by Evelyn Bailey
On Friday evening June 27, 1969 at 3 a.m., eight plainclothes officers (including two women) raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.
The employees were arrested for selling liquor without a license. The customers were allowed to leave one at a time. They waited outside for their friends. Many had been in such raids before. One observer referred to the gathering as festive with those exiting the club striking poses swishing and camping.
Then there was a sudden mood change when the paddy wagon arrived and the bartender, doorman, three drag queens and a struggling lesbian were shoved inside. There were cat calls and cries to topple the paddy wagon. Once the paddy wagon left the police moved quickly back into the Stonewall Inn and locked themselves in.
The butch lesbians and drag queens fought back. The bar patrons threw bottles and rocks at the police. They chanted, “Gay Power!” and “Liberate Christopher St.!” One person threw a rock through a window and eventually garbage cans, bottles, and even a parking meter were used to assault the building. New York's Tactical Police Force arrived on the scene. The crowd was disbursed.
Later that night and into Sunday morning a crowd again gathered in front of the ravaged bar. Many young gay men showed up to protest the flurry of raids, but they did so by handholding, kissing, and forming a chorus line. “We are the Stonewall girls,” they sang kicking their legs in front of the police. “We wear our hair in curls. / We have no underwear. / We show our pubic hair.” Police cleared the street without incident this time, but another street altercation occurred a few days later.
The Stonewall Riots were over in less than 2 hours. Their impact would be felt for many decades by many men and women. The participants and witnesses have never forgotten this life changing experience. Here are a few of those whose stories reflect the experiences of hundreds and thousands of LGBT men and women young and old.
Virginia Apuzzo was 28 years old. She made her way from Riverdale, New York, where she was a novice at the Convent of Mount Saint Vincent, to New York City's Greenwich Village within days of the Riot . "I read about Stonewall in the newspaper," she recalled in an interview, "and I was very, very curious. Before I entered the convent at age 26, I'd had two lovers and knew I was a lesbian, but I tried to play by the rules. I thought I'd have to live my life with this deep dark secret."
Before the summer was over Apuzzo left the convent, "with what I had on my back," she explained. "When you live a lie, as I was living, you wait for someone to whisper the truth so you can give up the lie, too. That's so much of how I saw and experienced Stonewall and how I've experienced the gay movement."
Apuzzo dedicated her life to public service as both an educator and gay rights pioneer. Along the way, she served as executive director of the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force, founded the Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center, and was appointed to a number of government positions including associate deputy Secretary of Labor. Apuzzo served as the highest ranking gay person in the Clinton White House. She served as assistant to the president for management and administration.
Apuzzo appreciates that Stonewall still has relevance because "Stonewall happens every day." She explained, "When you go to a Pride march and you see people standing on the side of the road watching and then someone takes that first step off the curb to join the marchers, that's Stonewall all over again. When we, here at the Hudson Valley Center, talk to a teacher about the problems of a young student who is in the process of questioning himself or herself and that kid feels somebody standing there talking to the rule-makers on his or her behalf, that kid experiences a piece of Stonewall all over again. It's just in a different context, but for that one young person, it's no less powerful."
In 1969, just a few months after participating in the Stonewall riots, Martin Boyce returned for the fall semester of his junior year at Hunter College in New York City determined to do something he could never have imagined before Stonewall. "I decided that all of my term papers would be gay," he recalled. "I can say now that that was a courageous thing to do because nobody would hand in a paper in 1969 that had those explicit themes. It just wasn't accepted. But for a student like me, it was exciting because it was ground that no one else had covered before."
Boyce sees his participation in the Stonewall riot as "a perfect event in my life because it let me live the kinds of dreams I had of seeing an equitable society. I was able to live my life, which I would have done anyway, but without Stonewall I would have had more opposition. So it turns out the times were on my side, which left me with a basically happy life."
On the first night of the Stonewall riots, 25-year-old Martha Shelley was escorting two out-of-town guests on a tour of Greenwich Village. "They wanted to form a Boston chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis [DOB]," Shelley said, and as the former president of the group's local chapter and their current spokesperson, Shelley was the ideal guide. When Shelley and her guests stumbled across the ongoing riot outside the Stonewall Inn, they didn't realize what was going on. "We saw these people, who looked younger than I was, throwing things at cops," Shelley recalled. "One of the women turned to me and said, 'What's going on here?' I said, 'Oh, it's a riot. These things happen in New York all the time.'"
A day or two later, when Shelley learned about the uprising, "I was tremendously excited by it," she said. "I hadn't had enough sleep for the past couple of days and was feeling feverish and thought we had to have a protest march and be out on the streets. It was like I was on fire with it." In the days that followed, Shelley attended a meeting that had been quickly organized by the Mattachine Society in response to the riots. "There were 400 people at that first meeting, and I raised my hand and suggested a protest march and everyone agreed with it," she said. "We formed a committee to organize the march, which DOB and Mattachine co-sponsored."
It was at a committee meeting later in the week where Shelley is widely credited with naming the first of the post-Stonewall gay rights groups. "People said I was the one who came up with the Gay Liberation Front name. But I was drinking beer and I really don't recollect that. What I remember saying was, 'That's it! We're the Gay Liberation Front!' That was 'it' because it was like the National Liberation Front of North Vietnam, the Vietcong. They were heroic in the eyes of the left. It was David against Goliath, fighting for their nation and for the liberation of their people, daring to stand up to the most powerful army in the world."
Shelley credits Stonewall with "changing my life. Before the riots I wanted to go around and convince the straight world we were okay," she said. "And after Stonewall we told the straight world that we didn't give a damn what they thought. We were going to do what we were going to do and we weren't going to ask their permission."
In the fall of 1965, 17-year-old Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt left home for Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, to study art, but he was only there one year. After his father wanted Tommy to land a union construction job in New Jersey, Lanigan-Schmidt left home. "I took the train to New York," he said, "and I've been here ever since."
Lanigan-Schmidt's first stop was 42nd Street, where he met other gay street kids. "I learned very quickly," he said, "that I couldn't survive the 42nd Street bunch and made my way to the Village. I hung out with the other runaways who were living hand to mouth, mostly pan-handling, and living wherever I could find a place."He was an eyewitness to the Stonewall riots. The uprising was a transformative experience, he said, but the bar's biggest effect on Lanigan-Schmidt came before the riot. "The Stonewall was totally different because you could slow dance together. Holding on to another person without that fear that someone is going to bash you over the head is totally centering. So going to the Stonewall grounded me and then the Stonewall riots just brought that feeling out into the real world."
Despite his father's wishes and Cooper-Union's searing rejection, Lanigan-Schmidt ultimately wound up making art, and showing in exhibitions from the Venice Biennale to the Whitney Museum in New York. For the past two decades he has been teaching in the MFA department at New York City's School of Visual Arts (SVA). "I'm the gay teacher there," he said, "and I've only had trouble once and the once happened just last year. A student, who had been in the Army, said he wished I didn't make such a big deal about being gay. He wasn't telling me it was bad to be gay. He said it just wasn't such a big deal. And he's right."
Shoulders To Stand On is proud to remember these men and women out of hundreds who experienced Stonewall. A mere 42 years later, Stonewall continues to be a focal point of our struggle for equal rights. History does repeat itself. As Virginia Apuzzo said, “Stonewall happens every day.” Shoulders To Stand On is proud to document these experiences, and to preserve the story for generations to come. Please visit us at www.shoulderstostandon.org and share your story and experiences. Send contributions to Shoulders To Stand On, Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley, 875 East Main St. Suite 500, Rochester, NY 14605.