STONEWALL - OUR FIRST STAND
June 29, 1969 Friday night
Remembered by Michael Safdiah -- June 2006

Hey, and happy gay pride to all of us. We were the ones who started the whole ball rolling out at Fire Island before there was electricity or even before the word gay was heard, and while they had to cook dinner on Coleman gas stoves and see at night with lanterns. A concoction of potato chips, tuna, canned corn and beans was called "Fairy Pudding" and you didn't need to cook it because there was no way to. Those were the days when you got arrested for being in a gay bar or for dancing with a man.
Then in 1969, another watershed event took place at a gay bar being raided ---.

This year I decided it was time I wrote down my own recollections of the night the Stonewall was raided, and also confess to being the dork I then was. Yeah, I got stuck in that mess, and as the years passed and I grew older, I realized how much of an effect it had on my life. I began to write, and the writing transformed me, renewing my determination, my anger and my pride.

I know it's long, but it's a story worth telling. - The New York Blade has evolved into an excellent paper in our community, and decided to publish an edited version of my memoir only because of space limitations. But I want the story to be told in the context of what led up to it and the events which followed. So pour yourself something refreshing, relax, and join me on a trip back through my foggy memory.
With apologies and love,
Michael
.....I was in my twenties, gay, ignorant, unsure of myself and very lonely. I moved into the West Village - a life-long wish - trying to make sense out of life. I was terribly isolated as a gay man, hungry for the company of others like myself. The bars were an important part of my social life; in fact, all of it. I was accepted there. It wasn't easy to be gay the same way it is today. I grew up feeling different, an outsider. I was as good as anyone, but society taught me otherwise, and I bore the scars.

It was just another warm June evening. The West Village was starting to fill up with Friday night celebrants. A tranny called Rollerina glided around on roller skates. She wore an antique faded beige party dress, making graceful backward circles. Her poker face and gray wig, pulled back into a bun, gave her the appearance of a thin specter from an southern gothic novel. She waved her magic wand blessing the passers by. There was a glittered star at its tip: Dorothy's Good Witch.

Outside my safe cocoon, there was a war in Viet Nam, and a president we didn't like. Sown by old leftists like Pete Seeger and by the dwindling hippie culture, the seeds of rebellion against authority were already germinating.
History shows that gays were always hated, persecuted. Bars were routinely raided by police, patrons arrested, and beatings by police were common. The names of men arrested for "questioning" were printed in newspapers, and they lost their jobs with no recourse.

The mood in the village had recently been dampened by the raids and arrests. The mob was supposedly involved with the bar scene, and cops were rumored to be shaking down the bars. I had just left Julius, my favorite hangout, and arrived at the crowded Stonewall, half a block away. Stonewall was considered a "protected" bar; the signs were evident: the typical goon at the door, we could buy liquor, fake ID was easy to pass, we could dance, and feel safe. To get in, you had to sign your name (fake, of course), and pay five bucks for your drink. I was on a zero budget, which is why I was in the bathroom refilling my bottle with water. I waved to Steve, the friendly bartender who knew all our names, hiding my bottle so he couldn't see I had filled it with water.

There was music and dancing in the rear of the bar, away from the door so you could stop if intruders came. Too shy to ask anyone, I was hoping someone would walk over to me. I had no idea how to start a conversation; only my loneliness rooted me in that awful place. The overheated room was filled with cigarette smoke; I was headed outside to the park across the street for air. People were standing there, hanging out. I passed Brandy Alexander, a loveable drag queen; she blew me an air kiss so she wouldn't muss her make up. I liked her, but could never relate to men dressed as women as being the same kind of gay as I was. There were a lot of drags that night, more than usual…
I hardly noticed exactly when it happened, but I became aware of a silence where there should have been noise. There were cops in the room, and few plain clothes, but you had to be blind to miss them, and the bouncer was missing from the doorway. The rest happened so fast.

"GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF ME!"

Well Mary, there it was. They were demanding ID from the ladies and shoving them toward the door. Parked outside was the Black Maria, the infamous paddy wagon they used to round up victims to cart off to the badass police station. I knew what that meant.

"LEAVE ME ALONE, PIG!"

I shrank back against the wall. Through the open doors, I saw them roughly pushing a few of the girls into the wagon, ten more things all happened at once and all hell broke loose. Someone started yelling; another screamed and dropped to the floor. 

"THAT'S IT - I'VE HAD ENOUGH!"

She started to throw bottles; someone threw a woman's high heel shoe. It hit the cop who was behind the bar emptying the cash register "gathering evidence". The pump thrower managed to get behind the bar, and began to throw glasses, and then bottles. She was wearing a bright green dress. The bar mirror exploded into pieces. The evidence gatherer fled. The resistance had spread like fire in dry grass to the paddy wagon, where one captive was struggling with a cop who gave up and let go when he heard the ruckus inside. The music continued loudly as ever.
I have no idea how I made it out of there; time blurs details. My instincts for self-preservation: becoming small in the face of danger. I stood there in frozen time while the patrons barricaded the police inside with a parking meter, God knows how. Tactical Police Reinforcements arrived in riot gear, sirens blaring. The cops by then had regrouped themselves inside the bar. Dressed like alien space soldiers, the tacticals charged the crowd, which fled back over to tiny Gay Street and Waverly Place, only to regroup around the bar again, taunting the police. Feeling the rush of what the others were doing, I started to throw anything I could find, hoping I wouldn't hurt anyone. It was a standoff; the summer street quickly filled with spectators.

There was a growing mob watching the goings on, and I was stuck in the middle with no way out. A quick glance over to Seventh Avenue showed a traffic jam, but the cops were chasing us so I followed the pack to nearby Gay Street, curving 'round into Waverly Place, stopping only for a few breathless exchanges. The cops charged into Gay Street. I ducked down into a shallow stairway, hiding there 'til they were gone. Ten of us managed to squeeze into each of those narrow basement apartment entrances. In that tight space, we bonded without a word. The police only saw an empty street, and when they left, we emerged laughing, and renewed our assault on the barricaded cops and the bar. Giddy laughter, "This is amazing; are you okay?" "Are you sticking around?", "What are we doing?"

The exact words faded after all those years, but it was like that. We knew this: no one had planned it, we had no leaders, and this was our chance to let them know how we felt. No one needed to remind us how abused and humiliated we had been, not only by the police, but also by all of society.

I was caught up in the swell of humanity crushing me. I can't remember being afraid at any time, there was too much excitement for me to even think of my safety. My rage welled up, driving me, these bastards were attacking the only place I had that I could call mine. My anger at years of being forced to hide who I was just erupted. I was acting out of passion, not reason.
My thoughts went back and forth through time; the Gettysburg address came to me at some point, Lincoln saying we are all created equal, and the world won't remember what we said, but what we began would be important; others should continue the fight---. For the first time in my life, I felt justified in this.

Later, there would be pamphlets and flyers from Matachine, and hasty papers would publish the events of this night to the world. The Oscar Wilde bookstore would become the center of a movement. Eventually parades on Fifth Avenue with floats featuring outrageous drag queens named, "Queen Saleen", escorted by half-naked caramel men in gold bikinis in brazen defiance of straight mores. Later, annual parades in cities all over the world.

And there would be a plague, which they would blame on us. This lie and the delays it caused brought on the death of millions of us because it was a "gay problem". They called it GRID (Gay Related Immune Dysfunction), so it could be conveniently ignored by Reagan, Bush and Company. In less than fifteen years, AIDS would take the lives of more than half the men who were there.
Gay bashing and murders would continue, and later from under rocks would crawl self-righteous hypocrites, posing as Christians, who would use us as political whipping boys the way the Nazis did to the Jews.

I got infected too, but I was lucky. Lucky because I became a better human being; lucky because life has so much more meaning. God's been good to me: I've lived a life I never imagined possible.

The police were bewildered by our resistance; they never expected that we'd stand up and fight back. To me they were the Keystone Cops, and just as funny. I needed to reduce those horrific bastards to comic proportions, but seriously, there were real guns drawn; the most frightening thing of all. I might have been killed. Today there'd be dead queers on the street, and they'd be saying we brought it on ourselves for being disruptive, a hazard etc. I stayed out on the streets all that night with the crowd; it was impossible to leave.

We stopped being strangers, and were sharing: "Oh My God what had we done", "Wasn't that fun", "Fuck 'em; they deserved it", "It's high time", and a sobering thought: "What will they do to us next?" The rest of the night was a spectator event, a social gathering. Rollerina was skating in and out of the crowd, blessing and shouting encouragement. The crowd started to break up sometime around sunrise the next day, but more were arriving. I wasn't tired, but there wasn't more to see that I hadn't already. The streets were buried in litter, broken glass, cans and paper. Half a block away, Seventh Avenue was still tied up. Horns honking, it was mayhem.

The word got out; Judy Garland had just died of an overdose. The brush fire got worse, as if Stonewall weren't enough. The next few days it seemed all the gays in New York were converging on the village. Now our mood was anger mixed with grief. We'd had time to reflect; rebellion was feeding on its own momentum. The raid on that bar became the shot heard around the gay world. The media had a field day mocking it. Posters and activist flyers were everywhere; I started a scrapbook.

That night sparked my becoming an activist. As the years passed, and AIDS was largely ignored by two presidents, the importance of Stonewall grew larger in me. That night taught me that fighting back is the only way to survive.

The news photos made us look like gay kids rioting, but we were angry young Americans defending our rights. That instant in time highlighted so many wrongs and so many hurts we had endured. We had no choice but to act as we did. I'm proud, not only of being gay, which is who I am and I'm proud of me, but also for my standing up against the injustices of a backward society which strives for some stupid biblical ideal it can never attain for itself.

I was a confused, half scared, half thrilled spectator, watching a magnificent Force of Nature. We had been pushed beyond our ability to swallow any more hatred; we acted with our hearts. I never realized I was watching history being made; does anyone ever? The city won't ever forget that night; I'm grateful that I was there.

It's no big deal I'm a Stonewall Vet, I only stumbled into a protest I had no part in causing. I can't take any credit for it. The drag queens are the real heroes; they took the initiative. I never realized how much courage it takes to be one. I had convinced myself I wasn't like them, yet I was the very bigot I detested -- but that was then. I started that night ashamed of being lumped together with "those other blatant queens", but no longer; we need to stick together. After Stonewall, there was no going back. The Stonewall story needs to be told to gays who take their tenuous rights too much for granted. Remember that the pendulum swings; you can lose it in a heartbeat. With what time I have left I hope to tell the story; someone has to.

On our way home that morning, we were exhausted, sweaty but exhilarated from the high of the past hours; dawn had just broken. The blinding gold light of the sun was reflecting back at us from the east-facing buildings as we crossed Christopher Street. Rollerina, still that inscrutable mask on her face, skated around us, winked and glided away.

The End