Stonewall Inn Headed for City Landmark Status

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) begins consideration this week whether to appoint landmark designation for the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, location of the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 which sparked the modern LGBT rights movement,

The Stonewall Inn, between 1967-1969, was often a fun place.

Said to be a free-wheeling, colorful and democratic scene attracting a great variety of types, especially long-haired youths trying—as youths often do– to get away from their otherwise “proper” home environments and meeting gladdened refugees in flight from pre-69 Manhattan’s generally unappealing gay bar circuit.

Only a few years before, the Ce Soir, one of Gotham’s two gay “dance” bars where, in a back room, a light bulb hung ominously from a single cord, ignited whenever an unknown customer entered the front door.

The lighting of the bulb signaled that dancing couples must separate. In June, 1969 The Stonewall Inn was light years away from this furtive past, attracting the arrival of what media soon began calling “the new homosexual,” emboldened by the 60’s counterculture, by new standards challenging gender roles.

The counterculture revolution was seen by gay conservatives and by right wing politicos as a threat to the social order. The gay conservatives sought a world in which previously acceptable heterosexual standards were to be implemented in gay circles. They established gay Christian churches, sought to have their own children not through adoptions but through artificial inseminations, suggested imitation establishment marriages, and asked, along with heterosexual males, the right to fight and kill for a belligerent Vietnam-punishing Uncle Sam.

But the straight counterculture, and “the new homosexuals” were going, during the Vietnam war, in another direction, declaring themselves “gay” at the draft boards to muddle conscriptions and to denounce the war. In our columns Lige and I called for “buggering up the barracks” and “clusterfucking for peace.”

Militant gay activism had preceded the Stonewall uprising by nearly a decade. In 1965 picketing was launched in Washington’s direct action group, the Mattachine Society. But it was a foiled police raid on the Stonewall Inn in late June, 1969, that first caught the media’s attention. The Stonewall uprising offered just the right mix of dramatics: youths fighting back for the first time against police corruption, the stuff of a legend.

Almost immediately, it became clear there were those who would integrate gays into the mainstream culture and those who believed that culture to be unredeemable. As gay columnists writing for the then-zany SCREW, an otherwise straight tabloid, and for the gay newspaper, The Advocate, Lige Clarke and Jack Nichols wrote the first journalist’s published accounts of the Stonewall rebellion and, because of their counterculture underpinnings, they not only celebrated it, but called on the youths of their time to press the Stonewall uprising beyond its narrow boundaries. On July 8, 1969, sounding the counterculture’s view, they issued this “call to arms”:

“The homosexual revolution is only part of a larger revolution sweeping through all segments of society. We hope that “Gay Power” will not become a call for separation, but for sexual integration, and that the young activists will read, study, and make themselves acquainted with all of the facts which will help them to carry the sexual revolt triumphantly into the councils of the U.S. government, into the anti-homosexual churches, into the offices of anti-homosexual psychiatrists, into the city government, and into the state legislatures which make our manner of lovemaking a crime. It is time to push the homosexual revolution to its logical conclusion. We must crush tyranny wherever it exists and join forces with those who would assist in the utter destruction of the puritanical, repressive, anti-sexual Establishment.”

Today I marvel when I see what’s been accomplished in a mere 45 years since the Stonewall uprising. Since that first gay march at The White House in 1965, when only ten people; three women and seven men, took part, I’ve watched our capital city’s gay and lesbian demonstrations grow size-wise over the decades, expanding into what we only dreamed about early on. I’ve seen a U.S. President speak out repeatedly on behalf of same-sex love and affection, and I’ve seen an incredible country start begin to allow same-sex marriage.

Even if it is, in certain ways, a sexually-segregated community still, I continue to hope for a much-integrated future where, as prophesied by Walt Whitman, men will blur distinctions by walking hand in hand in America’s streets because, as he well knew, same-sex love is not a gay matter alone, no, “the germ is in everybody.”

Here’s to the Stonewall Inn and everything it represents. For more on their history please visit http://www.thestonewallinnnyc.com/StonewallInnNYC/HISTORY.html.

By William Pinyon and Jack Nichols