feeling like we’d had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn’t anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration… Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back. It was like the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us…. All kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined, and everything just kind of ran its course. It was the police who were doing most of the destruction. We were really trying to get back in and break free. And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. 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, and that’s what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom a long time overdue, and we’re 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.”

After the Stonewall riots, gays and lesbians in New York City faced gender, race, class, and generational obstacles to becoming a cohesive community. Within six months, two gay activist organizations were formed in New York, concentrating on confrontational tactics, and three newspapers were established to promote rights for gays and lesbians.

Within a few years, gay rights organizations were founded across the U.S. and the world. On June 28, 1970, the first Gay Pride marches took place in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago commemorating the anniversary of the riots. Similar marches were organized in other cities.

Today, Gay Pride events are held annually throughout the world toward the end of June to mark the Stonewall riots.

When asked about the first Pride Parades, Marsha P. Johnson said:

“I wanted to see gays at least have a start in life, because they never had anything called a parade that was their own, they always had to hide in the closet of somebody else’s parade.”

Gay Liberation Front

Although the Mattachine Society had existed since the 1950s, many of their methods now seemed too mild for people who had witnessed or been inspired by the riots.

With a flyer announcing: “Do You Think Homosexuals Are Revolting? You Bet Your Sweet Ass We Are!” the Gay Liberation Front was formed, the first gay organization to use “gay” in its name. Previous organizations such as the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, and various homophile groups had masked their purpose by deliberately choosing obscure names.

Within two years of the Stonewall riots there were gay rights groups in every major American city, as well as Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. People who joined activist organizations after the riots had very little in common other than their same-sex attraction. Many who arrived at GLF or GAA meetings were taken aback by the number of gay people in one place.

Race, class, ideology, and gender became frequent obstacles in the years after the riots. This was illustrated during the 1973 Stonewall rally when, moments after Barbara Gittings exuberantly praised the diversity of the crowd, feminist activist Jean O’Leary protested what she perceived as the mocking of women by cross-dressers and drag queens in attendance.

The decade after Stonewall saw gradual, but halting, progress in the cause of gay rights. In 1972, a lesbian was allowed to retain custody of her children in a contested divorce for the first time in American history. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association declared for the first time that homosexuality was not a mental illness. And by the end of the decade, 22states had repealed their laws making consensual sodomy a crime.

These developments sparked a sharp backlash, however. The most dramatic explosion arose over a proposed gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. In 1977, the county commission, following the lead of several other cities, passed an ordinance prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Local religious groups were outraged, and demanded an immediate repeal of the ordinance.

This victory generated momentum for a new, even more deeply religion-based anti-gay movement.  Within two years, many of the laws that had been enacted in other cities to protect gays from discrimination were also repealed.

Over the course of the next decade, AIDS ravaged the homosexual community, ironically, though, the horror of AIDS brought homosexuality into the light. As thousands of gay men died horrible deaths, people had to take notice – often, though not always, with sympathy and concern. 

“Gay invisibility” was suddenly melting away. As if in a dream, gays and lesbians suddenly saw newspaper articles affirming their social identity. In 1993, Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America won the Tony Award, and the following year the movie Philadelphia, which addressed the AIDS epidemic, because the top-grossing film in the nation. At the Gay and Lesbian March on Washington in 1993, hundreds of thousands of individuals wearing pink triangles marched proudly past the White House in support of equality.

In the view of the Christian Right, homosexual perversion, immorality, and degeneracy were being spewed across the land. Donald Wildmon, the president of the American Family Association, railed that homosexuality was “a sin grievous to God and repulsive to Christians.” This struggle, he declared, was a matter of life and death, because if we fail, “we fear the judgment of God on our nation.” The battle lines had clearly been drawn.

And the battle soon turned to the Supreme Court. ...

The Supreme Court, and the rights of gays and lesbians

In August 1982, an Atlanta police officer went to the home of Michael Hardwick to serve an arrest warrant for public drinking. Upon entering the home, the officer observed Hardwick and another man engaged in oral sex. The officer placed both men under arrest for the crime of sodomy.

In Bowers v. Hardwick, decided in 1986, the Supreme Court held that Georgia’s prohibition of homosexual sodomy was not unconstitutional. Noting that the Constitution says nothing about a right to commit sodomy, and that proscriptions against homosexuality “have ancient roots,” Justice Byron White, who had been appointed to the Court by President Kennedy, and who wrote the majority opinion, concluded that, to claim that the Constitution protects “a right to engage in such conduct . . . is, at best, facetious.”

In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Warren Burger added that condemnation of homosexual conduct “is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards” and that “to hold that the act of homosexual sodomy” was somehow protected by the Constitution “would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.”

Justice Harry Blackmun, joined by Justices Brennan, Marshall, and Stevens, dissented. Although conceding that “traditional Judeo-Christian values” had proscribed homosexual intimacy for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, Blackmun insisted that that fact “cannot provide an adequate justification” in itself for the Georgia law. “That certain . . . religious groups condemn the behaviour at issue,” he reasoned, “gives the State no license to impose their judgments on the entire citizenry.”

To the contrary, “the legitimacy of secular legislation” depends on “whether the State can advance some justification for its law beyond its conformity to religious doctrine.” Finding no such justification, Blackmun concluded that the Georgia statute could not be reconciled with the United States Constitution. This, however, was a dissenting opinion.

The Supreme Court’s second decision involving the constitutionality of laws making sodomy a criminal offense, Lawrence v. Texas, was pretty much a re-run of Bowers. Police officers in Houston were dispatched to a private residence in response to a reported disturbance. After they entered the residence, they saw two men engaging in anal sex. The men were arrested, charged, and convicted of violating a Texas statute making it a crime for any person to engage “in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex.”

Since 1986, Bowers had been used by politicians, legislators, and judges to justify discrimination against gays and lesbians in deportation hearings, adoption proceedings, military discharges, employment discrimination, and a host of other contexts. After all, if homosexual conduct is criminal, than a homosexual is no different than a rapist, a robber, or a thief.

Much had changed, however, in the 17 years between Bowers and Lawrence. Not only had AIDS devastated the gay community and changed the public’s perception of homosexuality, but sixty percent of Americans now thought that homosexual sex should no longer be deemed a criminal offense.

In a six-to-three decision, the Supreme Court overruled Bowers and held the Texas statute unconstitutional. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who had been appointed by President Reagan, delivered the opinion of the Court. Although conceding that the Framers of the Constitution had not expressly guaranteed the right to engage in homosexual sex, Kennedy explained that the Framers had intentionally left some constitutional guarantees open-ended because “they knew” that “later generations can see that laws once thought proper in fact serve only to oppress.” That, Kennedy maintained, was the situation in Lawrence. There was, he concluded, no constitutionally legitimate justification for making same-sex sex a crime.

Justice Scalia, joined in by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Thomas, dissented. Scalia accused the Court of signing on to what he termed the “homosexual agenda,” and he fumed that the Court had no business invalidating legislation that, he maintained, had been legitimately enacted by the citizens of Texas.

Echoing Justice Scalia’s outrage, religious conservatives throughout the nation were livid. Pat Robertson denounced the Court for rending the “moral fabric of the nation,” Jerry Falwell warned that Lawrence would lead to bestiality, and a pastor in Kansas fumed that it marked “the death knell of American civilization.”

For gays in America, Lawrence meant much more than that rarely-enforced anti-sodomy laws could no longer be legally enforced. Rather, Lawrence meant that never again would their rights be dismissed by the highest tribunal in the land as, “at best, facetious,” and never again would they wonder whether the words engraved on the pediment of the Supreme Court building, “Equal Justice Under Law,” included them. The Constitution was now their constitution, too.

In San Francisco, a group of veterans who had been expelled from military service during World War II because of their sexual orientation proudly saluted as a huge Rainbow Flag, which had flown atop an eighty-foot pole for more than five years, was lowered and an American flag for the first time was raised in its place.

It is striking how far the Court had moved in the 17 years from Bowers to Lawrence. This was due to several factors, one of which was not an overall move of the Court in a more “liberal” direction. To the contrary, on a broad range of issues, including affirmative action, campaign finance, gun control, and voting rights, the Court, with the additions of Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Souter, had grown, if anything, notably more “conservative” than the Court at the time of Bowers.

What had changed in those years was the public awareness of gays and lesbians in society and the public and legal understanding of both the morality and wisdom of laws discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. Indeed, public opinion on this issue had shifted dramatically between Bowers and Lawrence.

This shift was due to many factors, but most important was the profound change in the visibility of gays and lesbians in American society. This transformation affected not only everyday citizens, but also legislators, mayors, governors, presidents, and judges.

With these changes, the traditional judicial understandings of such fundamental legal concepts as liberty, equality, and due process – as applied to homosexuals – were suddenly called into question, and rightly so. Indeed, it is striking that four of the seven justices who had been appointed by Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush voted with the majority in Lawrence.

And the battle will continue with same-sex marriage. ..

The Supreme Court and same sex marriage

In 1990, however, only four years after Bowers v. Hardwick, three gay couples in Hawaii applied for marriage licenses, which were of course denied. Audaciously, they then filed suit in state court claiming that the state’s refusal to allow same-sex couples to marry violated the Hawaii constitution. To pretty much everyone’s surprise, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that the state’s law restricting marriage to a man and a woman might violate the Hawaii constitution.

This decision provoked a furious response from the Christian Right, and almost immediately states across the nation rushed to amend their state constitutions to define marriage as involving one man and one woman. The goal of these amendments was both to prevent their own state courts from following the Hawaii Supreme Court’s suggestion, and to make it impossible for future majorities in the state, should they emerge, to legalize same-sex marriage by enacting legislation to that effect. Instead, they would have to go through the much more onerous process of re-amending their state constitutions.

These issues played out at the national level, as well. As the 1996 election approached, the anti-gay rhetoric was virulent and Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich proposed the “Defence of Marriage Act,” or DOMA, which provided, among other things, that if any state recognized marriages between persons of the same sex, persons entering into such marriages would be ineligible for the multitude of federal benefits that were otherwise available to married couples.

The hearings on DOMA were “openly homophobic.” Members of Congress described gays and lesbians “as sick, perverted, and dangerous"... Congress quickly enacted the legislation.

 Seven years later, though, in 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Court held that laws denying same-sex couples the freedom to marry violated the Massachusetts constitution. Massachusetts thus became the first state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage. In response, thirteen additional states promptly amended their state constitutions to forbid same-sex marriage.

Thus, despite several seemingly landmark victories, the movement for same-sex marriage had stalled. DOMA remained the law nationally, most efforts to legalize same-sex marriage had been overturned, and by 2013 more than thirty states had enacted state constitutional amendments expressly outlawing same-sex marriage.

On June 26, 2013 – ten years to the day after its decision in Lawrence. As in Lawrence, Justice Kennedy authored the opinion of the Court. He was joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito dissented.

In his opinion for the Court, Justice Kennedy explained that the issue presented was not whether states were constitutionally obligated to recognize same-sex marriage, but whether the federal government could constitutionally discriminate against couples who were legally married in a state because those individuals happened to be of the same sex.

In approaching this question, Kennedy emphasized that a state’s decision to give same-sex couples “the right to marry conferred upon them a dignity and status of immense import.” Kennedy maintained that a central purpose of DOMA was to undermine “the equal dignity” of gays and lesbians.

Indeed, DOMA’s “principal effect,” he maintained, “is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal.” Because no legitimate federal interest justified what he described as “the purpose and effect” of disparaging “those whom the State sought to protect,” Kennedy concluded that DOMA violated the Constitution.

In a furious dissenting opinion, Justice Scalia characterized the Court’s reasoning as nothing short of “remarkable.” At various points, Scalia dismissed Kennedy’s analysis as “perplexing,” “confusing,” “absurd,” “overcooked,” and “legalistic argle-bargle.” Scalia reiterated what he had insisted upon in Lawrence: “The Constitution does not forbid the government to enforce traditional moral and sexual norms.” That, in itself, he maintained, is sufficient justification for the federal government’s decision not to recognize same-sex marriages.

OBERGEFELL v. HODGES

In the years after Windsor, there was a virtual avalanche of lower court decisions invalidating state laws denying same-sex couples the freedom to marry. Then, in Obergefell v. Hodges, decided on June 26, two years to the day after Windsor, the Supreme Court, in another bitterly-divided five-to-four decision, held that states cannot constitutionally deny two persons of the same sex the freedom to marry.

The opinion, written once again by Justice Anthony Kennedy, and joined once again by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, was premised on what Justice Kennedy described as “the transcendent importance of marriage.

“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfilment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

The final paragraph of Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion holding that couples of the same sex have a constitutional right to wed is a cogent statement of what marriage means.

Although conceding that marriage had traditionally been understood as between a man and a woman, Kennedy declared that it is both appropriate and inevitable in a free society that “new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations” of Americans over time.

Noting that the Court had long held that fundamental “personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy” can be protected by the Constitution, and that the Court had long recognized marriage as one of those fundamental rights, Kennedy concluded that, although “the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may have long seemed natural and just, its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest.”

Predictably, Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito dissented. Roberts accused the justices in the majority of rampant and reckless judicial activism. “The majority’s decision,” he declared, “is an act of will, not legal judgment.” Indeed, he fumed, the majority’s position was “simply indefensible as a matter of constitutional law.”

Upon exiting the Supreme Court building on June 26, 2015, Jim Obergefell, in tears, observed that “today’s ruling . . . affirms that our love is equal” and that “all Americans deserve equal dignity, respect and treatment.” He was surrounded by hundreds of supporters beaming with joy and pride, waving rainbow flags, and chanting “Love Conquers.”

At the same time, throngs of couples and families – gay and straight – flocked to the Stonewall Inn to rejoice and to pay tribute to the determined gay rights activists whose efforts over the years had opened the door to the Court’s decision. For most of those who gathered at the Stonewall, this was a moment they had never thought possible in their lifetime.

This enthusiasm reflected the views of a clear majority of the American people. Indeed, despite the complaints of the dissenting justices that the Court’s decision in Obergefell had been foisted upon the American people, 58 percent of Americans supported the decision.

In the four months after the Court’s decision, some 200,000 gays and lesbians entered into same-sex marriages in states across the nation, bringing to one million the number of gays and lesbians in same-sex marriages. More than a quarter of these families were already raising their own children.

Same-sex marriage around the world

Ironically the first "gay" marriage in Spain was with two women and they married in 1901.

Marcela and Elisa, school teachers, lived their lesbianism secretly until they decided to marry for the Church. To deceive the priest Elisa himself off as Mario. She would take the daughter of an Army captain to the altar. It happened in “A Coruña”, on June 8, 1901. When they were discovered, they had to flee Spain. But they had already passed into history as the first gay marriage.

Same-sex marriage is legal in 24 countries: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay, United States.

The first country to legalise same-sex marriage was the Netherlands in 2001.

In 2017 so far, same-sex marriage laws came into force in Finland and Slovenia. But gay activists say more remains to be done in Slovenia, where same-sex couples are denied the right to adopt children and excluded from artificial insemination.

In Africa, where homosexuality is a crime in many countries and can lead to imprisonment or the death penalty, South Africa alone has granted the same access to gay couples. Same-sex marriage legislation came into force there in 2006.

There are no countries in Asia that allow same-sex couples to marry, or enter civil unions of any kind.

Almost one in three adults globally believe people of the same sex should be allowed to marry, a survey of almost 100,000 people in 65 countries showed in 2016.

Bibliography:

Homosexuality and Civilization: Louis Crompton. Harvard University Press.

Homosexuality in the Ancient World by Luke Geraty.  

Brent L. Pickett. Historical Dictionary of Homosexuality. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Geoffrey R. Stone. The Supreme Court, and the rights of gays and lesbians. University of Chicago. 

A look at same-sex marriage around the world by Anna Pujol-Mazzini. Thomson Reuters Foundation. 

Homosexualidad: Primer matrimonio “Gay” en España. Crónica del Diario el mundo. 
 
From Ancient Theatre to Modern Drag: 100+ Stunning Historical Images That Document the Timeline of LGBT History by James B. Barnes.