Gay History in the Smithsonian Archives

Filmed in 2024, this video presents memorabilia of gay life in America before and after Stonewall.  Quite poignant.

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Stonewall Inn Now a National Monument

Last Friday, President Obama announced that he has designated the Stonewall Inn in New York City, along with Christopher Park across the street and some other properties in the vicinity, as America's newest national monument, commemorating the modern gay rights movement that began there 47 years ago last night.

The official text of the presidential proclamation is here. 

The Park Service site is here.

The New York Times article is here.

These two announcement videos overlap a bit:






And here's a report from CBS New York:




Ya know, guys, it continues to take my breath away to realize how far we've come just in my lifetime - when Stonewall happened, I was a closeted, totally isolated teenager in a world where merely the word homosexual was loathsome and unmentionable. But now that I'm an old man, the President of the United States has declared a gay bar a national monument.  Incredible.

And I have lived to see this day.

Stonewall

To be released September 25th.  Seems way melodramatic to me, but see what you think, fellas.

Pride 2014

As usual, the Empire State Building is lit up with the colors of the rainbow for three nights this weekend during NYC Pride. This year is the 45th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that mark the beginning of the modern gay-rights era.  I'm sure nobody at the time ever thought they would see such a fabulous sight as this.

How To Crank a Revolution

Linda Hirshman, author of Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, on "What Stonewall Got Right, and Occupy Got Wrong," an excerpt:

This Sunday, as every fourth Sunday in June, the streets of New York will fill with prideful marchers celebrating Pride Month. There will be similar marches, too, in cities around the country. Sunday marks the forty-third year since the uprising in a Greenwich Village bar called Stonewall that supposedly started the modern gay revolution. The myth is that a few hundred angry people acted out in lower Manhattan, and the world changed. Maybe that’s where Occupy Wall Street got the idea that this is how it’s done.

It’s the wrong lesson. Stonewall was the product of a handful of brilliant community organizers applying basic principles of social organizing. Without them, Stonewall would have been nothing more than one of several gay-bar pushbacks in the late sixties, or another one of the non-gay street demonstrations that characterized New York in that tumultuous time. It was the dedicated strategizing of the men and women of the nascent gay movement that turned something unremarkable into the Bastille. Their achievement is a field guide to how to make a social movement, and also offers insight into why Occupy is failing.

Which reminds your Head Trucker - who naively used to think that demostrations just spontaneously happened, like meteorites or flatulence - of the time he was in D.C. for the display of the AIDS quilt in 1992, and somehow my first husband and I and our little group from the far South learned there was to be a kind of memorial concert one night on the Mall, to be followed by a silent candlelight march past the White House.  Being out-of-towners, we of course were the last ones to hear about this, and by the time we did, every store in the vicinity of Dupont Circle, where we were staying, had been ransacked and de-candled.  But we turned up anyway, and gratefully accepted some free candles a stranger was handing out, so we were able to stand and shine - even though we were so damn far away from the stage, if there was a stage, that we couldn't hear a thing but the occasional rumble of what sounded like distant thunder.

Still, we were there and we were queer and totally out in the open about it, which was a great treat for all of us.  (My husband and I walked all over the tourist parts of D.C. hand in hand, in broad daylight - what a thrilling feeling of freedom that was, something we'd never before in our lives been able to do out of doors.)  Eventually, though, the concert apparently having ended, the great crowd, like an enormous flounder, slowly began to scuddle along and pour itself onto a pavement that was headed in the general direction of the White House.  We oozed along with everybody else, proudly holding high our windproofed, Dixie-cupped candles amid the many thousand points of light flowing all around us, wrapped in a sort of speechless reverie at the thought that we were actually there in that famous place, doing these things.

What a surprise it was, then, to discover that during this supposedly silent protest march, there were lean, angry-looking guys with voices like a drill sergeant's, striding through the rows and files of marchers, eyes blazing, whipping us up into chanting "Shame!  Shame!  Shame!" as we approached 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Which I did, and I'm glad I did - we had good reason, and it was, forgive me for saying so, great fun too.

But country boy here made mental note:  Aha, this is how the world really works.

Homosexuality in America - 1964

Decoy officer and partner lead handcuffed homosexual away in Hollywood.  When arrested for soliciting, he burst into tears. 

--Life magazine, June 26, 1964


Found this over on Box Turtle Bulletin, a link to the 1964 Life magazine article "Homosexuality in America."  While we are celebrating Pride and enjoying the afterglow of victory for equal marriage in New York, it's important to remember just how far we've come. 

Do the homosexuals, like the Communists, intend to bury us?  Yes indeed, suggested a startling front-page story in the New York Times and other newspapers last month.  A committee of the highly respected New York Academy of Medicine had come to the conclusion that American homosexuals want far more than to be merely tolerated and even more than to be grudgingly accepted.  Their true goal, said an Academy report, is to convince the world that homosexuality is a "desirable, noble, preferable way of life" - the secret of the greatness of Ancient Greece and "a perfect answer to the problem of the population explosion."

To its credit, Life did try to dispel the outright hysteria:

The Academy committee was dead wrong.  Only a tiny minority of U.S. homosexuals would ever beat the drums so sensationally for their way of life.

But then, as was usual in that pre-Stonewall period, the article went on to dwell relentlessly on the hopelessness of those sick, pathetic, messed-up homos:

Far more of them regard their homosexuality as an affliction.  The lot of the homosexual, as the photographs and article on the preceding pages have shown, is often furtive, hazardous and lonely.  Many homosexuals have gone to psychiatrists begging desperately for help in escaping a life that they had decided was utterly intolerable.

Notice the effect of the subordinate clause here:  they had decided.  Like some confused, childish soul who tries this and tries that, and dislikes all the choices, for no good reason.

But hell, who wouldn't feel that life was intolerable, being labeled night and day not only insane, but also a criminal, and a literally god-damned, hellbound sinner?  Because that is exactly the way it was, living back then in the good old Mayberry days.  I know.  I was there.

So it's somewhat startling to be reminded by this article that notwithstanding all the hatred and hysteria, some big cities had very lively gay communities - with all the very same types of people we still have:  drag queens, leathermen, preppies, long-term couples, hustlers, activists, and so on.  Plus ca change . . . .

But sometimes things do change, for real.  In the context of the above committee report, it's ironic that 47 years later, the American Medical Association has come out for marriage equality.

Then again, some Barneys are stuck back in the kitchen with Aunt Bea:




Bonus: Joe.My.God. has posted the original 1969 report by the New York Daily News on the Stonewall riots. This long, thoroughly homophobic article, titled "HOMO NEST RAIDED - QUEEN BEES ARE STINGING MAD," drips with mockery and sneering condescension at the girly guys who made trouble for the police one hot night in the Village. The unwittingly ironic kicker comes at the very end, though:

The men of the First Division were unable to find any humor in the situation, despite the comical overtones of the raid.

"They were throwing more than lace hankies," one inspector said. "I was almost decapitated by a slab of thick glass. It was thrown like a discus and just missed my throat by inches. The beer can didn't miss, though, it hit me right above the temple." . . .

The police are sure of one thing. They haven't heard the last from the Girls of Christopher Street.

As Joe says, they sure fucking haven't.

Gay Pride: 1970 to 2010

The Stonewall Riots took place on the night of June 27/28, 1969, and subsequent evenings.  The first parade commemorating the event was held in New York on June 28, 1970.  Hence, this year's festivities are the 40th occurrence of public celebrations of Gay Pride.

Your Head Trucker hates to admit it, but he has never once attended any Pride parade or event.  I've always been stuck in some homophobic corner of the Deep South where such things just didn't happen.

And truth to tell, from all the pictures I've seen of such things - not being the party boy type, not at all - it looks like something that might be fun to watch once.  Just to say I'd been there.  Like a visit to your fifth cousin's place back in Oldfuckfield, Mississippi.

Because fellas, and I've never told anyone this, it's always been something of a disappointment to your Head Trucker that we collectively have no stirring anthem (like "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing"), no splendid historical events (like the March on Washington, 1963) to reflect on, no noble leaders (like Dr. King) to inspire and direct our cause.  No grand monuments or lovely statues to remind us of a highminded past.

No, what we have are a few photos of angry kids and drag queens screaming at cops and being hauled off to jail in the middle of the night.  Grainy videos of a few unremarked protestors and some crowds of long-haired youths shouting their way down the streets in a so-what city. 

No, what we have are way too many memories of a dark, crowded barroom, anywhere, with grungy floors and ear-splitting music.  And in the dark, the half-forgotten ache of selfish desires and little intrigues and petty jealousies and the difference between love and what you settle for at 2 a.m.

No, what we have - is it still shown, anywhere? - is the AIDS quilt, which is truly monumental and truly, deeply moving.  But when all is said and done, much more of a heartbreak than an inspiration.

No, all we have is the small, modest memory of the weak standing up to the strong, the few against the many, the despised against the righteous.  And that is our nobility, and our pride.  It is enough; it has to be.

But even though this is not the kind of outfit I would have chosen to join up with, if I had any choice - it's mine, all the good and the bad of it, and it's yours too.  Things are what they are, we have to make the best of them.

And in this little eggshell of space and time we are given - we have to make our lives as true and good and beautiful as possible:  the trinity of supreme values, said the ancient Greeks.  I think we gay people are particularly suited to live out those values, in some ways much more so than our heterosexual neighbors whose minds and hearts are fenced off with barb wire from some very important aspects of life - and utterly deluded about others.

Talking with the ex-roommate a while back, we both agreed that the one commonality all gay men seem to share is a fundamental love of beauty:  creating it, discovering it, expressing it, some way or other.

In spite of all the hate and oppression, while we can let us celebrate what we are.  For of course, we exist only at the sufferance of the enormously larger heterosexual world:  the huge 95 or 97 percent.  The tide is running in our favor now - but having lived a good part of my life near the seashore, I well know that though the tide comes in sometimes, it also goes out.  No current is unchangeable, fellas - remember that.

But we're here now, we're queer now, let's rejoice now.  I don't feel like writing a more profound essay than this jumble of thoughts, forgive me; but here's a couple things to mark this 40th anniversary of Pride.

First, Bryan Safi with a comic take on where we've been and where we are:



Second, a look back at the origins of Pride with people who were there:



Finally, to show how far we have not come, lest anyone be deluded - here's the contrast, the cold, hard difference between most of us and the vast, vast majority of the 97 percent:  here is, all their crocodile-tear protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, what they celebrate and adore and idolize, what they build monuments to, what they glorify with every tribute and sanctify with every prayer, what they will always choose - given a choice, men and women alike - over and instead of us:  from the Rolling Stone interview that just caused an earthquake in Washington:

'How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.

McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.

"Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?"

McChrystal gives him the middle finger. . . .

McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.

"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says.

He pauses a beat.

"Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it."

With that, he's out the door.

"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.

"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."

We've Only Just Begun

Veteran journalist Rex Wockner has this to say about the notion that Stonewall 2.0 is fizzling out:

That's because Stonewall 2.0 already happened. Stonewall itself lasted three nights in 1969, but it set the stage for much that came after it. Stonewall 2.0 lasted, at minimum, 11 days -- and, I suggest, set the stage for much that will come after it.

In David Carter's book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, one Michael Fader told Carter: "We all had a collective feeling like we'd had enough of this kind of shit. ... 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. ... 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."

Sound familiar?