(I originally posted this on Facebook late last night at about 10PM).
51 years ago this day, at about this time of night, if you lived in New York City and you were Queer, you might be primping up right now, getting ready to head out to a mafia controlled Queer bar named Stonewall Inn that offered the only respite from near universal homophobic censure you faced nearly every moment of your life.
Strange that freedom only existed for you in such a confined space. It was the only sense of liberation you ever knew. So a smile comes over your face, but so did you quiver in fear and anxiety.
You were too keenly aware that If the wrong person saw you enter or exit Stonewall, it could ruin your life or be the end of it. If the right person saw you there it could be a chance for sexual exploration, or if you let yourself harbor optimism, that right person could be the love of your life.
Don’t be silly Queen.
So, you get inside safely. Victory! How could such a trivial thing bring such relief? Were you allowed anything more? The 19th century progenitor of modern Queer activism, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs spoke of how men of his nature suffered tainted happiness from the spectre of homophobic cruelty leading to suicide. This “tainted happiness” is why the most banal of things could seem so triumphant for Queers of the Stonewall era.
If you patronized Stonewall, you were not likely to be viewed as respectable by the Mattachine Society’s assimilationist standards, and you certainly were not respected by anyone in power. Respectability, civility, and peace were never yours to claim or expect.
But maybe you were sexually appealing. That boisterously sexy young man seemed to think so. Now past midnight and into the earliest hours of the 28th of June you and he made eye contact. He smirked approvingly.
What the heck?
The police raided the bar. Some made it out and began running away. You were all ordered to line up against the wall and have your ID out.
Panic struck you. Why did you come out? Oh no, what humiliation and disgrace you were to face, and it was all your f —
Whose fault? Confusion breaks out. Some decided to name whose fault, and it was not their own. The police were at fault. For some reason more and more of you stood up. Refused the shame. Refused the fault. One effort after the next. It began.
A riot. Collectively you and all the other queers summoned Ulrich’s courage. In the 1860s Ulrichs went to the German Congress of Jurists and declared his oppression was not his fault. It was not his shame.
“The [police are not] authorized to treat [us] as outside the pale of law,” Ulrich declared.
The queers, or as Ulrichs named us, urnings, pushed back. They escaped the Stonewall Inn, and barricaded the police inside it.
Now, for the first time in modern history you felt liberation outside a confined space, and the agents of the oppressors were, however brief, now experiencing the confinement. It was they who were humiliated.
The state had failed to heed Ulrichs’ words: “Just because Urnings are unfortunate enough to be a small minority, no damage can be done to their inalienable rights and to their civil rights. The law of liberty in the constitutional state also has to consider its minorities.”
That night, it is recorded, Ulrichs’ urnings had done something even more radical than confine the confiners. They expressed their liberation in the queerest of ways. They publicly displayed their affection for one another.
Queers kissed each other in public! Maybe the boisterously sexy young man kissed you in public. Maybe, for the first time in your life, a kiss did not feel shameful. It was more than a kiss. It was a pride you were never allowed to express until the riots.
The riots lasted a few days, but the epoch of your liberation was merely dawning.
Happy Pride Day!