|
|
|
|
|
Ladies, take a bow
By Brian W. Fairbanks
Stonewall. Merriam-Webster defines it this way: "to refuse to comply or cooperate with." Whether it was coincidence or fate, the Stonewall Inn, a gay watering hole at 57 Christopher Street in New York, was true to its name on June 27, 1969. On that night, the police raided the joint as they had many times in the past. The Stonewall, rumored to be Mafia owned, did not have a liquor license, but few of its patrons believed that was why the law paid a visit. The Stonewall was raided because it was, in unofficial police language, a "fag bar." Such raids barely caused a ripple but this one was different.
"Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad," is the way the New York Daily News described the events in their headline a week later. The patrons, most of them drag queens, did not go quietly as they had in the past.
They stonewalled.
The police not only had their hands full with the queens from the bar, but also from a crowd that had formed outside. That's when the battle really began.
"C'mon girls, let's go get 'em," was the battle cry as the queens pelted the cops with bobby pins, lipstick, compacts and curlers, determined to challenge the harassment they had meekly accepted in the past.
The war lasted some two hours, and when the face powder cleared, the police had 13 arrests but also a promise that this would not be an isolated incident. "If they close up all the gay joints in the area, there is going to be all out war," one queen threatened.It's doubtful anyone believed it at the time, least of all the Daily News whose report of the incident had a distinctly condescending tone, but a new civil rights movement was born that night. It was at Stonewall that the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movement as we know it today came to be.
Three decades later, the Stonewall Inn would be designated a national landmark, becoming the only gay site with a place on the National Register of Historic Places.
Comparing the uprising to The Boston Tea Party and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, John Berry, then Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior, described its significance when officially designating the Stonewall Inn a landmark.
"Laws that would call our love perverse, that hold our sacrifice of life in the service of our country any less dear, and that conclude that by our very existence we are somehow inferior are not laws founded in truth," he said. "They are repugnant and must be repudiated." Even President Clinton cited the Stonewall protestors as "a courageous group of citizens."
The greatest irony of the Stonewall riots may be that those who took part were in some ways left behind as Gay Lib swept the globe in the 1970s. As lesbians and gay men became more and more visible, and more eager to blend into mainstream or, if you prefer, "straight" society, drag queens were more likely to be stigmatized than accepted by the movement. Since the average heterosexual believed that all gay men wanted to be women anyway, men who flounced around in dresses and high heels were sometimes shunned as reinforcing homosexual stereotypes. "A prophet is without honor in his own land," the saying goes, and that seemed to be true of the drag queen.
Such prejudices seemed to suggest that there was as much bigotry among gays for people who weren't "like us" as there was in straight land. And there was a hidden message behind such thinking. If men who wanted to be women were inferior, was that not the same as saying that women were inferior too?
Thankfully, in recent years we have liberated ourselves from our own prejudices. Not only are lesbians given the recognition they sometimes did not receive in the days when the focus was almost always placed on gay men, but the transgendered among us have also been welcomed into our community. That is as it should be. Without them, we might be marching back into the closet rather than in the streets.So as we celebrate Pride, let us salute or perhaps curtsy to the "women" who made our annual celebrations of pride possible.
Ladies, take a bow.