Stonewall Riot Analysis

Many people from the United States hold the belief that being gay is something that has always been considered to be okay. They believe that it is just a given. Despite people’s current beliefs on the subject, for a very long time, it was something that was widely believed to be taboo. In the past, people were imprisoned due to their sexuality. Regardless, throughout the decades, people have pushed for the widespread acceptance of people who are part of the LGBT community. Today, homophobia still exists in some parts of the United States, but we have come a long way since the early 1900s.

Stonewall: the Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, was written by David Carter in New York, and published in 2004. This book serves the purpose of identifying Stonewall as the starting point for the modern gay revolution as a whole. It argues that the riots set a spark that ignited America in favor of homosexual rights as well as political and social opportunity. This book is valuable because it not only acknowledges the riots at Stonewall as important, but shows how they transformed homosexual life and the movement entirely. Carter persuades readers to see New York as a venue for revolution, and acknowledges the challenges faced throughout the beginning of the movement,

The story of gay In the U.S. today is completely different from the way it was in the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1950s and 1960s, gay people were only welcomed by a few establishments such as bars. During that period, the Stonewall Inn, owned by the Mafia, was very popular among the downgraded people in the gay community.

During the riot, community leaders and the police met at Athens Park. Many community leaders encouraged people to deal with the issue peacefully. Mrs. Frye, the mother of Marquette, also said that people should calm down. One teenager stepped to the microphone and told people that the rioting would not stop and that the rioters were going to invade the white parts of the city that night. Doing what the news do best, the media and news stations reported the hateful and inflammatory comments, but did not report on all of the peaceful speakers. As would be expected, the rioting continued. The National Guard was called in to help support the police (www.southcentralhistory.com). Finally, with the assistance of thousands of National Guardsmen, order was restored on August 16.

The Stonewall Inn was a gay bar in New York City and it was the starting place of the Gay Liberation Movement. In the 1970s gay men and lesbians started wanting equality because they faced lots of legal discrimination. They didn’t have equal rights because they couldn’t even have consensual sex with their partners and it was illegal in almost all states. So in 1969 police raided the Stonewall Inn and gay men fought the police and proclaimed “Gay Power.” This event caused riots between the New York City police and all the gay residents.

The struggle for gay rights was not always publicized due to fear for being “ill” for thinking that way. The fight for rights was known in the mental health community as an illness. In the courts where same-sex couples would be denied the right to marry, from the Stonewall riots to the U.S. Supreme Court decision on June 26 of this year, the evolvement and difficulty of those fighting.

The Saturday morning the Stonewall Inn was raided ignited the LGBT individuals’ anger. The owners were not notified of the raid and employees that illegally sold alcohol proceeded to be arrested by police. Bar patrons were being beaten and arrested by police due to their sexual orientations and wearing what was not deemed gender appropriate. A total of thirteen people were arrested that morning. Instead of leaving the area, furious onlookers decided to take action. As officers forced a lesbian into a police van she shouted, “Why don’t you guys do something!” Then, crowds began to form and throw objects at police, which included bottles and rocks. In addition to that, pennies were thrown at police by the crowd to mock the corrupt police officers. To protect themselves from debris, officers barricaded themselves in the bar and called for reinforcements. This was futile because the mob repeatedly broke through the barricade and set fire to the bar. When reinforcements arrived, they were able to take out the fire but were unable to stop the riot. Every time they dispersed the crowd in front of them, a new one would form behind them in minutes. The riots persisted for six days:

The raid began just after 3a.m, and the police found the illegal liquor and began arresting employees while the crowd booed but remained otherwise calm. Howard Smith, a village voice reporter who stayed with the police throughout the riot reported “During the “gay power” riots at the Stonewall last Friday night I found myself on what seemed to me the wrong side of the blue line. Very scary. Very enlightening.” After arresting some of the employees, including the bartender, doorman, and reportedly brutalising some of the patrons. The police turned their focus on those suspected in violation of New York’s gender appropriate laws; They had checked 5 persons suspected of

The next major event was the birth of the movement, The Stonewall Riots, which was the mother of all LGBT-themed associates and groups. There have been a large number of eyewitness accounts, articles and stories of how the riot began and ended, as well as what it immediately brought about. People began to start doing “radical” acts, one man decided to begin writing his college papers in terms of having a prominent gay

The 1960’s was a decade of great change in America, from civil rights for African Americans to equal rights for women, the American people were rising up and discovering that their voice in the political discourse was just as important as those they elected to office. One other such group that awakened and challenged the existing status quo that kept them silent and scared were the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities across the country. From the first large-scale associations of LGBT individuals that formed in San Francisco in the 1950’s to the political and social groups that came to be following the Stonewall Riots of 1969, they would speak out and not allow themselves to be kept down anymore. The aim of this paper is to establish the events and opinions that led up to the uprising at the Stonewall Inn such as perceived and real discrimination by police, medical professionals, and society itself, what actually happened at Stonewall, and how they sparked the modern LGBT movement in the United States over the next half century to the present day.

The riots started at around 3 am on June 28th, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in Brooklyn, New York City when police raided the inn, on the pretense of the bar’s lack of a liquor license. They began checking identification and taking people into the bar’s bathroom to determine their sex. The patrons of the bar were held outside as police threw the bar’s unstamped alcohol into patrol wagons. A crowd of Greenwich Village residents and the area’s homeless youth gathered to watch as the bar’s patrons were arrested.

Even though the Stonewall Riots happened 49 years ago, the boom of influence it made is still ringing in the ears of humanity today. 49 years prior, the victims of discrimination were asking for change, and today, activists for the LGBTQ+ community are still asking for change, but in a new and more inclusive

The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by people who were apart of the LGBT community against the police raid that happened on the morning of July 28,1969, at the Stonewall Inn, located in Manhattan, New York City. It’s believed that Sylvia Rivera, a trans woman, was the first one who rightfully threw the first brick. These events are widely considered to be the single most important event leading to the LGBT liberation movement and the current fight for LGBT rights in America.

The increase in support can be seen through the number of people who attend pride parades each year, which are now taking place in almost every country nowadays. The growth of the gay rights supporters compared to amount at the first pride parade in 1970 displays that the lives of the LGBT are being acknowledged and will continue to be spread and talked about in earnest as things progress for their community (Hirshman). The major shift from the 1960s race, gender, and sexual orientation discrimination to the acknowledgement of women’s rights and needs, African American opportunities and equality, and increase in trans and gay rights in the present show that the civil rights movement of Stonewall, Black rights, and women’s equality had a major effect on the future of society today (Williams). The effects of the Stonewall Riots can also be seen through the Supreme Court’s legalization of same sex marriage in all states in 2015. This is the biggest change in the journey for gay liberation in America and it’s evidence of the growing support that began with the riots and has continued on to the present.

In writing this paper, I went back to the very beginning of our discussions, and looked at my very first discussion post on the Stonewall Uprising. I realized, that while we did do a lot of court case focused work, that I still learned a lot even outside of these cases. I wanted to post both my