Stonewall Plus Forty
by Hendrik Hertzberg
The New Yorker
July 6, 2009
The most improbable of America’s mass movements for civil rights—improbable at the time, inevitable in retrospect—got its start at a most improbable hour in a most improbable place. The hour: two in the morning, forty years ago. The place: the sidewalk in front of the Stonewall Inn, a questionable bar (as it might then have been called by persons of delicate sensibilities) on Christopher Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village. Like most such establishments, the Stonewall was more or less openly run by the Mafia; it served prodigious quantities of watered-down booze, though it had no liquor license; it dealt in cash and seldom paid taxes, unless you counted the envelopes regularly provided to representatives of the local police precinct. But none of these was the ultimate reason that the N.Y.P.D. vice squad raided the Stonewall that night. The reason was that its customers were homosexuals.
This was, so to speak, normal: such raids were a routine hazard of gay nightlife. Normally, patrons who weren’t quick enough to escape unnoticed would submit meekly to arrest or humiliation. This time, they resisted. No one can say for sure why Saturday, June 28, 1969, was different, but the botched bust at the Stonewall touched off not only four nights of raucous, riotous demonstrations but also, in short order, a sustained burst of political activity aimed at making minority sexual orientation, like left-handedness or dark skin, a legally, morally, and socially neutral condition, not an impediment to full membership in the human family.
Even in the legendarily liberated nineteen-sixties, mainstream attitudes toward homosexuality were benighted to a degree that is difficult to exaggerate. “Sodomy” between consenting adults was against the law almost everywhere. “Perversion” was a firing offense throughout the federal government, not just in the military. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic” mental disorder. In the Daily News, gays were “homos.” In 1966, three years before Stonewall, Time, then the voice of middlebrow, middle-class respectability, published a long essay on “The Homosexual in America.” The magazine, while acknowledging that “homosexuals are present in every walk of life,” concluded that homosexuality is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.
At the time of the Stonewall uprising, Barack Obama was a seven-year-old grade-schooler in Jakarta, Indonesia. This week, as President of the United States, he will welcome an assemblage of prominent gay citizens, along with their partners and, in some cases, their spouses, to the East Room of the White House for a commemoration of the movement the uprising sparked. From the perspective of forty years ago, that is remarkable enough. But just as remarkable is the fact that many of these same citizens believe that this still new President has done too little to advance their cause. They have a point.
As a candidate, Barack Obama presented himself as a strong proponent of “full equality” for “LGBT people”—the current term of art, awkward but inclusive, for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people. He promised unequivocally to end the Pentagon’s misbegotten “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, under which some thirteen thousand soldiers and sailors have been cashiered for nothing more than acknowledging their sexual orientation, and to fight for the repeal of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which forbids federal recognition of same-sex marriages and allows states to ignore such marriages if contracted elsewhere. Although most organized gay support had gone to Hillary Clinton during the primary season, Obama took the overwhelming majority of gays’ votes in November.
(More here.)
The New Yorker
July 6, 2009
The most improbable of America’s mass movements for civil rights—improbable at the time, inevitable in retrospect—got its start at a most improbable hour in a most improbable place. The hour: two in the morning, forty years ago. The place: the sidewalk in front of the Stonewall Inn, a questionable bar (as it might then have been called by persons of delicate sensibilities) on Christopher Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village. Like most such establishments, the Stonewall was more or less openly run by the Mafia; it served prodigious quantities of watered-down booze, though it had no liquor license; it dealt in cash and seldom paid taxes, unless you counted the envelopes regularly provided to representatives of the local police precinct. But none of these was the ultimate reason that the N.Y.P.D. vice squad raided the Stonewall that night. The reason was that its customers were homosexuals.
This was, so to speak, normal: such raids were a routine hazard of gay nightlife. Normally, patrons who weren’t quick enough to escape unnoticed would submit meekly to arrest or humiliation. This time, they resisted. No one can say for sure why Saturday, June 28, 1969, was different, but the botched bust at the Stonewall touched off not only four nights of raucous, riotous demonstrations but also, in short order, a sustained burst of political activity aimed at making minority sexual orientation, like left-handedness or dark skin, a legally, morally, and socially neutral condition, not an impediment to full membership in the human family.
Even in the legendarily liberated nineteen-sixties, mainstream attitudes toward homosexuality were benighted to a degree that is difficult to exaggerate. “Sodomy” between consenting adults was against the law almost everywhere. “Perversion” was a firing offense throughout the federal government, not just in the military. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic” mental disorder. In the Daily News, gays were “homos.” In 1966, three years before Stonewall, Time, then the voice of middlebrow, middle-class respectability, published a long essay on “The Homosexual in America.” The magazine, while acknowledging that “homosexuals are present in every walk of life,” concluded that homosexuality is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.
At the time of the Stonewall uprising, Barack Obama was a seven-year-old grade-schooler in Jakarta, Indonesia. This week, as President of the United States, he will welcome an assemblage of prominent gay citizens, along with their partners and, in some cases, their spouses, to the East Room of the White House for a commemoration of the movement the uprising sparked. From the perspective of forty years ago, that is remarkable enough. But just as remarkable is the fact that many of these same citizens believe that this still new President has done too little to advance their cause. They have a point.
As a candidate, Barack Obama presented himself as a strong proponent of “full equality” for “LGBT people”—the current term of art, awkward but inclusive, for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people. He promised unequivocally to end the Pentagon’s misbegotten “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, under which some thirteen thousand soldiers and sailors have been cashiered for nothing more than acknowledging their sexual orientation, and to fight for the repeal of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which forbids federal recognition of same-sex marriages and allows states to ignore such marriages if contracted elsewhere. Although most organized gay support had gone to Hillary Clinton during the primary season, Obama took the overwhelming majority of gays’ votes in November.
(More here.)
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