Taking a Stand for the First Time
Police raids of homosexual establishments, in the 1960s, were frequent; bars and clubs would be shut down, and patrons would be arrested through claims of violations of the laws prohibiting sodomy, anti-prostitution laws, and others in place at the time. Homosexuals were growing tired of giving in. The reaction to the police raid of the Stonewall Inn on June 28 was different.
"At the peak, as many as five hundred people per year were arrested for the crime against nature, and between three and five thousand people per year arrested for various solicitation or loitering crimes. This is every year in New York City... Gay people were not powerful enough politically to prevent the clampdown and so you had a series of escalating skirmishes in 1969. Eventually something was bound to blow." |
June 27, 1969
"DO YOU THINK HOMOSEXUALS ARE REVOLTING? YOU BET YOUR SWEET ASS WE ARE."
-Leaflet Distributed During Stonewall Riots
"All of a sudden, the police faced something they had never seen before. Gay people were never supposed to be threats to police officers... And here they were lifting things up and fighting them and attacking them and beating them." The Stonewall Riots
The Stonewall Riots were a major catalyst for the advancement of the human rights of homosexuals.
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The patrons of the Stonewall Inn took responsibility onto themselves to gain their human rights. These riots began the realization that, to get their human rights, the homosexuals had to, themselves, fight to hold the United States responsible for withholding homosexuals from their rights.
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"This was the Rosa Parks moment, the time that gay people stood up and said no. And once that happened, the whole house of cards that was the system of oppression of gay people started to crumble."
-Lucian Truscott (Reporter, The Village Voice: the Newspaper of Greenwich Village)