The Stonewall Riots took place June 28, 1969 in Greenwich Village, New York. Many people see it as the beginning of the gay liberation movement.
I just wonder about one thing: What was the public’s original reaction to the event? I am too young to remember the event. I vaguely remember the 70s (although I was still a kid when they ended). All I know is, people were talking about a “sexual revolution” that was supposedly still taking place in the 70s. And I know Pat Robertson once made a remark about the aging “Woodstock Generation” (still alive now).
But what was the public’s reaction at the time? I am not just looking for polls, but newspaper articles too. (I’ve tried to get old newspaper articles online. But they usu. require a credit card, and I am wary of sharing any credit card online.)
My guess is that most people either didn’t hear about or thought “GODDAMN FAGGOTS”
Way back in the 80’s I tried to look up news reports about it in the NY Times and could not find anything about for that week. I may have missed something.
Hit submit by mistake. My mother said she had never heard about and we lived in RI at the time.
Seriously, you won’t use your credit card online? I felt the same, maybe 15 years ago. You realize half the developed world does half of its shopping with a credit card on line now do you? So long as its an SSL site you should be fine. It is probably safer than using it in a restaurant. (And you know, even if there is a problem, the credit card companies generally catch it quite quickly, are usually pretty cool about it, and eat the loss.)
Sorry, I don’t know the answer to your question, but my guess is that Foggy is right. It was probably little known outside the immediate locality unless you were gay, and maybe not even then. It was not, frankly, a very big riot compared to what was going on in, for instance, Chicago, or Paris, or Detroit, come to that, in that era. I was in my teens the time, but I don’t remember ever hearing about it at all until, maybe, the 1990s. No doubt it became symbolically important to the gay community (although even for them, I expect it was mostly just in New York, at first), and probably increasing so as time went on, but few other people knew or would have cared. There was a lot going on in the late '60s -stuff that was going on in Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, Vietnam, that was what we heard about - and even on the left, few straight people were more than somewhat uncomfortably tolerant of gays.
But sorry, this is not a proper GQ answer, it is guesswork based my subjective impression, general knowledge of the period, and memory of what I did not know about.
I was 15 at the time. I read the Baltimore Sun daily, not every article, but I certainly skimmed the national news. I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear about the Stonewall incident until at least 10 years later.
In April 1968, Baltimore had experienced rioting that involved burning, looting, deaths and the mobilization of the entire Maryland National Guard. The Stonewall riot was a minor event compared to that. It also involved gay people, who were of course too icky to be reported on by respectable newspapers like the Baltimore Sun and News American.
It’s hard to understand, from the perspective of 2013, that this crap passed for journalism in 1969.
Police raids of gay bars were so routine that there wasn’t usually any publicity, especially compared to the ethnic and anti-war riots that were taking place. Bar patrons were routinely roughed up (or worse), and arrested. And sometimes their names, addresses and employers were printed in the paper. And nobody did anything about it.
But what was not routine, was that the bar patrons fought back.
Even as a gay man still in college, I probably didn’t hear about it until weeks later. You have to remember that there wasn’t any kind of “gay community” back then. There were bars, the baths, and there were places for anonymous sex, and neither was conducive to political discussions. Pretty much everything was in the “down-low” back then, and it was understood that if anyone’s life was ruined, it must have been his own fault for getting caught. And yes, there were suicides.
So the initial public reaction was either mild curiosity or indifference or “it serves them right.” And this was, a decade later, the same public reaction to the AIDS crisis.
It wasn’t covered much outside of NYC; I lived on Long Island and I never heard of it. If Newsday covered it, it would have been a small article a long way from the front page.
Indeed the whole historical importance of Stonewall is that it made discrimination against gays an issue.
Most people who are suspicious of putting their credit card info into a web browser are not-so-coincidentally the same people who aren’t very internet-savvy. It’s probably better not to risk it for someone who is incapable of knowing whether they might have a virus (or ten) at any given time.
But you have to remember that this was a first step that not even they realized was being taken. Police raids on gay bars, bathhouses, nightclubs, and other gathering spots had happened for the entire century. It wasn’t news, much less national news. It’s meaningful only in retrospect.
I grew up in New York City. I was 8 years old in 1969, but I followed the news closely. Indeed, I drove my parents nuts by reading editorials, then asking questions like, “What’s prostitution?”
So, I can tell you this: If you followed the mainstream media in New York City in 1969, you probably had no idea that gays were rioting, let alone that this was a milestone of any kind. The media barely paid the incident any attention at all. If the newspapers HAD covered the story in any detail, believe me, I’d have been pestering my parents with, “What’s a homosexual?”
The riots were occurring in the summer of 1969, when almost everyone in New York was following either the Mets or the Apollo 11 mission.
With the Daily News option of making the whole thing a tasteless joke. For World AIDS Day a few days ago, the transcript of the very first Reagan White House press conference in which the word “AIDS” was mentioned was re-released. It’s appalling and more than a little infuriating.
Well, it is primarily a matter of prejudice. But journalism-wise it’s also a matter of ‘decorum’.
Back then salacious stories with any kind of sexual angle were simply not covered by the mainstream press. If you had a 16mm film of Marilyn Monroe blowing JFK there’s not much you could have done with it, journalism-wise. Today something like that (of a current politician) could be worth millions but back then, even if it was clearly authentic, no news outlet would be interested in paying you anything for it because there’s nothing they could do with it. If they even mentioned it existed they would be shouted down and ostracized by their peers (and the public too). The Zapruder film wasn’t shown on TV until eleven years later, not because of any conspiracy regarding it showing a shot from the front, but simply because it contained a scene of graphic, bloody, NC-17 level, horrific violence.
Although I despise today’s infotainment world of being famous for being famous, the upside is that since now anything goes, genuinely unjust things will get covered regardless of any unsavory content. Of course it’s still a ratio of about 1000:1 versus things that truly matter and/or the press getting it right…
Hmmm… in gay lore, the imagery of “Drag Queens on the Barricades” is now indelibly associated with the Stonewall riots, to the point that it affects gay political strategizing.
A few years ago, there was a controversy over whether ENDA should be pushed through Congress without a clause mentioning transgender individuals – the assumption was that most Republicans would grudgingly endorse an “LGB” version without the “T,” but an “LGBT” version would be shot down.
In gay media outlets, the overwhelming cry was “Remember the Drag Queens at Stonewall!” – which was, of course, shorthand for “don’t pass ENDA without the trans clause.” (Never mind the point that “drag” and “transgender” aren’t synonymous, or even necessarily related.)
But anyway, reading the tabloid-y spin in the Daily News inevitably makes me wonder: to what extent were the “Drag Queens on the Barricades” a media exaggeration, because it made for more sensational copy?