Gayle E Pitman - The Stonewall Riots: Coming Out in the Streets

Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-4197-3720-6
eISBN: 978-1-68335-567-0

Text copyright 2019 Gayle E. Pitman

Book design by Sara Corbett

For image credits, see .

Published in 2019 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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BY FRED SARGEANT

Although Id known years earlier that I was different from friends, it wasnt until I was thirteen that I realized the difference was that I was gay. No one else knew. I didnt know others who might be gay and did what was common among young gays in the 1960s: As soon as I could, I moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. I was nineteen. Soon after getting there, I met a young gay activist, Craig Rodwell, and we became partners. Craigs commitment to truth captured my attention. He was a true pioneer for his time.

Craig introduced me to so many of the people in the story that follows, and its been my privilege to share my recollections with its author, Gayle Pitman. Gayle has always been a strong listener for the everyday aspects of a story and communicates that well in her narrative.

Over the past fifty years, we have gone from the age of orderly boy-and-girl picketinga picket that was single file or male-female couples only to present a nonthreatening image for straight peopleto utilizing the centuries-old tool of leafletting, to an age of texts and social media. But in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, leaflets abounded and carried the same clues to commerce and politics in a community that texts and social media do today. Leaflets produced what back then passed for immediate results! The morning after the Stonewall Riots, we handed out leaflets in the West Village, calling for further demonstrations by young people in the area that evening to protest the corrupt ties between the mobgay bar syndicate and the New York police department. It was the immediacy with passersby on the street while leafletting that produced the second nights crowds at Stonewall.

The late 1960s became a period of explosive political expansion by the LGBT community, with LGBT youth at the forefront of it. Gayles work captures this tumultuous time and accurately reports on the fact-shy myths that have grown up around Stonewall and Pride.

If life can be said to be an accumulation of experiences that guide our decisions, then in my case, it may certainly be said that the experiences of those nights at Stonewall, and then Pride, led to a career in policing and further activism. The many others involved with Stonewall and Pride became academics, entertainers, writers, engineers, and business leaders. We were all forever changed by the experience of Stonewall, and later Pride. And we are all the better for it. Fred Sargeant

FRED SARGEANT was at the front line of the LGBT movement and was actively involved in the Stonewall Riots and in the emergence of Pride. Today he is a retired lieutenant from the Stamford, Connecticut, police department.

Every object tells a story if you know how to read it.
HENRY FORD

Objects can tell the story of a persons life. And they can tell a lot about an event, a period in history, or a moment in time. Studying objects and the stories they tell about history and culture involves whats called material culture. Museums are filled with exhibits involving material culture. Objects might include tools, items of clothing, newspaper articles, letters, jewelry, or other personal items. They could include public objects, such as street signs, billboards, playground equipment, or other items in common spaces. Most of these items might seem mundane and boringbut when put together, those objects can tell a very interesting story.

Using objects to understand history is a particularly good way to tell a story thats complicatedespecially if that story differs depending on who tells it. Telling a story through objects is like viewing something through a kaleidoscope. Each fragment seems entirely separate, but together they form a colorful, multifaceted image. What happens when the tube turns? The image changes! And while the new image is still made up of the original fragments, its impossible to reconstruct the image viewed before that. Thats what the history of the Stonewall Riots is like. Its a complex story, made up of many fragments and dimensions, and its a challenging history to reconstruct.

What really happened in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969? It was chaotic, and the riots lasted for several days. Some people said they were there, and there is evidence to support that. Others claim to have been there, but that evidence is more murky. There are arguments about who started the riots and what the exact sequence of events were. The people who were part of this complicated story include seemingly unrelated groups of people, including gay men, lesbian women, cross-dressers and drag queens, homeless street kids, the Mafia, the police, and the residents of Greenwich Village. While many of their stories overlap, none of their stories are exactly the same.

In the 1960s, the terms, queen, drag queen, and transvestite were used interchangeably to describe men who dressed in womens clothing, or who identified as women. The term transgender was not commonly used during that time period. Today transgender refers to people whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex.

Choosing objects for this book is like curating a museum exhibition. People who work in museums have to determine which items are important in telling a story, and which items are not. Its a challenging task, and it involves making hard decisions. Many of the objects chosen for this book are authentic and are still in existence. Other objects are examples or replicas of what would have existed at the time. Because this is a history of a series of riots and uprisings, a lot of objects were destroyed and are no longer available. But in order to tell this story accurately, its important to include them all.

Greenwich Village is one of the most vibrant and bustling neighborhoods in New York City, filled with apartment buildings, brownstone row houses, shops, and restaurants. Its also one of the most famous gay neighborhoods in the world. If you visit Greenwich Village today, youll probably see rainbow flags flying from apartment balconies, same-sex couples holding hands as they walk down the street together, and flyers advertising LGBTQ+ events. (The terms LGBT and LGBTQ+ have evolved over time. Around the time of the Stonewall Riots, the terms gay