But First, A Word From Our Sponsor:
Top Comments recognizes the previous day's Top Mojo and strives to promote each day's outstanding comments through nominations made by Kossacks like you. Please send comments (before 9:30pm ET) by email to topcomments@gmail.com or by our KosMail message board. Just click on the Spinning Top™ to make a submission. Look for the Spinning Top™ to pop up in diaries posts around Daily Kos.
Make sure that you include the direct link to the comment (the URL), which is available by clicking on that comment's date/time. Please let us know your Daily Kos user name if you use email so we can credit you properly. If you send a writeup with the link, we can include that as well. The diarist poster reserves the right to edit all content.
Please come in. You're invited to make yourself at home! Join us beneath the doodle...
|
On this beautiful Saturday evening the LGBT community is celebrating the 45th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, that indelible moment in our history now credited with setting off a civil rights movement.
On that June night in Greenwich Village, little could that community of situational activists have envisioned our movement today, on this historic cusp as we bear witness to their demand for our full equality coming to fruition. Much work remains, true, but we must never forget the immense volume of work that came before.
Of course, Stonewall didn't happen in a vacuum. True grassroots effort and many outrages preceded the night our cumulative anger fully boiled over and grabbed national attention. Both Los Angeles and San Francisco had been active in the movement as early as 1950. Yet it will remain Stonewall that will forever play the pivotal role of game-changer.
So what happened next? Well, many things, but tonight I would like to shine a spotlight on Halloween night of 1969 in San Francisco, just four months later.
After Stonewall, the media was faced with a new dilemma. Long the mouthpiece of a conservative society, their stat narrative of passive homosexuals who hid themselves in shame from their negative scrutiny had been upended. Threats of names and faces being exposed in newspapers no longer had the desired effect of keeping us all locked in our closets. Yet some newspapers continued on with their public shaming tactics as if Stonewall hadn't taken place, as if activists cared what they thought anymore. The venerable San Francisco Examiner was among them.
After a string of disparaging stories against San Francisco's burgeoning gay scene appeared in the paper, 60 members of two prominent rights groups planned a protest. The newly formed San Francisco chapter of the Gay Liberation Front and the already existing Society for Individual Rights staged a protest in front of the Examiner's building.
By all accounts, it was a peaceful protest until employees from the Examiner decided they didn't like these queers protesting outside their building, no, not one bit. It is disputed whether these employees acted from a third floor office or from the roof, but what is not disputed is that they threw either a bag or barrel of purple printers' ink onto the protesters below.
The shocked activists took the opportunity to document the ugly moment by running through downtown San Francisco, placing their purple stained handprints on buildings as a testimony to the media's antipathy. Naturally, the police were called and naturally they reacted violently.
President of SIR, Larry LittleJohn:
At that point, the tactical squad arrived—not to get the employees who dumped the ink, but to arrest the demonstrators who were the victims. The police could have surrounded the Examiner building...but no, they went after the gays...Somebody could have been hurt if that ink had gotten into their eyes, but the police came racing in with their clubs swinging, knocking people to the ground. It was unbelievable.
In fact, many people were injured with at least one protester's teeth being knocked out.
For a brief period following this brutality, activists trying to galvanize the movement through symbolism attempted to introduce the purple handprint as an icon of our oppression. It failed to take hold, with activists moving in favor of the pink triangle and eventually settling on the rainbow flag.
But for a brief moment, the city of San Francisco woke up to a purple hand in their face placed there by members of their own community who refused to be disparaged, intimidated and forced back into their stifling closets by a local rag.
Happy Pride to all my brothers and sisters tonight. Happy Pride to those who came before and those who will come after. Happy Pride to our allies who support us and who have worked along side of us these many years.
I give you all a high purple five tonight.
Steven
Now on to Tops!
TOP COMMENTS
June 28, 2014
Thanks to tonight's Top Comments contributors! Let us hear from YOU
when you find that proficient comment.
From Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
In Hunter's diary Rick Santorum says anti-gay Christians being sent to re-education camp, Formandalay points out the obvious flaw.
From ban nock:
Finally a comment that reflects the compassionate community that I thought DK was.
From Puddytat:
I asked a question about why the GOP, today concerned about Hillary Clinton being "too rich" to run for President, never saying a word about Mitt's Money Pile. I got a whale of a funny answer.
From BeninSC:
This stunning first comment from RenegadeNH tells a story of conditions on the front line of a beleaguered abortion clinic. Wow.
and...
This next comment, from optionzz (ALSO a new Kossack contributor!), tells yet another remarkable aboriton clinic escort story, of a very clever comment from the optionzz's brother!
From Steveningen:
In Chrislove's Cheesy Top Comments Diary last night, JeffW gave us this gem.
|
TOP PHOTOS
June 27, 2014
Enjoy jotter's wonderful PictureQuilt™ below. Just click on the picture and it will magically take you to the comment that features that photo. Have fun, Kossacks!
|