06/28/2025
Can't Erase Us.
In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in New York was raided by a bunch of crayon-eating f**kgiraffes bearing badges and batons. Big surprise, the police got violent. The LGBT community was sick of these frequent raids, got violent right back, and the Stonewall Riots began.
--On This Day in History S**t Went Down: June 28, 1969--
During the ‘50s and ‘60s the FBI was all over the g**s, seeing them as a threat to national security, proclaiming they were susceptible to blackmail. If you had any kind of LGBT material mailed to your house, the Post Office put you on a list. Gay bars were shut down, their patrons arrested and publicly exposed in newspapers. The American Psychiatric Association listed being gay as a mental disorder until 1974. Same-s*x relations were against the law in every state until 1962. You weren’t allowed to hold hands, kiss, or dance with someone of the same s*x; wearing clothes of the opposite s*x was also illegal.
Greenwich Village had a sizeable LGBT community, and in the early ‘60s the mayor of New York was on a mission to rid his city of gay bars because the World Fair was coming and won’t someone think of the children? Most gay bars in the village, including the Stonewall Inn, were owned by the mafia. Due to its illegal nature the place was a sh****le that overcharged for watered-down booze, but it was still known as the gay bar in the city. Despite payoffs to police, raids were frequent.
The infamous raid began at 1:20 a.m. The bar had more than 200 patrons present, and they were lined up by the cops. Trans women and drag queens were arrested, and they resisted. Others refused to give their identification to police. The police said f**k it and began arresting people en masse. Rather than disperse, a frustrated crowd of patrons gathered outside the Stonewall. Then, a spark set off the riot.
A le***an woman, possibly Stormé DeLarverie, was escorted from the club in handcuffs to a police wagon, and she fought. Swearing and screaming, she was beaten on the head with a police baton. She yelled to the crowd “Why don’t you guys do something?” as she was rammed into the back of the wagon. That was it. The crowd went “berserk.”
Police responded with violence which further incited the crowd. One person yelled that the raid happened because the cops hadn’t been paid off, so coins were thrown at the cops as a mocking payoff. It was a spontaneous f**k this after years of torment. One observer said, “We all had a collective feeling like we’d had enough of this kind of sh*t.”
The riots lasted for days and became a catalyst event in the gay liberation movement. On the one-year anniversary of the outbreak of the Stonewall riots, the first gay pride marches took place in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
Those who cannot remember the past … need a history teacher who says “f**k” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY S**T WENT DOWN at JamesFell.com/books.
