The Stonewall Story you know, is a hybrid Myth. But does that matter?
June 25, 2019 6:34 AM   Subscribe

The Stonewall Riots happened within Living History, yet many of the known 'facts' may just be myths.. Who threw the first Brick? Is that a loaded question? Does it matter?

Wikipedia describes the Stonewall Riots as:

"The Stonewall riots (also referred to as the Stonewall uprising or the Stonewall rebellion) were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the gay (LGBT) community"

But how spontaneous were they? Various Media representations and reinterpretations of the event have been criticised for trying to 'reframe history'.

In the Youtube linked [SYTL 9 min 45 seconds] video people who were actually there, as well as contemporary LGBTQI+ activists / scholars, try to describe and contextualise what really happened and why.
posted by Faintdreams (29 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
Stonewall and the Myth of Self-Deliverance by Kwame Anthony Appiah is a good read along these lines.
posted by stevil at 6:51 AM on June 25, 2019 [4 favorites]


This sounds like the way Rosa Parks and the bus strike has been cast as spontaneous when she was a part of a long path of training and preparation and planning.
posted by kokaku at 6:57 AM on June 25, 2019 [17 favorites]


You wonder about these hinge moments in history. We can draw lines backward, ala James Burke's Connections, but looking forward ... there's just no clue. What will be the queer tipping points that are just happening now? And where will they lead.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:28 AM on June 25, 2019


I stopped in for a beer at the Stonewall about four years ago and sat at the bar just to see if I got a vibe from the place. The barman told several patrons the same story about being there the night of the riots with such practised ease that I knew it was part of a routine. He didn't look like he was in his sixties though and nobody pulled him up on it. It was a good yarn though.
posted by Molesome at 7:30 AM on June 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


It sounds like you're claiming that their recollections are fabrications, which is quite an assumption if it is what you're saying.

I imagine you're far from the first person to pop in to see and hear the history of the place, and I'm sure the regulars share their experiences often enough that it's become a routine for them.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:44 AM on June 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


It sounds like you're claiming that their recollections are fabrications, which is quite an assumption if it is what you're saying.

From a neurological standpoint, all recollections are fabrications. Your recollection of an event is you remembering the last time you recalled an event, and so your recollections can drift wildly from what actually happened to you, particularly if you learn other information that you then incorporate into the event.

That doesn't mean they're lying, far from it. It does, however, mean to never trust eyewitness testimony when you're on jury duty.
posted by Merus at 8:25 AM on June 25, 2019 [13 favorites]


Anyone who would expect such an event--a chaotic clash with law enforcement by marginalized people late at night that ended up having vital historical significance--not to accrete myth around it is...a little naive, to be honest.
posted by praemunire at 8:25 AM on June 25, 2019 [6 favorites]


As if to prove Merus' point; Fred E. Tree - my recollection is of a much younger man tending bar that night, maybe more like in his forties, but I guess it could have been Fred.
posted by Molesome at 8:46 AM on June 25, 2019


I don't think anyone seriously argues that there were no gay rights movements before Stonewall. Or if such a person exists making that claim, I doubt that anyone would take their claim too seriously. Whether or not this strawman exists, Stonewall did happen and it was definitely a turning point in our history.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:47 AM on June 25, 2019 [4 favorites]


This doesn’t directly address Stonewall but it’s a nice account of some of the conflicts that were going on in the years leading up to it.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:10 AM on June 25, 2019 [3 favorites]


I don't think anyone seriously argues that there were no gay rights movements before Stonewall.

I think it’s more about the myth (ala Rosa Parks) that one spontaneous symbolic moment tipped the balance.

Of course neither Rosa Parks on the bus nor the Stonewall riots were truly spontaneous — in the case of Rosa Parks it was literally a planned event, in the case of Stonewall it was the latest in a series of riots that reflected the gay community’s growing resolve. But that resolve didn’t just pop up one day, it owed a lot to the little people: anonymous activists and organizers doing thankless (and at times) dangerous jobs to bring together and galvanize the community.

I think it is so so important to tone down the determined focus on Stonewall that obscures their work. Why? Because right now we are all the little people. It is not incumbent on us to directly organize the next great moment in civil right’s history, it is sufficient (and necessary) for us to build and encourage communities so that there is energy and focus when the time comes.

I do my little sliver of a hair to help. I don’t expect a plaque; I don’t even expect to be mentioned in the newsletter. But I will be annoyed and somewhat disheartened if after the next Big Event, an attitude that only Big Events matter prevails and everything that is happening right now becomes a single throwaway line in their history.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:45 AM on June 25, 2019 [9 favorites]


I have been working on a book project for more than a year, about sex scandals that happened in Boise in 1955, and there were similar sex scandals that occured in Walla Wall in 1912. Part of what happened in Stonewall, was the move of queerness from action to identity, but part of that problem was that Stonewall reified this idea that all queerness happened in New York. The other problem, by pushing Riveria as the instigator, it means that throwing the brick was the only thing that Riveria did, and also by making her a saint, it denies her life time of work that is now found distasteful, we can think of her as a brick thrower, which means that we don't have to think of her advocacy for sex work.
posted by PinkMoose at 10:12 AM on June 25, 2019 [15 favorites]


I have now seen that first video shared numerous times by TERFs on twitter as a "gotcha! Trans women didn't start Stonewall! It was a butch lesbian!" and is then used as a jumping-off point to denigrate trans people as taking credit for LGBT developments that had been done by cis lesbians/gay men.

I don't have any disagreement with the video, and the video itself is not in any way anti-trans - but this is the first time I have come across it linked to when it isn't surrounded by hateful anti-trans rhetoric. That in itself may make part of the video's point; the 'story' around that video is (in certain parts of the internet) now a different 'story' to that of the video itself.
posted by Vortisaur at 10:56 AM on June 25, 2019 [5 favorites]


I just wonder why people think that loose bricks litter the streets of New York
posted by Automocar at 11:09 AM on June 25, 2019 [2 favorites]


I can't watch video at the moment, so I'm not sure if it's mentioned, but the Nib piece linked above talks about Compton's Cafeteria. The new/updated season of Tales of the City had a great/heartbreaking episode centered around Compton's and the protest/riot there - I'd shamefully never even heard of it!
posted by the sockening at 12:59 PM on June 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


I just wonder why people think that loose bricks litter the streets of New York

i mean. new york was on fire for the entire 70s.
posted by poffin boffin at 1:15 PM on June 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


Whenever I hear a popular story that's purported to be the truth, and particularly when it's beautiful and concise and magical and imparts a lovely bit of wisdom with an elegantly restrained narrative, I'm reminded how little most people understand about how memory and perception work. I tell stories about my past, and they're true as I recall them, but they change and drift and focus and refocus over the years, and they are cities built on the ruins of other cities built on the ruins of cities and villages and encampments and finally the exposed bedrock of what actually happened. Storytelling is a strange thing, and if you don't read every extant version and compile together a shaggy, contradictory, inconsistent mess of a narrative, you're either going to get a fragmentary understanding or one that's the work of a storyteller concerned with reinforcing their own intention.

When I was a gay fledgling, square in the middle of the Reagan Memorial AIDS Epidemic™ in the ruinous eighties, my vision of the history of my people was weirdly focused by the combination of early narratives of the movement that I could get from the library, and it mattered that a lot of them were penned by people who came into their own with the GLF, for instance. The GLF was largely a group that rejected the work of people like Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings as assimilationist, so their retellings mythologized the roots of their movement while dismissing Mattachine and Bilitis as apologists rooted in shame.

They're right and they're wrong.

Earlier movements will tell you a narrative rooted in a more conservative, incremental movement working in and against a culture seething with hatred of anything even microscopically off axis from the media narrative of television-ready perfection, and they're right and wrong, too.

In the eighties, in a decade so full of virulent homophobia and misogyny that it's almost impossible to manifest nostalgia for, say, the films you loved as a teen then, because...oh, the underdog protagonist rapes a woman as his triumph against the jocks, or everyone yells "faggot" in a nonstop caterwauling chorus of teenybopper straightfear, you'd never hear that anyone at Stonewall was black, or transgender, or latina, or...well, almost anything off the established trail of gay being equal to well-dressed white men with an artistic disposition and acceptance-worthy middle-class suburban preppiness. You'd hear plenty of narratives, but they were focused through the lens of their time and internal prejudices.

I met my first grown-up romantic partner literally at the feet of Frank Kameny, where the gay twenty-somethings support group hosted him in the old DC Gay Community Center that my hazy memory reminds me was near 17th and R outside Dupont Circle. It was a medium-sized room in the Community Center in a DC rowhouse, and enough people from the group showed up that we ran out of chairs and my future partner and I sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor around Frank like kids in a kindergarten storytime.

Kameny told stories I'd never heard, in his own distinct voice and in a rambling, joyous, and verging-on-giddy/exasperated excitement about his history in the movement, and it was like having an exuberant gay uncle to relate colorful tales of days-gone-by in an era where all the exuberant gay uncles were all being lost to the plague years. Hearing about protests like the Annual Reminders, which usually only garnered a line or two in the then-popular histories and the usual shot of a dress-clad Barbara Gittings carrying an exquisitely-lettered picket sign complete with "HOMOSEXUALS" in the breeziest lettering this side of a sale on cantaloupes at a mid-sixties grocery store was...just refreshing, and amazing, and another layer exposed in the fossil strata of our history.

He was hard to market in a scene then all shaved and pressed and dressed to kill in a choking cloud of Drakkar Noir, but fortunately, Frank lived long enough to tell his tales in the modern era for our kind of people and get the reverence that he deserved (unlike poor Sylvia and Marsha, to name a few). We heard him, though, my first gentleman caller and I, and it fueled more interest in history and the anthropology of sexual deviation, and when I think of Stonewall now, it reminds me of a tree I once walked past in heavy fog in late autumn in the little town where I grew up and where I still live.

I was on a walk, listening to something quiet and electronic on the little Minidisc player strapped onto my belt, and I came up to a tree in front of the local armory. It was backlit by a glaring mercury light, and I paused, taking in the thrilling glory of it. Shafts of light cast out from the dark form of the tree, each formed by the shadows of the leafless branches, reaching out in blocky blue-white arms from the tree, and when I'd taken it in, I started walking, but the tree just pulsated and writhed with activity, those fog-defined beams moving and changing and interacting as I moved. It struck me, when I stopped again, that all these different forms were really all constant, unchanging from an imaginary all-encompassing perspective, but it was my movement through all the possible ways of seeing the tree and the shadows that defined what I was seeing.

I can't define a single view of this tree as what the tree looks like. It looks like all these things, and the things I can't see, either.

Stories work the same way, particularly fifty years on, and how people are affected and changed by events are part of the story, and the histories and how we remember them so differently are part of the story, and the things that were amplified to make a point are part of the story, or which were devalued to undermine a participant or movement are part of the story, and we can tell a story of Stonewall, but can we ever tell the story, as if there's every really such a thing, in the absence of ubiquitous cameras and recording instruments?

We can listen, though, and read, and let them all aggregate for us, and we can challenge and explore and wonder why one person remembers a thing one way, and what that meant for them to remember it that way, and why one thinks the opposite is true, and what that meant for them. If we're desperate for a single true story that's inarguably clear and coherent and covers all, we're likely to be disappointed, but if we accept that a blizzard of stories still takes the form of the places and people around which it blew and surged in a storm of change, there's so much to learn.
posted by sonascope at 1:22 PM on June 25, 2019 [21 favorites]


I just wonder why people think that loose bricks litter the streets of New York

The Avengers are always fighting off supervillans and aliens, so buildings are getting HULK SMASHed all the time, right?
posted by AzraelBrown at 2:07 PM on June 25, 2019


Nah, we have Damage Control to clean up after.
posted by praemunire at 2:09 PM on June 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


I don't think anyone seriously argues that there were no gay rights movements before Stonewall. Or if such a person exists making that claim, I doubt that anyone would take their claim too seriously.

You clearly don't hang out with the right wrong people on tumblr or twitter. It is a popular hot take among the kids in those parts.
posted by brandnewday989 at 3:21 PM on June 25, 2019 [2 favorites]


Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context edited by Vern L. Bullough is a great resource on some of many, many people who were politically active in the fight for LGBT rights before 1969. Some of my personal favourites are Pearl M. Hart and Jeannette Howard Foster - I learned about both while I was doing research for a collaborative textile art project honouring queer activists and role models - a series of four quilts/banners (warning: facebook link).
posted by jb at 3:37 PM on June 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


(and OF COURSE we had Stormé DeLarverie - and also Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who were on a couple of the other four quilts. They were the first three names we thought of, along with Phyllis Frye who started advocating for trans rights in the 70s and 80s).
posted by jb at 3:40 PM on June 25, 2019


You clearly don't hang out with the right wrong people on tumblr or twitter. It is a popular hot take among the kids in those parts.

I don't spend much time there, I guess. But I remember the director of Independence Day who made a movie about his version of the Stonewall riots, getting (rightly) criticized for whitewashing the story. That criticism even came from film critics from outside our community. So I'm optimistic that people are starting to learn more, and that those who don't know much will get more informed as pop culture (drag community, lately, and queer artists on Instagram) gently brings them up to speed on the salient points.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:23 PM on June 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


So I'm optimistic that people are starting to learn more, and that those who don't know much will get more informed as pop culture (drag community, lately, and queer artists on Instagram) gently brings them up to speed on the salient points.

Hell, I've even seen straight people posting "The first Pride was a riot!" things on social media this year. It's become such a meme that I'm wondering when they're going to start selling shirts at Target that say that.
posted by the sockening at 5:43 PM on June 25, 2019


Hell, I've even seen straight people posting "The first Pride was a riot!" things on social media this year.

This meme has definitely become a thing in Canada, that pride here is actually all about Stonewall, which is depressing but not surprising. Canadians are shockingly ignorant of our own history of civil rights in general, I would imagine more Canadians know who Rosa Parks is vs Viola Desmond for example, so it's not a huge surprise that many people I run into during pride know more about Stonewall than, say, the Pisces bathhouse raids in Edmonton (where I live) which were more directly relevant to the local gay rights movement.
posted by selenized at 6:21 PM on June 25, 2019 [3 favorites]


That was a good video and also thanks for this comment which links to a great additional piece: Stonewall and the Myth of Self-Deliverance by Kwame Anthony Appiah is a good read along these lines.
posted by stevil at 6:51 AM on June 25


It's disorienting being 45 and queer all my life and watching the way queer narrative has changed over time. (Last weekend in Target I was stopped in my tracks by a rainbow branded bottle of Listerine. Contrast that with the giant bottle of Vaseline Karla Jay described in the video at LAs first Gay Liberation march in 1970).

Over the years I've observed the way we talk about Stonewall morph and solidify. Like the first times I heard about it, it was this radical, still not-well-known history, being brought into the sun by scrappy DIY queer historians. Now it's gelled into this mythology, flavored with a changing cast of main characters, that is clearly not especially accurate. It's been given a significance as a beginning - a moment - when things clicked. But surely the people who organized the first Gay Liberation marches in 1970 were not only activated by Stonewall (or Compton's Cafeteria, or any one event). Many of these were folks also participating in civil rights and women's movement and anti-war struggles. And they were weaving into the established threads of decriminalization of sexuality efforts that had been going on in the US and Europe for decades.

The flattening might be an inevitable result of elevating this history. You can't make something into a well-known story without losing context and detail, not to mention the way any historical story we elevate necessarily leaves other stories untold.

What's troubling about the simplistic story we hear about Rosa Parks isn't just the erasure of her ongoing work as an organizer, or the erasure of Claudette Colvin, but that there are literally thousands of other stories we don't hear. And change always requires these decades of effort by thousands of people. And we are unlikely to ever be able to point to one or a few events and say they caused the change.

To the extend that we have gay liberation today, I know for certain we could not have it without the African American Civil Rights movement. We could not have it without the second wave feminist movement. We could not have it without the sexual liberation movement of the 70s. We could not have it without the militant and self-organizing response the queer community had to AIDS. We could not have it without those who did not necessarily identify themselves as activists, but chose to live openly with their forbidden gender identities and expressions, those who had raunchy and illegal sex, those who had polyamorous relationships and sex with strangers on piers, those who basically didn't fit with mainstream values around sex, relationships and gender. Elevating any event into a beginning of a history will always be false.

I was quite moved by Tourmaline concluding the video with talk of how it could have been a brick, or a stone, or a purse, or a shoe, and it could have been Stonewall or the past or the future. Stonewall is a snapshot of a moment in a flowing river that got us where we are now and will bear us forward into the future.
posted by latkes at 7:36 PM on June 25, 2019 [8 favorites]


Canadians are shockingly ignorant of our own history of civil rights in general, I would imagine more Canadians know who Rosa Parks is vs Viola Desmond for example, so it's not a huge surprise that many people I run into during pride know more about Stonewall than, say, the Pisces bathhouse raids in Edmonton (where I live) which were more directly relevant to the local gay rights movement.

I feel like this has changed a lot in the last 10 years, or at least it seems to have in Ontario.

I don't think I was aware of Viola Desmond prior to her posthumous pardon in 2010, but since then she's made the news a lot. She's on our $10 bill, she has her own Heritage Minute, she has at least two public schools named after her, and she's part of school curriculums across the country.

The Toronto Bathhouse Raids (Operation Soap) and the resulting protests have been in the papers a fair bit too in recent years: because of the 30th anniversary in 2011, the police apology in 2016, the Black Lives Matters protest at Pride Toronto 2016 and the subsequent barring of uniformed police from participation in the parade, and then the coverage of questionable police handling of missing and murdered LGBTQ+ people which wound up with many of the deaths being because of a !@#$% serial killer.

I'm embarrassed to say that I first learned about the Stonewall Riots because of the name of a character in the webcomic Three Panel Soul (TLDR: Video game player has a character named "The Homosexual Agenda". Game admins force him to change his character name, and he chooses the somewhat more subtle name "Stonewall Riots" instead.)
posted by Secret Sparrow at 9:37 PM on June 25, 2019


Sometimes local history gets a bit mythologized. The Brunswick Four are less well known in Toronto, but pre-date the Toronto Bathhouse riots by 7 years. (It was a smaller incident, though still significant.) Also, the first Pride March in Toronto was actually in about 1970 or 1971 shortly after Stonewall (heard about it from Adrienne Potts) - but after they had a couple of marches, they moved to having a picnic on the island until after the bathhouse raids.

My first exposure to the story of Stonewall was from the 1995 film, which I think did a really nice job in showing the tensions within the community between the "respectable homophiles" and the trans and other parts of the communities.
posted by jb at 6:53 AM on June 26, 2019


I feel like this has changed a lot in the last 10 years, or at least it seems to have in Ontario.

I may also just be primed to be a grumpy-old-man-yelling-at-the-youths about this. I think a lot of Edmontonians didn't really feel the need to confront the reasons for pride until this year, when the organization that runs the pride festival decided to cancel the parade and most everything else. That obviously sparked some conversations in which I was told that actually pride was all about Stonewall. Also some people thought Edmonton cancelled its parade because of the Toronto police? which is...it's own thing.
posted by selenized at 9:10 AM on June 26, 2019


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