51/53 Christopher Street

Christopher Street, for those of you unfamiliar, is a street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan.  Back in the sixties number 51/53 was a bit of a rundown ramshackle building owned by the Genovese crime family.

Yup.  It was owned by the Mafia and at the time it housed a restaurant, which wasn’t doing very well.

Three “made” men of La Cosa Nostra had an idea.  They would put up $3,500 and convert the restaurant to a bar  - a gay bar.  And thus Stonewall came to be.

Once a week a police officer would collect envelopes of cash as a payoff, as the Stonewall Inn had no liquor license. It had no running water behind the bar - used glasses were run through tubs of water and immediately reused.  There were no fire exits, and the toilets overran consistently   Though the bar was not used for prostitution, drug sales and other “cash transactions” took place. It was the only bar for gay men in New York City where dancing was allowed; dancing was its main draw since its re-opening as a gay club.

Visitors to the Stonewall Inn in 1969 were greeted by a bouncer who inspected them through a peephole in the door. The legal drinking age was 18, and to avoid unwittingly letting in undercover police (who were called “Lily Law”, “Alice Blue Gown”, or “Betty Badge”), visitors would have to be known by the doorman, or look gay. The entrance fee on weekends was $3, for which the customer received two tickets that could be exchanged for two drinks. Patrons were required to sign their names in a book to prove that the bar was a private “bottle club”, but rarely signed their real names.

There were two dance floors in the Stonewall; the interior was painted black, making it very dark inside, with pulsing colored or black lights. If police were spotted, regular white lights were turned on, signaling that everyone should stop dancing or touching.

In the rear of the bar was a smaller room frequented by “queens”; it was one of two bars where effeminate men who wore makeup and teased their hair (though dressed in men’s clothing) could go.  Only a few transvestites, or men in full drag, were allowed in by the bouncers. The customers were “98 percent male” but a few lesbians sometimes came to the bar. Younger homeless adolescent males, who slept in nearby Christopher Park, would often try to get in so customers would buy them drinks.  The age of the clientele ranged between the upper teens and early thirties, and the racial mix was evenly distributed among white, black, and Hispanic patrons.   Because of its even mix of people, its location, and the attraction of dancing, the Stonewall Inn was known by many as “the gay bar in the city”.

Police raids on gay bars were frequent - occurring on average once a month for each bar. Bar management usually knew about raids beforehand due to police tip-offs, and raids occurred early enough in the evening that business could commence after the police had finished.

What was life like if you were gay in the’50s and early ’60s?

In 49 states homosexual activity was considered sodomy, a criminal offense.

Well as far as the Federal Government was concerned, homosexuals were security risks, classed with anarchists and communists. Homosexuals were included in this list by the U.S. State Department on the theory that they were susceptible to blackmail.

In 1950, a Senate investigation chaired by Clyde R. Hoey noted in a report, “It is generally believed that those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons”, and said all of the government’s intelligence agencies “are in complete agreement that sex perverts in Government constitute security risks”.  Between 1947 and 1950, 1,700 federal job applications were denied, 4,380 people were discharged from the military, and 420 were fired from their government jobs for being suspected homosexuals.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (headed by J. Edgar hoover!) and police departments kept lists of known homosexuals, their favored establishments, and friends; the U.S. Post Office kept track of addresses where material pertaining to homosexuality was mailed.  State and local governments followed suit: bars catering to homosexuals were shut down, and their customers were arrested and exposed in newspapers. Cities performed “sweeps” to rid neighborhoods, parks, bars, and beaches of gay people. They outlawed the wearing of opposite gender clothes, and universities expelled instructors suspected of being homosexual.

In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual  as a mental disorder. A large-scale study of homosexuality in 1962 was used to justify inclusion of the disorder as a supposed pathological hidden fear of the opposite sex caused by traumatic parent�"child relationships.  It thus remained a mental disorder until 1972..

That was the life of a gay man or woman  -  until Stonewall.

At 1:20 a.m. on Saturday, June 28, 1969,  plainclothes and uniformed policemen arrived at the Stonewall’s double doors and announced “Police! We’re taking the place!  There had been none of the usual prior tips from police that a raid was coming; the raids usually came early in the evening before business.

The story goes that the Genovese crime family had been extorting patrons for blackmail money, particularly those who worked on Wall Street.  Soon the Mafia was making more money from extortion than from the bar business,  Problem was the Mafia refused to share  the extortion money  with the cops.

The raid did not go as planned. Standard procedure was to line up the patrons, check their identification, and have female police officers take customers dressed as women to the bathroom to verify their sex, upon which any men dressed as women would be arrested. Those dressed as women that night refused to go with the officers. Men in line began to refuse to produce their identification. The police decided to take everyone present to the police station, after separating those cross-dressing in a room in the back of the bar.

Those who were not arrested were released from the front door, but they did not leave quickly as usual. Instead, they stopped outside and a crowd began to grow and watch. Within minutes, between 100 and 150 people had congregated outside, some after they were released from inside the Stonewall, and some after noticing the police cars and the crowd. Although the police forcefully pushed or kicked some patrons out of the bar, some customers released by the police performed for the crowd by posing and saluting the police in an exaggerated fashion. The crowd’s applause encouraged them further: “Wrists were limp, hair was primped, and reactions to the applause were classic.”

Soon the crowd grew to almost 400. A scuffle broke out when a woman in handcuffs was escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon several times. She escaped repeatedly and fought with four of the police, swearing and shouting, for about ten minutes. Described as “a typical New York butch” and “a dyke - stone butch”, she had been hit on the head by an officer with a baton for, as one witness claimed, complaining that her handcuffs were too tight.

As she was thrown into the waiting wagon, the crowd became raucous as she shouted “Why don’t you guys do something!!” The police tried to restrain some of the crowd, knocking a few people down, which incited bystanders even more.  Those arrested escaped from the wagon as the few police jostled with the crowd, which then tried to overthrow the police van.

Violence broke out as homeless teens began raining bottles and rocks at the police.  Reinforcements arrived in the form of a tactical squad and was met by a line of cross-dressers dancing in a kick line to “Tra-la=la- Boom-de-ay” poking fun at the officer’s machismo.

Crowds gathered on the evening of Wednesday, July 2, 1969, five nights after a raid on the Stonewall Inn, a nightclub on Christopher Street.

The violence escalated and continued.  Police still in the bar were attacked and drew their weapons.  Fire broke out and the fire trucks arrived.  By 4 AM it was over but the gay community would continue to gather for several nights, clashing with police.

“We all had a collective feeling like we’d had enough of this kind of s**t. It wasn’t anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration… 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…. All kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined, and everything just kind of ran its course. It was the police who were doing most of the destruction. We were really trying to get back in and break free. And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We weren’t going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around - it’s like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way, and that’s what caught the police by surprise. 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”

Michael Fader

And out of that night came the Gay Liberation Front and one year later the first Gay Pride parade.

This year, on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, New York City will hold the largest Gay Pride parade in the world.