The riots began on this day in 1969 in front of the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in New York. Predominantly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people fought street battles with the police through 3 July. This event is generally regarded as the big bang of the international LGBTIQ* movement.
What is forgotten in the master narrative, however, is that it was not a single issue. Rather, the roots of the uprising are intertwined with other social (liberation) movements. Today, a false understanding of ‘identity politic’” (in contrast to the solidary concept of ‘identity politics’ according to the Black, radical, lesbian Combahee River Collective) is predominantly used to argue about which people from which social situations and positionalities were present at the events, and what role they played in them. In this way, rights of belonging and participation in memories are negotiated.
In a plural understanding of remembrance culture, it is therefore essential to also look at the gaps in narratives, whose ‘silences’ are the result of the exercise of power.
As early as 1984, the lesbian writer Rita Mae Brown complained that ‘the inmates of the Women’s House of Detention heard the noise and started a prison riot … They set fire to their mattresses and put them through the bars. This was never written down, because all the documented testimonies of that time were from men’.
Brown speaks of the prison riot at the notorious Women’s House of Detention (WHoD) as a response to the riots on Christopher Street, which is within earshot. Arcus Flynn, an activist with the lesbian organisation Daughters of Bilitis, first learned of the Stonewall Riots by noticing fires in the windows as she passed the WHoD and that ‘probably hundreds’ of inmates were shouting ‘Gay rights! Gay rights! Gay rights!’. Other testimonies attest that the inmates also chanted ‘Gay Power!’ in a variation on the black movement’s slogan ‘Black Power!’.
The WHoD, built in 1932, had become known as the ‘Lesbian Prison’, as many inmates were queer women, butches, and trans men imprisoned for minor offences, including violating the clothing law, which stipulated that a person had to wear at least three visible items of clothing of their sex as assigned at birth. Inmates were mainly non-white, poor, and gender non-conforming women and trans men.
The WHoD, also known as the ‘Hell Hole’, was notorious for harassment, abuse, and (sexualised) violence against inmates. In the late 1960s, an increasing number of political prisoners from the peace movement, the radical left and, above all, the black movement were imprisoned there. Among the best-known inmates were the three queer Black Panther activists Afeni Shakur, Joan Bird, and Angela Davis. The latter was only imprisoned after the Stonewall riots, but Shakur and Bird were among the protagonists of the prison uprising.
This prison uprising quickly gave rise to a solidarity alliance of organisations that fought together against the WHoD and the violent conditions that prevailed there, as well as for its inmates. In 1971, the ‘hellhole’ was closed for good and demolished. The site has been a public park since 1974.
Stonewall veteran and lesbian butch Jay Toole, who was one of the many homeless, queer youth who took part in the riots on the streets at the time, describes the turning point in LGBTIQ* history with these words: ‘It was every form of human being, every shade of human being, every sexuality of human being, all coming together as one. It was just like, enough is e-fucking-nough!’
In the spirit of a plural culture of remembrance: Black Power! Gay Power! Happy Pride! Queers for Future!
