Last Sunday was the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City’s famous Greenwich Village.
On June 28, 1969, New York City police did what New York City police had been doing for years: They raided a gay bar. But at that particular bar, on that particular night, something unusual happened.
Tired of being treated as second-class citizens subject to daily discriminatory harassment, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn decided they had enough. When the police lined them up to check their identification and, ultimately, their genders, the crowd decided that this time would be different.
This time, they would fight back.
According to accounts of people who were there that night, the conflict was a totally spontaneous event. No one knew the police were coming, and there was no preexisting plan. There was just a growing feeling that police persecution of the queer community had gone on long enough. That sense of injustice was strong enough in the hearts and minds of the people in the bar that night for the spark of the police raid to ignited a civil rights movement’s fire.
Today, we trace the birth of the queer rights movement to that summer night in Greenwich Village. Before Stonewall, gay and transgender citizens largely kept their orientations secret due to police harassment and community intolerance. It was illegal, for example, to wear “opposite gender” clothes, and the FBI kept lists of “known or
suspected homosexuals.”
Shortly after Stonewall, the momentum for the modern gay rights movement reached a critical mass. Although we have a long way to go to achieve full equality — as illustrated by last weekend’s raid on the Rainbow Lounge in Fort Worth and the excessive use of force by city and state authorities — our progress in the last 40 years is phenomenal.
This is because — not in spite of — our willingness to take action, to be loud, to demand our rights — the very qualities embodied by the Stonewall riots.
Of course, it is not as simple as the Stonewall incidents themselves, just as the long struggle for racial equality was bigger than the day Rosa Parks was taken to jail for her famous act of civil disobedience.
The gay community has been pushing back against police persecution for some time now, but Stonewall lives on in our memory as a watershed moment when the dialogue shifted, resistance seemed possible and change within reach.
The way to social change is complicated. Few would advocate advancing an agenda of equality by uprooting parking meters to use as battering rams, as the crowd did 40 years ago at Stonewall. And yet that was exactly what it took to galvanize the movement and engender a sense of empowerment and action in the community.
This is not where the movement ended, of course. After the uprising, queer people and their allies came together to organize political advocacy groups to demand rights.
The protections now enshrined in law were won at the negotiating table and in state legislatures, not in street brawls. But without action, there is no reason to compromise. Without speaking out loudly, we never get a seat at the table.
Without the riots, or some similar catalyst, there would have been no discussion of workplace anti-discrimination laws and marriage equality.
Without Rosa Parks heading off to jail, the Montgomery bus boycotts and the march on Washington, the 1964 Civil Rights Act would never have been born.
Without the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott, there would have been no reforms to protect migrant agricultural workers.
Laws are made by negotiation. But the impetus for negotiation comes from pressure that can only be born from public outcry.
We have no way of knowing ahead of time what the tipping point in any struggle will be. What we do know, however, is that social change is sparked by those who have the courage to push back against the status quo.
Whether you count yourself as part of the queer community or not, you can find inspiration in that hot June night 40 years ago, when the patrons of the Stonewall Inn fought back against stereotypes and injustice and took action for change. It’s important for us to remember that one decade’s impossibility is the next decade’s inevitability — but only if we have the courage to take action and be loud, even in the face of critics imploring us to “be reasonable."
Guevara is an economics and Latin American studies major.
it all starts when *one* person has the courage to say HELL NO!