Stonewall, night 3: ‘The battle was on’
Lavender & red, part 70
By
Leslie Feinberg
Published Aug 14, 2006 9:26 PM
Sunday, June 29, saw a lull between battles,
although many cops were patrolling the streets of the Village, hurling slurs at
those milling on the corners and sidewalks, reportedly trying to egg on
skirmishes.
As thousands of gays and lesbians—drawing to their
leadership and ranks people of color, trans people, street youths—had
waged pitched battles with the cops on Friday and Sat urday during the early
nights of the Stonewall Uprising, a fault line of political difference opened
visibly wide between those who had the least to lose and the most to gain from
fighting back, and those who fav ored not rocking the boat.
The tony crowd
soaking up a little sun in the Hamptons and Fire Island Pines either ignored
news of the rebellion or, as historian Martin Duberman noted, tended to condemn
it as “regrettable.”
The Mattachine Society had posted a sign
on the Stonewall Inn reading, “We homosexuals plead with our people to
please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the
Village.” Matta chine-New York, according to historian David Carter,
“after talking to the mayor’s office and the police, joined police
efforts to stop the protests. … Mattachine officials came to the Stonewall
Inn and talked to people who showed up in an attempt to discourage them from
protesting.”
This was a far cry from the early days of the first
Matta chine in California at the height of the Cold War 1950s, when communists
and other revolutionaries led grassroots organizing to confront widespread
police entrapment and brutality against gay men and the Chican@/ Mexican@
communities.
However, a bodacious group of gay youths descended on the
Sixth Precinct and plastered the police cruisers, a police arrest van, and the
personal cars of police officers with luminescent fuchsia and blue bumper
stickers demanding “Equality for Homosexuals.”
Throughout the
Village, teams made up of one male and one female passed out leaflets issued by
the Homophile Youth Movement that demanded, “Get the Mafia and the Cops
Out of Gay Bars.”
Assessments of the changed mood of the LGBT
population on Christopher Street were voiced from two antithetical
directions.
Deputy Inspector Pine, who led the initial raid on the
Stonewall Inn, made a remark insulting those who showed individual courage,
defiance and resistance in the face of police arrest and imprisonment, beatings
and torture. Nevertheless, his words documented a dramatic overall shift in mass
mood in the LGBT population: “For those of us in public morals [sic],
things were completely changed … suddenly they were not submissive any
more.”
Gay male poet Allen Ginsberg visited the Stonewall Inn on
Sunday night with Village Voice reporter Lucian Truscott. His later observation
to Truscott contains a word that inflicts wounds when used by an anti-gay bigot.
Yet speaking about his own community with tender pride, he wrote about the sea
change he witnessed. “You know, the guys there were so
beautiful—they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years
ago.”
Rage still smoldering
David Carter assembled the
following firsthand accounts of incidents on Mon day through Wednesday from
participants.
Monday and Tuesday nights were mostly quiet in the Village,
as rain soaked the streets.
Police who tried to pick fights, however,
were met with bold responses.
When one arrogant cop at Christopher Street
and Waverly twirled his nightstick and hurled insults in the direction of
passersby, an individual described as a “wildly ‘fem’
queen” lit the fuse of a firecracker and detonated it under his feet. The
cop landed on his ass on the sidewalk.
The cop shouted and flailed with
his club. When the same militant individual tossed another firecracker at him,
the crowd fought with the cop and was able to snatch his badge off his
uniform.
On Wednesday night, widespread street fighting
resumed.
That was the night the Village Voice coverage of the early events
in the Stone wall rebellion hit newsstands. Some community members were so
enraged by the anti-gay tone of the journalists that they debated torching the
Voice’s offices that evening.
Carter states, “The second
reason that rioting resumed in full force on Wednes day is because various
radical Left groups came to protest.”
Participant Bob Kohler
recalled: “There were more people rioting that could not be easily
categorized, and a lot of that had to do with people that came over from other
areas. The straight movement moved in heavily that night as a
support.”
Reports of those of all sexualities who came in support
included members of the Black Panther Party, Workers World Party, the Yippies, a
group that called itself the Crazies, and other self-identified
leftists.
In reality, these were parties and organizations with
memberships of diverse sexualities. And many of the LGBT people who fought the
cops at Stonewall also self-identified as leftists and
revolutionaries.
Struggle erupted around 10 p.m. A chanting crowd,
estimated at 500 strong, met a motorcade of police with a shower of
bottles.
Police used their nightsticks to beat back the crowd. Eyewitness
Ronnie De Brienza described seeing a friend pummeled by police and dragged off
to a patrol car under arrest. “This was it,” he said. “From
nowhere the crowd swelled to an estimated thousand, and the battle was
on.”
Those who were there that night describe the battle between
police and protesters as ferocious. Once again, eyewitnesses explain, it was the
most oppres sed who led the struggle. Unarmed protesters fought hard and bravely
against police—who were well-protected by equip ment and armed to the
teeth.
Dick Leitsch, Mattachine-New York leader, observed that night that
bodies of Stonewall combatants wounded in battle lay on the streets and
sidewalks on Seventh Avenue South between Christo pher and West 10th
streets.
He concluded: “Young people, many of them queens, were
lying on the sidewalk, bleeding from the head, face, mouth, and even the eyes.
Others were nursing bruised and often bleeding arms, legs, backs and
necks.”
Within roughly an hour, the fighting ended. But the battles
fought by the most oppressed and most militant layers of the LGBT population
paved a new road toward revolutionary struggle.
Next: Left wing of
“gay liberation” at every barricade.
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