Watch This: Looking Back at Stonewall, the Birthplace of Pride
(Photo Credits: Rhododendrites [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons)
Today—June 28, 2018—we are taking a look back at the Stonewall riots and the impact it made on the LGBT community all over the world.
I personally love history. Not only is it fascinating and inspiring, it also helps us understand the past and present; the society and people as a whole; and most of all, history helps us understand change (or the need for it).
For Adam4Adam members out there who are just hearing the word Stonewall for the first time, it refers to the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar owned and operated by the New York Mafia which is located in the Greenwich Village in New York City. It is famous for being the site of the riot that lasted for days—also known as the Stonewall uprising or the Stonewall rebellion—which started because of what seemed at first, a usual police raid that took place at around 1:20am on June 28, 1969. Raids were common during that period, but in that particular moment something shifted and for the first time the LGBT community was fighting back and saying, “We are gay and we are here to stay.”
You can read more about the Stonewall here. The videos below on the other hand are interviews with people who were present during the riot who described how those days were for them plus some insights from today’s generation.
And this is why LGBT Pride Month is celebrated in June—to commemorate the Stonewall riots and the impact it made on the lives of the LGBT people worldwide. Stonewall served as the catalyst for change, the emergence of gay rights movements in the US, and the LGBT community’s subsequent fight for rights and equality.
That being said, what do you think are the works that remain undone in terms of LGBT rights and equality today? Sound off in the comments section below.
Several years before Stonewall there were riots in San Francisco which you can learn about on YouTube in a documentary called Screaming Queens.
Shit, as of yesterday, we need a Democratic Lesbian or Gay man; maybe of color even, not some injurious log-cabin son-of-a-bitch as a judge on the supreme court. Man, things are about to get really fuckin’ bumpy, looks like we’re going way back to the dark-ages; days of back-alley sleaze as mentioned in “what does gay pride means to you?”
So, ‘if’ there’s ‘still’ going to be gay pride parades, (doubtful) how about if you’re going to be in garb; instead of leather-men: cops, doctors, military personnel, ect., in other words PROFFESSIONALS!
Instead of the “usual” drag queens; PROFFESSIONALS like nurses or models of something. There’s only one Ru Paul, lol, bless his heart.
I really hope you “log-cabin” cock-suckers are proud of yourselves, of course the Democratic politicians can thank themselves as well. I know this might seem off-subject to some of you, but not really; we’re talking about politics, yeah? Fucking right.
Shove off, Lamar. Your Trump Derangement Sydrome is on full display. You don’t even know who the nominee will be and you’re already coming apart at the seams like a drag queen with a broken high heel. You reek of the sort of whiney crybaby that feels like having the same rights as anybody else isn’t enough, you’ve got to have MORE. What makes you so damned special?
And what of these so-called “PROFESSIONALS”? Just exactly what the fuck is a PROFESSIONAL in your small, closed mind? Is that some fantasy fetish of yours – guys in uniform? Do you think plumbers, welders, mechanics, equipment operators, electricians, or even ditch diggers can’t be professionals?
Since you want to make this about politics, here is a salient quote for you: “Sanctimonious ignorance is contagious, a staple of mob cohesion. It is far more gratifying to join an uninformed collective united in pious revulsion than submit to the onerous task of sifting through a voluminous deposition and using one’s common sense.” (David Solway)
Thanks for your opinion but I’d prefer our Constitutional Republic to your Democratic mob rule. Likewise, I also prefer a thinking judge and not somebody led by their emotions.
I just laugh at you, you still think we-I, “need more rights” We, just want the ones already on the books reinforced, enough said. I like your inclusions too, by the way
of the plumbers, welders, ect., yeah, they are professionals, the other shit is just vitriol. Buy a bottle of the pink stuff.
Thank you Tree
So easy to take ALL this for granted TODAY in modern, forward thinking America … those here, regularly complaining about over the top – self important gays, may find we are very near an impending crisis, made worse by those ‘I don’t wave a flag’ mentalities.
The soon-to-be retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, WILL mean an opportunity to replace this moderate SCOTUS ‘across-the-aisle’ Justice, with the possibility of a hardcore conservative. As the high court has recently chosen to take more conservative and narrow stances, this could end up throwing many forward-thinking strides back to local state politics. That could mean that individual states could decide it is in the best civil rights interests of say some religious organizations, to not have to pay for a health service through either taxation or medical insurance communities. This could further exacerbate local laws regarding gay civil rights in the US.
Before ANYONE attempts to say this post is an alarmist plea, please take a serious look at the current US executive order machine. Look at the hardcore stance on overturning decisions some groups found ‘over the top’ in their scope of positivity towards gays … many might not care about the current immigration issues in the US, however, do not miss that the real questionable points have been the constitutionality of those decisions: “Can we over look the civil rights of a refugee seeking asylum in the US?” (different than natural immigration). Furthermore; for those who have followed the forced separation of parents and children EVEN at border offices (supposedly offering help to asylum seekers), it is clearly evident that a “policy” has been put in place to test THIS constitutionality … as we move to more ‘populist opinions,’ DO NOT BELIEVE FOR ONE MOMENT there are not groups of people whose hatred of THIS community far exceeds, and makes bland, the vitriol spewed within many blogs. It may be OUR choice to share components of our sexuality, but WAKE UP America … you are about to receive a litmus test of just how far some are willing to go to see to it that you have no rights based solely on who you sleep with (not to be confused with who you ARE).
While we could jest last week about WHAT DOES PRIDE MEAN TO THIS COMMUNITY … I promise you, heads will spin when you realize that Aunt Ennis from Coal Country, was at the latest GBMC (gimme back my country) Rally, and wants her 1950s America BACK; that could mean “gettin’ those godless freaks out of their undeserved protected statuses.”
Whatever the case, IT just got a WHOLE LOT MORE REAL TODAY … WAKE UP MY BROTHERS, there is a group who hates US way more than we pretend to hate ourselves, and they don’t care if you are ‘stereotypical’ or ‘cool’ gay … because they much prefer a totally gay free country, much like you see in modern day Iran or Russia
Thank you twice! You, my bro, also need to be on SHOUT, my friend. I hope “libertarian queer” is reading this. As we have someone in the white house who has no idea, what Putin really poses to this country (cause ‘if’ he did, that would make him a total beast) as Trump is quite possibly being Trumped = used as the trump-card. He’s not, he isn’t nearly as intelligent as Putin, nor is he that psychopathic killer that Putin is either. There’s an old proverb: “there’s no honor among thieves”, we’ve never had a Pres., to be as manipulated, as this one, by our # enemy. When one group is not free, no one is free. This is what democracy stands against or is suppose to.
The Mafia owned the inn? Well… there’s a hot one! Probably for them it was all for the interest as a source of money in their pockets. It couldn’t be that they didn’t know about the kind of clientel that congregated there considering the era. One of the things known about cartels such as the Zetas and Maras (for sure the Mafia too)are homophobic and don’t even allow gays among their members niether.
WOW! Marsha P. Johnson,
I wasn’t going to look at the clips of him, but once I started, I couldn’t stop- saw them through to the end, made me a tear-up actually.
He’s was really more of man than most men I’ve met, calling themselves “alphas.”
His life ‘seemingly’ was one ‘self-liberated’ walk through the fire of being just who he knew himself to be, no apologies, no offense, “ain’t got time for that mess, I’m just doin’ me-being I know who I am to myself.” He boasted-proclaimed nothing of himself, he just got on with it.
He, had nothing monetarily speaking, but spiritually, way more than too many; so multi-faceted-gifted. I loved his spiritual awareness… makes one ask, are we all created equal-how so?
As for the Stonewall movie, I’m really annoyed with this false-outright lie, of who struck the first blow so to speak, “white men talking, once again, credit for the courageousness, of what someone black did.”
I said before and it bares repeating, “we as gay-folk, do not live in a vacuum,” what white men do
in the world at large, they do in the gay communities; same genetics, so they’ll do the same things as it pertains to people of color. They couldn’t find a black drag-queen to play the part of another black drag-queen, really?! Whom by the way; wasn’t he blond – most likely blue-eyed, why? Another words, more fictional and less authentic than it could be, due to “white-washing.”
Wait a minute! Get this shit! Aren’t you tryin’ to add Black and Brown to the fuckin’ rainbow flag,
where’s the integrity at?! See what I mean, told you, it doesn’t mean a thing!