Gay Liberation

something somewhat similar happened at the Black Cat Tavern in

Silver Lake in Los Angeles.

The Black Cat is still there.

Um This was a gay bar that was opened in

1966 and on New Year's Eve 1967.

Um It was full of L.

G. B.

T. Q.

Patrons and a number of undercover police officers were there

and at midnight when patrons started celebrating and kissing the

police uh started beating up on a lot of them

arrested. A number of them made some charges.

Eventually actually two of these men who were kissing.

Um we're charged and found guilty and registered as sex

offenders. Nothing happened in terms of protests on that night,

but in february of that year there were a series

of peaceful processed protests outside the Black Cat trying to

end police brutality and legal entrapment.

Police lawlessness.

This policy of undercover police officers.

Um some of whom actually not necessarily at the Black

Hat on that night but some of whom would try

to seduce or abate patrons and then arrest them.

And this kind of police entrapment or extortion Was a

common practice of police departments across the country throughout the

1950s and 1960s.

It was another image from these peaceful protests.

Um The Black Cat protests have often been mischaracterized um

as riots.

Uh and so you might have heard of it in

that context, but in fact there were no riots at

the Black Cat, nothing happened or erupted into violence on

the New Year's Eve and the protests that happened five

or six weeks later um were peaceful but they were

fairly numerous.

There were hundreds of people that turned up for this

and it did have an impact in terms of signaling

to the police that at least some members of the

population who were allies were tired of this behavior.

This brings us of course, to stonewall riots in New

York City in 1969, which as I mentioned earlier, are

the kind of iconic queer gay liberation riots.

The Stone Wall was a gay bar, but uh, as

with most gay bars in the country in this period

was not gay owned and operated who was in fact

owned and operated by the mafia.

These mafia run gay bars across the country and there

were many of them capitalist on the knowledge that LGBTQ

plus people didn't have that many places where they could

safely congregate.

So the mafia would buy and open up these bars.

They would charge very expensive prices for watered down drinks

in order to be able to make as much money

as possible.

And they almost always had corrupt relationships with the Police

Department. So on one hand, they would pay off the

Police Department to allow them to continue running in relative

safety, but at the same time, they would allow the

Police Department to come in and make these occasional raids.

Um, usually under the agreement that the Police Department would

give them some sort of advanced warning and also maybe

not do it in primetime, Maybe do it sort of

earlier in the evening rather than at say one a.m.

on Friday.

And this was definitely the practice at the Stonewall.

They would pay off the police serve these expensive watered

down drinks.

There were other ways that they got around laws regarding

whether you could sell drinks to LGBTQ populations.

So they ran it as a members only bottle club

rather than a regular bar and the police would occasionally

contact the stone wall and give them a heads up

that they were coming in to do a raid.

The managers of the Stone wall would turn on or

flash the lights in the bar to give a signal

that this was happening.

And generally what would happen was the police would turn

up, ask for rides for people kind of like bully

them and then possibly arrest one or two people, usually

employees of the bar, not patrons.

I have given you a number of materials this week

that describe the Three days worth of events that happened

in 1969 that we now call the stonewall riots.

So I'm not going to go through the whole thing

again here because you have numerous descriptions, you have, um,

Whitney strub talks about it in the article, from the

Routledge Reader.

And then you also have firsthand accounts in the excerpts

from the Stone Wall Reader.

And then there are also some, uh, another perspective in

the video, two part video series that I gave you

to look at.

So I don't need to rehearse all of that here.

What I mainly want to point to is that on

this Friday night in 1969, police did something very different

than what they normally did.

They turned up around one in the morning virtually unannounced.

I think they gave like a five minute warning rather

than the usual warning and um they raided and people

push back and it's not exactly clear why this of

all nights provoked this resistance, but it did, there have

been arguments that people were just fed up.

It was a young population that was at the stonewall

this night, as with most nights, there's also a sense

that arriving this late and uh, the sort of brutality

that the police brought that night was unusual.

Um, there are arguments that it was the arrest of

a, a famous butch lesbian woman famous for being a

long term and very beloved bouncer at a lot of

gay clubs in new york.

Her name was Storm a delivery.

Um, and there are arguments that it was her treatment

by the police that inflamed people, we don't really know

exactly what it was that set off some, well, what

we do know is that the resistance started and it

gained strength and as the police doubled down, they ended

up barricading themselves inside the stone wall, they took one

um, kind of hostage who was actually a straight person

um, and people started throwing rocks, throwing other objects.

People try to set the stone wall on fire from

outside the police called backup riot forces and rather than

ending the conflict, this seems to have exacerbated the situation.

Another thing that was very unusual about this night is

that suddenly you had lots of crowds gathering outside.

This was a time when a lot of other bars

were closing um, in Greenwich village was busy on a

friday night.

So you had a big crowd of onlookers and this

became a spectacle which seems also to have sort of

inflamed the courage, especially of a lot of the younger

brown and black trans women and drag queens who were

there. You see here a few images that I'm sharing.

This is just the sort of crowds beginning to gather,

but here we have a couple of images from the

night of tension and conflict, number of people were Arrested,

a number of people were injured, No one was killed.

So one thing that's also really worth noting about this

night, so you have these tactical Patrol forces, they're essentially

police in some degree of riot gear and not the

kind of 21st century version of incredibly militarized riot gear

that we are aware of now, but still they were

tactical units and in response to these tactical patrols showing

up, You had a number of these trans women and

drag queens joined together in a kind of chorus line,

like the famous new york, all female troupe of dancers,

the Rockets and start kicking their heels and chanting this

song, We are the Stonewall girls.

We wear our hair in curls, we wear no underwear,

we show our pubic hair, we wear our dungarees above

our nelly knees.

This is not an image from the actual night of

Stonewall, but this is an image of Marsha P.

Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, both of whom were there that

night and involved in this beautiful kick dance.

I think the thing I really like about thinking of

that moment is that you have this kind of extreme

show of force by the police and in response, you

have what is essentially an active camp if we're thinking

about last week's lesson, um, this mhm, this line of

queens and trans women joining together and basically reading against

the grain doing a cat version of the rockets um,

in order to battle against the force of the tactical

unit. And I think if any of you read Susan

Sontag's notes on camp, which I put on the CCL

last week as an optional reading.

She argues that camp is not political, but I would

say here, you have a moment where if it's not

political camp is at least being used in a tactical

way The Stonewall riots lasted essentially three nights as you'll

read in the materials for this week, the next day

people came back in tremendous numbers as did the police

and many have argued that there was more violence the

second night than the third and local newspapers, especially the

village voice started covering the riots in real time, often

in quite condescending ways.

But it gathered a lot of attention as it was

happening. So by sunday, a lot of people, especially in

the village had heard about what was going on and

they were showing up at the stonewall early evening to

see how the events might unfold.

You have reports of how some of the kind of

stars, this would probably include Marsha, P.

Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

Um, we're showing up on saturday night and kind of

posing for the cameras because there was already an awareness.

They had been the celebrities of friday night's actions.

Um, but apart from the sort of the joy and

performance of it, the violence really did continue.

So the arrests were real, The injuries were real.

The conflict was real and the police kept trying to

increase their numbers.

Um, and so did the L.

G. B.

T. Q.

Patrons, individuals and their allies.

So this became a three night stand off that eventually

dissipated. One argument is largely that it was sort of

going into the work day.

So on monday, people didn't really reappear in order to

talk about the feelings of accomplishment of these nights.

I'm going to let Sylvia Rivera use her own words,

she said, I wanted to do every destructive thing I

could think of to get back at those who had

heard us over the years, letting loose.

Fighting back was the only way to get across the

strait society and the cops that we weren't going to

take their fucking bullshit anymore.

There was a sense I think shared that this was

the kind of as the saying goes, the straw that

broke the camel's back, that once this uh pushback erupted

at the stonewall and there was never any going back.

And by monday morning, a lot of people who were

involved in activism and people who previously previously had not

been, were beginning to write, organize, um circulate fliers and

pamphlets and think about how to take the energy from

this night and direct it into something rather than just

letting it dissipate.

Gay Liberation

Chapters

Audio TranscriptAuto-generated