The idea was to be there first. It eats you up inside. In 1969 it was common for police officers to rough up a gay bar and ask for payoffs. In addition to interviews with activists and scholars, the film includes the reflections of renowned writer Allen Ginsberg. We were thinking about survival. Narrator (Archival):Note how Albert delicately pats his hair, and adjusts his collar. And there, we weren't allowed to be alone, the police would raid us still. They call them hotels, motels, lovers' lanes, drive-in movie theaters, etc. Mike Wallace (Archival):The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. Doing things like that. If that didn't work, they would do things like aversive conditioning, you know, show you pornography and then give you an electric shock. Jerry Hoose:I was chased down the street with billy clubs. And the police were showing up. Martin Boyce:The day after the first riot, when it was all over, and I remember sitting, sun was soon to come, and I was sitting on the stoop, and I was exhausted and I looked at that street, it was dark enough to allow the street lamps to pick up the glitter of all the broken glass, and all the debris, and all the different colored cloth, that was in different places. Alexandra Meryash Nikolchev, On-Line Editors And I knew that I was lesbian. Raymond Castro:New York City subways, parks, public bathrooms, you name it. Sign up for the American Experience newsletter! It was narrated by author Rita Mae Brown, directed by Greta Schiller, co-directed by Robert Rosenberg, and co-produced by John Scagliotti and Rosenberg, and Schiller. Marc Aubin Seymour Pine, Deputy Inspector, Morals Division, NYPD:They were sexual deviates. It was tremendous freedom. Is that conceivable? Amber Hall We didn't want to come on, you know, wearing fuzzy sweaters and lipstick, you know, and being freaks. So if any one of you, have let yourself become involved with an adult homosexual, or with another boy, and you're doing this on a regular basis, you better stop quick. Martin Boyce:And I remember moving into the open space and grabbing onto two of my friends and we started singing and doing a kick line. A year earlier, young gays, lesbians and transgender people clashed with police near a bar called The Stonewall Inn. I mean, I came out in Central Park and other places. You see these cops, like six or eight cops in drag. Jeremiah Hawkins Eventually something was bound to blow. Then the cops come up and make use of what used to be called the bubble-gum machine, back then a cop car only had one light on the top that spun around. And if we catch you, involved with a homosexual, your parents are going to know about it first. People talk about being in and out now, there was no out, there was just in. And the Stonewall was part of that system. Not even us. Dr. Socarides (Archival):I think the whole idea of saying "the happy homosexual" is to, uh, to create a mythology about the nature of homosexuality. Gay people were not powerful enough politically to prevent the clampdown and so you had a series of escalating skirmishes in 1969. Jerry Hoose:I remember I was in a paddy wagon one time on the way to jail, we were all locked up together on a chain in the paddy wagon and the paddy wagon stopped for a red light or something and one of the queens said "Oh, this is my stop." And when you got a word, the word was homosexuality and you looked it up. Jerry Hoose:The bar itself was a toilet. John O'Brien:I was with a group that we actually took a parking meter out of theground, three or four people, and we used it as a battering ram. National Archives and Records Administration And when she grabbed that everybody knew she couldn't do it alone so all the other queens, Congo Woman, queens like that started and they were hitting that door. It was narrated by author Rita Mae Brown, directed by Greta Schiller, co-directed by Robert Rosenberg, and co-produced by John Scagliotti and Rosenberg, and Schiller. Slate:Activity Group Therapy (1950), Columbia University Educational Films. Before Stonewall pries open the closet door, setting free dramatic stories from the early 1900's onwards of public and private existence as experienced by LGBT Americans. Gay people were never supposed to be threats to police officers. 1984 documentary film by Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg, "Berlinale 2016: Panorama Celebrates Teddy Award's 30th Anniversary and Announces First Titles in Programme", "Guest Post: What I Learned From Revisiting My 1984 Documentary 'Before Stonewall', "See the 25 New Additions to the National Film Registry, From Purple Rain to Clerks", "Complete National Film Registry Listing", "Before Stonewall - Independent Historical Film", Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community (Newly Restored), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Before_Stonewall&oldid=1134540821, Documentary films about United States history, Historiography of LGBT in the United States, United States National Film Registry films, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 19 January 2023, at 05:30. We didn't necessarily know where we were going yet, you know, what organizations we were going to be or how things would go, but we became something I, as a person, could all of a sudden grab onto, that I couldn't grab onto when I'd go to a subway T-room as a kid, or a 42nd street movie theater, you know, or being picked up by some dirty old man. I was wearing my mother's black and white cocktail dress that was empire-waisted. John O'Brien:Whenever you see the cops, you would run away from them. MacDonald & Associates We assembled on Christopher Street at 6th Avenue, to march. Cause we could feel a sense of love for each other that we couldn't show out on the street, because you couldn't show any affection out on the street. Dick Leitsch:And that's when you started seeing like, bodies laying on the sidewalk, people bleeding from the head. The first police officer that came in with our group said, "The place is under arrest. Pennebaker courtesy of Pennebaker Hegedus Films Geoff Kole Even non-gay people. ", Howard Smith, Reporter,The Village Voice:And he went to each man and said it by name. Frank Kameny John DiGiacomo One never knows when the homosexual is about. Howard Smith, Reporter,The Village Voice:I had been in some gay bars either for a story or gay friends would say, "Oh we're going to go in for a drink there, come on in, are you too uptight to go in?" Just let's see if they can. And then they send them out in the street and of course they did make arrests, because you know, there's all these guys who cruise around looking for drag queens. Because to be gay represented to me either very, super effeminate men or older men who hung out in the upper movie theatres on 42nd Street or in the subway T-rooms, who'd be masturbating. And I had become very radicalized in that time. Daniel Pine With this outpouring of courage and unity the gay liberation movement had begun. Seymour Pine, Deputy Inspector, Morals Division, NYPD:Our radio was cut off every time we got on the police radio. William Eskridge, Professor of Law:Ed Koch who was a democratic party leader in the Greenwich Village area, was a specific leader of the local forces seeking to clean up the streets. Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt:We would scatter, ka-poom, every which way. Howard Smith, Reporter,The Village Voice:That night I'm in my office, I looked down the street, and I could see the Stonewall sign and I started to see some activity in front. These homosexuals glorify unnatural sex acts. Participants of the 1969 Greenwich Village uprising describe the effect that Stonewall had on their lives. There are a lot of kids here. Howard Smith, Reporter,The Village Voice:It was getting worse and worse. Things were being thrown against the plywood, we piled things up to try to buttress it. And some people came out, being very dramatic, throwing their arms up in a V, you know, the victory sign. Transcript A gay rights march in New York in favor of the 1968 Civil Rights Act being amended to include gay rights. You know, Howard's concern was and my concern was that if all hell broke loose, they'd just start busting heads. If there had been a riot of that proportion in Harlem, my God, you know, there'd have been cameras everywhere. Seymour Pine, Deputy Inspector, Morals Division, NYPD:We didn't have the manpower, and the manpower for the other side was coming like it was a real war. Interviewer (Archival):Are you a homosexual? Virginia Apuzzo:It's very American to say, "This is not right." Martha Shelley:They wanted to fit into American society the way it was. Read a July 6, 1969excerpt fromTheNew York Daily News. It's very American to say, "You promised equality, you promised freedom." Raymond Castro And the rest of your life will be a living hell. Dick Leitsch:Mattachino in Italy were court jesters; the only people in the whole kingdom who could speak truth to the king because they did it with a smile. They didn't know what they were walking into. Franco Sacchi, Additional Animation and Effects The windows were always cloaked. Seymour Pine, Deputy Inspector, Morals Division, NYPD:We only had about six people altogether from the police department knowing that you had a precinct right nearby that would send assistance. Lilli M. Vincenz I famously used the word "fag" in the lead sentence I said "the forces of faggotry." It's the first time I'm fully inside the Stonewall. The homosexual, bitterly aware of his rejection, responds by going underground. [2][3] Later in 2019, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[4][5][6]. The police weren't letting us dance. Martha Shelley:When I was growing up in the '50s, I was supposed to get married to some guy, produce, you know, the usual 2.3 children, and I could look at a guy and say, "Well, objectively he's good looking," but I didn't feel anything, just didn't make any sense to me. Virginia Apuzzo:What we felt in isolation was a growing sense of outrage and fury particularly because we looked around and saw so many avenues of rebellion. Seymour Pine, Deputy Inspector, Morals Division, NYPD:It was always hands up, what do you want? Raymond Castro:So then I got pushed back in, into the Stonewall by these plain clothes cops and they would not let me out, they didn't let anybody out. Fifty years ago, a riot broke out at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village. There was no going back now, there was no going back, there was no, we had discovered a power that we weren't even aware that we had. Dana Gaiser Martha Shelley:If you were in a small town somewhere, everybody knew you and everybody knew what you did and you couldn't have a relationship with a member of your own sex, period. Dick Leitsch:Very often, they would put the cops in dresses, with makeup and they usually weren't very convincing. Giles Kotcher They pushed everybody like to the back room and slowly asking for IDs. It was as if an artist had arranged it, it was beautiful, it was like mica, it was like the streets we fought on were strewn with diamonds. I mean I'm talking like sardines. And we had no right to such. This 1955 educational film warns of homosexuality, calling it "a sickness of the mind.". The term like "authority figures" wasn't used back then, there was just "Lily Law," "Patty Pig," "Betty Badge." Oddball Film + Video, San Francisco Now, 50 years later, the film is back. Nobody. Once it started, once that genie was out of the bottle, it was never going to go back in. Martin Boyce:Well, in the front part of the bar would be like "A" gays, like regular gays, that didn't go in any kind of drag, didn't use the word "she," that type, but they were gay, a hundred percent gay. Richard Enman (Archival):Present laws give the adult homosexual only the choice of being, to simplify the matter, heterosexual and legal or homosexual and illegal. Howard Smith, Reporter,The Village Voice:But there were little, tiny pin holes in the plywood windows, I'll call them the windows but they were plywood, and we could look out from there and every time I went over and looked out through one of those pin holes where he did, we were shocked at how big the crowd had become. Every arrest and prosecution is a step in the education of the public to the solution of the problem. But I was just curious, I didn't want to participate because number one it was so packed. That was our world, that block. For the first time the next person stood up. Calling 'em names, telling 'em how good-looking they were, grabbing their butts. Martin Boyce:All of a sudden, Miss New Orleans and all people around us started marching step by step and the police started moving back. Your choice, you can come in with us or you can stay out here with the crowd and report your stuff from out here. Fred Sargeant:In the '60s, I met Craig Rodwell who was running the Oscar Wilde Bookshop. But the before section, I really wanted people to have a sense of what it felt like to be gay, lesbian, transgender, before Stonewall and before you have this mass civil rights movement that comes after Stonewall. And this went on for hours. And as I'm looking around to see what's going on, police cars, different things happening, it's getting bigger by the minute. John O'Brien:All of a sudden, the police faced something they had never seen before. Available on Prime Video, Tubi TV, iTunes. Dana Kirchoff The mirrors, all the bottles of liquor, the jukebox, the cigarette machines. In 1999, producer Scagliotti directed a companion piece, After Stonewall. So gay people were being strangled, shot, thrown in the river, blackmailed, fired from jobs. John O'Brien:The election was in November of 1969 and this was the summer of 1969, this was June. It premiered at the 1984 Toronto International Film Festival and was released in the United States on June 27, 1985. Dick Leitsch:And the blocks were small enough that we could run around the block and come in behind them before they got to the next corner. Greg Shea, Legal Urban Stages And in a sense the Stonewall riots said, "Get off our backs, deliver on the promise." Mike Wallace (Archival):Two out of three Americans look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort or fear. Louis Mandelbaum And that crowd between Howard Johnson's and Mama's Chik-n-Rib was like the basic crowd of the gay community at that time in the Village. Doric Wilson Leaflets in the 60s were like the internet, today. The medical experimentation in Atascadero included administering, to gay people, a drug that simulated the experience of drowning; in other words, a pharmacological example of waterboarding. The documentary shows how homosexual people enjoyed and shared with each other. And so we had to create these spaces, mostly in the trucks. I was proud. John O'Brien:If a gay man is caught by the police and is identified as being involved in what they called lewd, immoral behavior, they would have their person's name, their age and many times their home address listed in the major newspapers. Stacker put together a timeline of LGBTQ+ history leading up to Stonewall, beginning with prehistoric events and ending in the late 1960s. We went, "Oh my God. Danny Garvin:People were screaming "pig," "copper." Susan Liberti David Carter And the harder she fought, the more the cops were beating her up and the madder the crowd got. (Enter your ZIP code for information on American Experience events and screening in your area.). And there was tear gas on Saturday night, right in front of the Stonewall. That never happened before. Martin Boyce:It was thrilling. Cop (Archival):Anyone can walk into that men's room, any child can walk in there, and see what you guys were doing. Jerry Hoose:Who was gonna complain about a crackdown against gay people? And so there was this drag queen standing on the corner, so they go up and make a sexual offer and they'd get busted. Before Stonewall (1984) - full transcript New York City's Stonewall Inn is regarded by many as the site of gay and lesbian liberation since it was at this bar that drag queens fought back against police June 27-28, 1969. Fifty years ago, a gay bar in New York City called The Stonewall Inn was raided by police, and what followed were days of rebellion where protesters and police clashed. John O'Brien:There was one street called Christopher Street, where actually I could sit and talk to other gay people beyond just having sex. It was an age of experimentation. Janice Flood Lucian Truscott, IV, Reporter,The Village Voice:Saturday night there it was. People that were involved in it like me referred to it as "The First Run." Fred Sargeant:The effect of the Stonewall riot was to change the direction of the gay movement. They frequent their own clubs, and bars and coffee houses, where they can escape the disapproving eye of the society that they call straight. Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt:The police would zero in on us because sometimes they would be in plain clothes, and sometimes they would even entrap. Dick Leitsch:New York State Liquor Authority had a rule that one known homosexual at a licensed premise made the place disorderly, so nobody would set up a place where we could meet because they were afraid that the cops would come in to close it, and that's how the Mafia got into the gay bar business. John O'Brien:And deep down I believed because I was gay and couldn't speak out for my rights, was probably one of the reasons that I was so active in the Civil Rights Movement. Danny Garvin:With Waverly Street coming in there, West Fourth coming in there, Seventh Avenue coming in there, Christopher Street coming in there, there was no way to contain us. Eric Marcus, Writer:The Mattachine Society was the first gay rights organization, and they literally met in a space with the blinds drawn. You know, we wanted to be part of the mainstream society. Gay people were told we didn't have any of that. Geordie, Liam and Theo Gude In 1969 the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, leading to three nights of rioting by the city's gay community. Jay Fialkov In a spontaneous show of support and frustration, the citys gay community rioted for three nights in the streets, an event that is considered the birth of the modern Gay Rights Movement. I mean I'm only 19 and this'll ruin me. John O'Brien:They had increased their raids in the trucks. This 19-year-old serviceman left his girlfriend on the beach to go to a men's room in a park nearby where he knew that he could find a homosexual contact. Slate:In 1969, homosexual acts were illegal in every state except Illinois. Doric Wilson:And we were about 100, 120 people and there were people lining the sidewalks ahead of us to watch us go by, gay people, mainly. But I'm wearing this police thing I'm thinking well if they break through I better take it off really quickly but they're gunna come this way and we're going to be backing up and -- who knows what'll happen. They were getting more ferocious. The newly restored 1984 documentary "Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community," re-released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the seminal Stonewall riots, remains a . View in iTunes. We love to hear from our listeners! He may appear normal, and it may be too late when you discover he is mentally ill. John O'Brien:I was a poor, young gay person. Few photographs of the raid and the riots that followed exist. Gay bars were to gay people what churches were to blacks in the South. Marjorie Duffield ", Martin Boyce:People in the neighborhood, the most unlikely people were starting to support it. David Carter, Author ofStonewall:There was also vigilantism, people were using walkie-talkies to coordinate attacks on gay men. Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives Available via license: Content may be subject to . Slate:Perversion for Profit(1965), Citizens for Decency Through Law. And it's interesting to note how many youngsters we've been seeing in these films. That night, we printed a box, we had 5,000. Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution That's it. Howard Smith, Reporter,The Village Voice:I had a column inThe Village Voicethat ran from '66 all the way through '84. And here they were lifting things up and fighting them and attacking them and beating them. I was a homosexual. There may be some here today that will be homosexual in the future. Finally, Mayor Lindsay listened to us and he announced that there would be no more police entrapment in New York City. And then there were all these priests ranting in church about certain places not to go, so you kind of knew where you could go by what you were told not to do.

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