The Night the Stonewall Inn Became a Proud Shrine
Les émeutes de Stonewall, ou la naissance des mouvements LGBT+.
Pourquoi célèbre-t-on la Pride en Juin ? Cet événement annuel trouve son origine dans les émeutes de Stonewall – une riposte de la communauté LGBT+ contre les assauts de la police, à New York, en 1969. Que s'est-il précisément passé ce soir-là, dans le bar gay The Stonewall Inn ? Reconstitution d'une nuit houleuse, devenue marche des fiertés.
Hours before it was to become a flash point in the modern gay rights movement and a landmark visited with awe and reverence half a century later as if a shrine, it was just a dark, dingy bar called the Stonewall Inn, just another Friday night in June. “It was a bar for the people who were too young, too poor or just too much to get in anywhere else,” one patron would recall later in “Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution,” by David Carter.
2. No one inside on the night of June 27, 1969, knew that just outside the door, as Friday night rolled over into Saturday morning, trouble was arriving across the street. A police team quietly waited for the go-ahead command to raid the Stonewall. The officer in charge was Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, a World War II veteran who had fought in foxholes in Europe before he was injured by a land mine.
3. Pine knew the Stonewall; he had raided it just four days earlier, arresting employees and seizing liquor that Tuesday night. But as he was leaving, someone said with disdain, “We’ll be open again tomorrow.”
4. Gay New Yorkers were feeling increasing pressure and harassment in Greenwich Village and beyond. In Kew Gardens, Queens, a “vigilante committee” concerned about gay people gathering in a park cut down all the trees. Within days of the Stonewall uprising, the police had raided five gay bars in the Village,
Carter wrote, shutting three of them — the Checkerboard, the Tel-Star and the Sewer — down for good. “How many times can one turn the other cheek?” a then 26-year-old musician in the Stonewall that night later asked.
5. Into this mood of growing unrest, Pine returned. About 1:20 a.m. on June 28, he led seven officers into the bar. The music stopped, and the bright lights blinked on. “I thought, ‘Here we go again,’” recalled a 26-year-old patron, Philip Eagles, who was sipping a drink when the officers arrived. But immediately, this raid felt different, foremost in its timing. Usually, officers arrived early in the evening, before the bars got busy. After midnight was a different story.
6. The crowd outside grew as the bar continued to empty out, with loud cheers for the new arrivals. The mood started out as jovial before it shifted. “The crowd began taunting the police,” Segal wrote. “The cops started to get rough, pushing and shoving.” A woman resisted the police and was handcuffed and, despite her struggles, manhandled into the back of a police car. She managed to get out, and the officers pushed her in again. This ratcheted up the response from the crowd, and people began throwing things — pocket change clanged off the car and struck officers.
7. A reporter for the Village Voice, Howard Smith, saw the commotion from a window nearby, and he grabbed a notebook and rushed over. By chance, he fell in beside Pine. A police wagon arrived to transport the people who had
been arrested and the dozens of bottles of seized liquor. “The crowd had grown to ten times its size,” Pine said later. “It was really frightening.” Somebody threw a beer can at the wagon. Bottles followed. “No one has a slogan, no one has an attitude, but something’s brewing.”
"THESE ARE OUR STREETS" 8. Outside, someone squirted fluid from a cigarette lighter on the plywood covering a window. “There were flames,” an onlooker said later. Nearby, Smith saw an arm push through a window. “It squirts a liquid into the room, and a flaring match follows,” he wrote. He managed to escape through a window, along with Pine and his officers.
9. Then, from outside, a new sound. Sirens. Firefighters, followed by more police officers, some in riot gear, arrived on Christopher Street. A long process of clearing the block followed, marked by more skirmishes between the police and civilians. Taunts and thrown debris were met with nightsticks and arrests.
10. “Whose streets are these? These are our streets,” O’Brien said later, recalling the atmosphere that long morning. “And you cops are not from this area. This is our area. It’s gay people’s streets.” Gay people kept those streets. The Stone
wall uprising would extend into the next night and beyond, would be marked with anniversary rallies that paved the way for the Pride Parade.
11. Pine later retired, and [in 2004], apologized to those in attendance, 15 years before the Police Department gave an official apology. He acknowledged that his raid unintentionally helped kick off a global movement. None of this could have been predicted in the immediate aftermath of that Saturday morning 50 years ago. Jerry Hoose, a gay activist and Stonewall regular, remembered crying tears of joy that morning. “It was like, ‘It’s about time,’” he said later.
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