So picture this. It's 1 .20 AM on a really sweltering
Friday night, June 1969. Right in the middle
of a heat wave. Exactly. And the music abruptly
stops. The lights flash on. You're trapped inside
this windowless mafia run dive bar. There are
no fire exits. The air is just thick with cigarette
smoke. And well, the police just barricaded the
front doors. It's a terrifying scenario. It really
is. And, you know, when you picture the modern
LGBTQ rights movement today, you probably picture
like rainbow flags, massive corporate parade
floats, you know, a whole month of officially
sanctions celebration. Yeah, the very polished,
acceptable version of it. Right. But today, our
mission for this deep dive is to strip all of
that neat, resolved history away. We are taking
a really comprehensive look at a defining moment
in modern civil rights, the Stonewall Riots.
A very messy, very gritty moment. Absolutely.
And our source material for today's exploration
is a highly detailed historical text covering
the background, the six chaotic days of rioting,
and the incredibly complex and often contested
legacy of the whole event. There's a lot to dig
into there. For sure. We're going to see what
actually happened on the ground in Greenwich
Village and why it fundamentally changed the
mechanics of resistance in America. OK, let's
unpack this. Well, to really grasp why that specific
bar exploded into a riot that night, we need
to bypass the basic history of the 1950s and
60s and look directly at them. mechanics of state
-sponsored oppression at the time. Right, because
it didn't just happen out of nowhere. Exactly.
The establishment had essentially built this
legal and medical cage around anyone who didn't
fit a very narrow societal mold. The pressure
must have been unbearable. It was. I mean, you
didn't just have the lavender scare where the
federal government was systematically firing
thousands of employees just for being suspected
security risks. Just for being gay. Right. but
you also had the medical establishment pathologizing
your very existence. In 1952, the American Psychiatric
Association actually officially classified homosexuality
as a mental disorder in the DSM. Which is the
official diagnostic playbook used by doctors
everywhere. Exactly. So the state is legally
classifying you as a criminal, and the medical
board is officially diagnosing you as diseased.
So if you're living under that kind of targeted
pressure, I mean, the natural instinct is to
try and prove them wrong by being as non -threatening
as possible. Right. That was the initial reaction
for many. Yeah. Which totally explains the strategy
of the early homophile movement. Like, you had
groups like the Mattachine Society for Men and
the Daughters of Belitis for Women. And their
entire operational tactic was just respectability
politics. Do you want to just show how normal
they were? Yeah. They staged these incredibly
quiet, orderly pickets where holding hands was
strictly forbidden. I mean, the men wore conservative
suits. The women wore dresses. The logic was
basically if we just mirror the heterosexual
middle class they'll have to accept us. But looking
at that polite non -confrontational approach,
it feels like trying to blend in at a corporate
job where HR has an active written mandate to
fire you just for existing. That's a really good
way to put it. Right. Like, you can wear the
nicest suit in the world, but if your mere presence
in the building is deemed illegal, assimilation
isn't a strategy. It's just a delaying tactic.
And respectability politics is fundamentally
flawed when the system itself is designed to
exclude you, you know, regardless of your behavior.
The establishment didn't care about the suits.
They didn't care at all. And pushing sexual minorities
to the absolute furthest fringes of society,
criminalizing their existence, it didn't eliminate
them. It ironically created the exact conditions
for a rebellion. It forced them together. Right.
It forced the most marginalized people, the ones
who couldn't simply put on a suit and blend in
into tight knit underground communities. It inadvertently
forged a subculture of people who eventually
had absolutely nothing left to lose. And the
breaking point was never going to come from the
people trying to play by the rules of polite
society. Precisely. It came from the people who
were barred from polite society entirely because
Since the state criminalized these communities,
legitimate business owners wouldn't rent to them,
and the state liquor authority wouldn't grant
licenses to bars that serve them. So they had
nowhere to go. Nowhere legal. So the only entities
willing to provide spaces for gay people to gather
were organized crime syndicates. Which brings
a completely different, almost cinematic element
into the story, the mafia. specifically the Genovese
crime family. They bought the Stonewall Inn in
Greenwich Village in 1966. And we really have
to clarify what kind of establishment this was.
It was not a glamorous speakeasy. It was a squalid,
hazardous dump. Truly terrible conditions. Yeah,
like there was no running water behind the bar.
So the bartenders literally just dunked used
glasses into tubs of murky water and immediately
served the next customer. Disgusting. And the
liquor was notoriously watered down. They drastically
overcharged the patrons. the toilets constantly
overflowed, and as we mentioned earlier, no fire
exits. What's fascinating here is the unintentional
ecosystem the mafia created. Their sheer greed
and exploitation of the gay community inadvertently
established a centralized headquarters for the
absolute most outcast members of society. Because
it operated illegally, right? Exactly. It operated
as a bottle club. which was a loophole where
patrons supposedly brought their own liquor.
So it welcomed the people who couldn't get past
the bouncers at the more exclusive, rigid underground
clubs. The people who were turned away everywhere
else. Right. It became the sanctuary for drag
queens, trans people, effeminate young men, butch
lesbians, and homeless street kids. And crucially,
it was also the only bar in New York City where
gay men were allowed to dance. Wait, so the mafia
were the ones providing the safe spaces? That's
like relying on a loan shark for therapy. It
really is. It's a bizarre paradox. That's like
having to pay a cartel just for the privilege
of standing in a room without getting arrested.
You're being extorted by criminals simply to
experience a basic human social interaction,
like dancing. And the extortion went all the
way up the chain. The mafia actually expected
police raids. It was built into their business
model. Just part of the overhead. Right. The
sixth precinct would collect their payoff, tip
off the bar owners in advance, show up early
in the evening, make a few performative arrests,
and the bar would just restock the registers
and open right back up for the peak night crowd.
So the whole ecosystem functioned on this predictable
corruption? Until the raid on June 28, 1969.
That night broke the protocol completely. What
was different about it? Well first, there was
no tip -off from the precinct. Second, the timing
was totally disruptive. The police burst through
the double doors at 1 .20 a .m. on a Friday night,
the absolute peak of the weekend. So they trapped,
what, around 200 people inside? About that, yeah.
And when the lights flipped on and the music
stopped, the standard police procedure was to
line everyone up, check IDs, and have female
officers take anyone presenting as a woman into
the bathroom to physically verify their sex.
If you were wearing drag or if your gender presentation
didn't match your ID, you were arrested. Forcing
someone into a bathroom for a physical sex verification
is the ultimate exertion of state power. It's
just pure humiliation. It was designed to demean
them. But that night, the psychological dam finally
broke. The patrons simply refused to comply.
They just said no. Yeah. The trans women refused
to go to the bathrooms. The men refused to hand
over their IDs. It was this spontaneous total
breakdown of compliance. I can't imagine how
shocked the cops must have been. They were caught
completely off guard. Their response was to escalate.
They decided to just arrest everyone and started
hauling patrons out to the street to wait for
the patrol wagons. But the wagons didn't show
up right away, did they? No, they were delayed.
And this logistical failure allowed a massive
crowd to gather outside on Christopher Street.
A mix of people, right? Exactly. You had the
patrons who had just been kicked out, the homeless
youth who lived in the park across the street,
and just neighborhood bystanders. The crowd quickly
swelled to five or six hundred people. And the
spark that finally ignited that massive crowd
was a single woman. She's often identified by
historians as Stormé de Larvery, a butch lesbian.
A really pivotal moment. Yeah, she was handcuffed,
but she physically fought with the police for,
like, 10 agonizing minutes. She kept escaping
the cruiser and the officers kept striking her
with a baton. It was brutal. Very brutal. And
bleeding from the head, she turned to the passive
crowd watching from the sidewalk and shouted,
why don't you guys do something? That shout was
the catalyst that shattered the trance. It just
woke everybody up. It did. The spark of resistance
from one woman instantly ignited decades of pent
up trauma and rage within that crowd. The fear
of authority that had kept them compliant for
their entire lives just evaporated. The power
dynamic completely flipped. Flipped in a matter
of seconds. And the eruption was so physical
and immediate. First, the source notes the crowd
threw pennies at the police, which is a deliberate
mockery of the payoffs the cops usually demanded.
A very symbolic gesture. Right. But then came
the beer bottles. then bricks from a nearby construction
site. The police force was entirely outnumbered
and in genuine shock. They were forced into a
tactical retreat. They actually had to run for
cover. Yeah. They grabbed a few people, including
this folk singer named Dave Van Ronk who had
literally just wandered over from a neighboring
business, and they barricaded themselves inside
the Stonewall Inn. The visual irony of that moment
is staggering. The police... The ultimate symbol
of state authority and control fleeing into the
very underground gay bar they had just raided.
Desperately hiding from the marginalized citizens,
they had spent decades terrorizing. And the crowd
didn't back down. They uprooted a heavy parking
meter and used it as a battering ram against
the door. The whole parking meter. The whole
parking meter. They lit garbage on fire and stuffed
it through the broken windows to smoke the officers
out. The police inside actually found a fire
hose, but in a final stroke of mafia negligence,
it had no water pressure. So the officers are
trapped inside a burning bar by the exact homeless
teens, and drag queen society told them we're
weak and diseased. It's honestly absurd to think
about. It really turned everything upside down.
But the NYPD wasn't going to just surrender,
obviously. They called in the Tactical Patrol
Force, the TPF. The city's elite riot squad.
Right. Heavily armed, wearing helmets, carrying
long batons, marching down Christopher Street
in a disciplined phalanx formation to clear the
crowd. And the crowd's response to this militarized
force wasn't to run. They weaponized camp. Weaponized
camp. I love that. It's an incredibly potent
psychological weapon. As the riot police marched
forward, the rioters formed an impromptu chorus
line in the middle of the street. A literal kick
line. Yes. They started doing synchronized high
kicks and singing to the tune of Tarara Boondie,
changing the lyrics to boast about being the
Stonewall Girls. That is amazing. When police
use riot gear, their primary weapon is intimidation.
They rely on the sheer terror of their presence
to scatter a crowd. But you can't intimidate
someone who is aggressively, theatrically joyful.
Exactly. So the cops, the ultimate symbol of
macho authority, are getting chased down the
street by drag queens and homeless teens. It's
like a movie scene that sounds too cinematic
to be real. It really neutralized the NYPD's
primary weapon. It physically paralyzed the police
force because, I mean, there's no tactical playbook
for how a phalanx should respond to a high kick
routine. They had no idea what to do. None. It
was a complete rejection of the shame that the
state demanded from them. And here's where it
gets really interesting, because that rejection
wasn't just a one night skirmish. The rioting
continued off and on for almost a week. The physical
fire at the Stonewall was eventually extinguished.
But the psychological fire it ignited completely
incinerated the old ways of doing things. So
the era of the polite suit and tie protests was
over. Officially died on Christopher Street.
And the speed of that organizational shift is
just breathtaking. The morning after the very
first night of rioting, a man named Craig Rodwell
was already out on the streets handing out leaflets.
He didn't waste any time. No. And he wasn't asking
for better treatment. He was demanding that the
mafia and the corrupt cops be driven out of gay
bars entirely. A total paradigm shift. Yeah.
And then a few days later, on July 4th, at the
annual reminder picket in Philadelphia, which
was that same event where everyone usually walked
in quiet, obedient circles, couples spontaneously
started holding hands in defiance. And Frank
Kameny, the old guard leader of the Mattachine
Society. was visibly frantic about this. Because
it broke all their rules. Right. He was physically
breaking couples apart, shouting at them because
holding hands violated their strict assimilation
strategy. He fundamentally misunderstood that
the ground had shifted right beneath his feet.
The old way was gone. The radical gay liberation
movement was born. Activists immediately formed
the Gay Liberation Front, the GLF, and shortly
after, the Gay Activists Alliance, the GAA. And
they completely abandoned the quiet, polite approach.
Completely. Instead, they pioneered the ZAP.
What's a ZAP exactly? It wasn't just a protest.
It was a mechanical, confrontational media hijack.
They would publicly ambush politicians, including
New York City Mayor John Lindsay. Just jump out
at them. Pretty much. Surrounding them at public
events and forcing them to address gay rights
on camera, where they couldn't ignore the question
or rely on PR teams. Wow. The shift from asking
for tolerance to aggressively demanding space
was absolute. But wasn't the gay community united
after this? You would think so, but no. Because
you'd think a riot against the police would bring
everyone together, but the source says they actually
started in fighting almost immediately. Why would
they turn on each other right after winning?
If we connect this to the bigger picture, every
single social movement in history eventually
hits a critical juncture where it must decide
what parts of its past to keep and what to aggressively
reject. So they were fighting over their own
identity. Exactly. The post -Stonewall activists
had some incredibly sharp ideological and socioeconomic
divides. The new radical activists, many of whom
were younger and heavily influenced by the anti
-war movement, actively rejected the pre -Stonewall
bar culture entirely. They didn't want any part
of it. No, they viewed the butch and femme relationship
roles as toxic, patriarchal artifacts of oppression
that needed to be dismantled. The source actually
details a massive clash at the 1973 Stonewall
rally that perfectly illustrates this fracture.
You had lesbian feminist activists like Jean
O 'Leary who felt that drag queens were making
a misogynistic mockery of women. She was very
vocal about it. Yeah, she essentially orchestrated
a protest against their presence at the rally.
And on the other side, you had trans activists
and drag queens like Sylvia Rivera and Lee Brewster
who were furious at being pushed out of the very
movement they helped start. And Brewster actually
fought back at that rally. Right. Brewster seized
the microphone and told the crowd, you go to
bars because of what drag queens did for you,
and these bitches tell us to quit being ourselves.
It was incredibly fractured. Race, class, and
gender identity became massive, almost insurmountable
obstacles to building a cohesive liberation movement.
It sounds so messy. Very messy. Activists like
O 'Leary initially worked to exclude transgender
people from the movement entirely. The prevailing,
albeit flawed, logic among assimilationists was
that including transgender individuals made the
movement too unpalatable to the mainstream public.
They thought it would make it harder to get basic
legal rights for cisgender gays and lesbians.
Right. Now O 'Leary later expressed deep public
regret over that exclusionary stance, but it
demonstrates how divided and politically cutthroat
the fight for liberation really was behind the
scenes. And that messiness extends directly into
how the event itself is recorded and remembered
today, doesn't it? Absolutely. Because the Stonewall
riots were a spontaneous uprising by marginalized
people in the middle of the night, there were
no news cameras there to document it. I think
there is literally only one known photograph
of the first night of the riots. Just one. So
when you have a massive vacuum of official state
sanctioned records, that empty space is very
quickly filled by oral history and, inevitably,
by myths. This raises an important question regarding
historiography. When marginalized communities
are systematically ignored or erased by the official
historical record, how do they preserve their
own history? By telling stories. Right. Often,
legends and myths serve a vital purpose in ensuring
survival and community cohesion. But as historians
dig deeper, we have to recognize that the historical
reality is often far more profound than the sanitized
myths we create. The perfect example of that
is the Judy Garland myth. For decades, there
was this persistent narrative claiming the riot
started because the gay community was just grief
-stricken over the death of Judy Garland, whose
funeral was held earlier that week. The implication
being they were too emotional to handle a raid.
Exactly. The idea was that they were just too
emotionally fragile that night. But the source
explicitly debunts this by looking at the actual
demographics of the rioters. The street kids.
Right. The participants themselves said that
homeless street kids who were fighting for their
daily survival against police brutality couldn't
have cared less about the death of a wealthy
Hollywood star. It was a boiling point of systemic
abuse, not celebrity grief. Exactly. Or... Consider
the intensely debated myth of Sylvia Rivera throwing
the first Molotov cocktail. Ah, right. David
Carter, who is considered one of the foremost
historians of the Stonewall uprising, found through
exhaustive research and cross -referencing interviews
that Sylvia Rivera wasn't even present at the
uprising on the first night. She wasn't there
when it started. But Stonewall veterans actively
pushed to have her written into the core narrative
of that night. They deliberately merged timelines
because they wanted young, Puerto Rican transgender
street kids to have a visible hero. A role model
they could look up to in a history that constantly
erased them. If people know that Judy Garland
or the Molotov myths aren't true, why do they
survive? Do we just prefer a neat cinematic story
over messy reality? Well, it's an incredibly
poignant mechanism of community building. It
shows a desperate, necessary hunger for visible
heroes. Human beings are fundamentally hardwired
for narrative simplicity. We want a clear beginning,
middle, We want a main character. We want a singular
hero throwing a singular object that magically
changes the world in an instant. A six -day,
chaotic, violent street brawl involving competing
activist factions, mafia bosses, and deep socioeconomic
divides that doesn't fit neatly onto a commemorative
bronze plaque. No, it really doesn't. But, you
know, the historical reality that the first bricks
and bottles were thrown by unnamed homeless youth,
drag queens, and butch lesbians whose names we
will never know who simply decided they had endured
enough abuse is arguably a much more powerful
testament to human resilience. I agree completely.
And that tension over who gets to claim the narrative
and what goes on the plaque didn't end in the
1970s. It's actually happening right now in real
time. In fact, the story is still being written.
Right. In 2016, President Obama established the
Stonewall National Monument, making it the first
national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights.
But the source material details how this history
is still an active battleground. It really is.
Because the source notes that on February 13th,
2025, references to transgender and queer people
were removed from the monument's official federal
website. And then a few months later, on July
10th, 2025, references to bisexual people were
removed from the site as well. It really highlights
the fragility of historical memory. The struggle
to define, claim, and protect this history is
not just an academic exercise about the past.
It is an ongoing present -day action. It's happening
right in front of us. Yes. The legacy of Stonewall
is not a closed book safely stored on a shelf.
It is an active, highly contested space. So what
does this all mean? When we take all these moving
pieces, the mafia exploitation, the mechanics
of the police raids, the psychological warfare
of the kickline, the internal fractures, the
constructed myths, what's the core takeaway for
you listening right now? It's important to frame
it correctly. The Stonewall riots were not the
first time the LGBTQ community physically fought
back against police brutality. I mean, there
was the Cooper Doonuts riot in Los Angeles years
prior and the Compton's Cafeteria riot in San
Francisco. They were at the first. But Stonewall
was the structural catalyst. It was the specific
detonation that shifted the community's entire
tactic from politely asking for assimilation
to aggressively demanding space, fundamentally
birthing the modern pride. And it serves as a
powerful, enduring reminder of how systemic change
actually materializes. History is rarely made
by those sitting comfortably in seats of power,
or by those politely asking the system to change
its rules. It just doesn't work that way. No.
It is usually forged by those who are pushed
so far into the margins, who have so much stripped
away from them, that they have absolutely no
choice left but to push back with everything
they have. As you go about your day, I want to
leave you with a final thought to mull over.
Think about that 2025 detail we just mentioned.
The sudden removal of trans, queer, and bisexual
references from the official Stonewall Monument
website. It's a striking detail. How does the
ongoing real time editing of this history on
federal platforms parallel the exact same state
sponsored erasure that those patrons of the Stonewall
Inn were rioting against on that sweltering June
night in 1969? It's a haunting historical parallel.
It really is something to think about. Thank
you so much for joining us for this deep dive.
We'll see you next time.