Early American Musings

At the end of our wander through lower Manhattan, we stopped at the Stonewall Inn. The Stonewall Inn was the site of one of the most significant events in LGBTQ+ history, “The Stonewall Riots” of June 1969. Stonewall wasn’t a unique riot. There had been other riots, such as the Black Cat riots in Los Angeles and the Compton’s Café riot in San Francisco. At the time, the Stonewall Riots didn’t get much press attention, but what ultimately made Stonewall so important was its commemoration. When people gathered a year later to commemorate the event, what was expected to be a small community event turned into a massive parade and festival and marked the development of Pride. And that is why the majority of pride events used to take place in late June. Stonewall is also a term used worldwide for gay rights organisations, such as Stonewall in Britain.

Considering its importance today, the Stonewall Inn had quite a seedy history. Before it became an iconic bar, the building that houses the Stonewall Inn was originally a horse stable in the 1840s! In the 1930s, it was converted into a bakery, and later, in the 1950s, it became a tearoom before finally transforming into a gay bar in 1967. At the time of the riots, it was run by the mafia because no one could get a license for a bar where men might dance together or, heaven forbid, kiss one another. All gay venues were strictly illegal, and many were run by criminals or groups such as the mafia—and that became a significant argument for decriminalisation—if you could legally run such a bar, it would drive out organised crime.

At the time of my first visit to New York in 1984, the Stonewall Inn didn’t exist. After the riots, the bar went out of business and was leased to various other establishments. For a time, it housed a bagel shop and a Chinese restaurant. By the 1990s, gay bars began to return to Christopher Street, and the western half of the original Stonewall Inn space was renovated and reopened as a bar.

In 2016, President Barack Obama announced the establishment of the Stonewall National Monument and the site is now protected. Half of the old Inn is now the modern Stonewall Inn, and half an information centre run by the National Park Service. The inn itself was very pleasant, but it felt like many gay bars anywhere in the world and reminded us very much of the Kings Arms in London, just off Oxford Street, just a bit bigger!

PBS has a great documentary about the riot, and what I find interesting is the reflection that so many of the rioters just wanted the same liberty as other Americans. They wanted the same liberty encapsulated in the Statue of Liberty, that the immigrants heading to the USA had sought.