Exactly what I was going to ask. Did the majority of Stonewall patrons go there in drag, or did the Daily News single the ones who were out in order to ridicule the event?
I was just shy of 20 years old at the time, and I thought I remembered Stonewall being mentioned on at least one national network news show, and that they treated it soberly, as another demonstration for a relatively new cause.
This was not the first mention of homosexuality in national media. There were occasional stories in the mid and late 60’s about whether and how much homosexuals were involved in the hippy and free love movements. There was a Sinatra movie in 1968 (The Detective) in the plot of which homosexuality played a big part, including a very strong scene with William Windom. The play Boys in the Band opened in 1968. So if you were paying attention (I was, for possibly obvious reasons) this stuff was in the air already. The Stonewall Riots didn’t really come out of the blue.
Note: neither The Detective nor Boys in the Band portray homosexuality in any kind of positive light. In these cases gay men were presented as semi-icky victims. But even that was better than pretending we didn’t exist at all, in my opinion.
Roddy