REVOLUTION OF LOVE
At library, Valentine’s tribute to Stonewall
ve is love. The story and struggle of the gay hts movement — from the pivotal newall riots to the 21st century — ll go on display to the public on the liday that, fittingly, celebrates love. “Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50”, a ecial exhibit at the New York Public rary’s main Fifth Ave. branch open on Valentine’s Day, features images d artifacts from both before and af Stonewall. r Among the treasures on display is a photo of a small 1965 march on the Pentagon that shows lesbian Lilli Vinnz holding a sign that reads, 00,000 homosexual soldiers dend review of army policy.” She was e of only a dozen who dared to ket. In just four years, that would ange. On a steamy June night in 1969, the PD raided the Stonewall Inn on ristopher St. and got more than they rgained for. The bar was a frequent target for the police, and as the Daily News reported at the time, there were suspicions the mob-connected owners made regular payoffs to the cops. But on that evening, the patrons fought back. They refused to be searched. They refused to show identification. They refused to go quietly just because they were dressed in drag. “This whole issue of gay people’s rights to nightlife, it was a political issue in New York at the time,” Jason Baumann, the exhibit’s curator, explained. “It was illegal to serve a drink to a known gay person in a bar. And also it was illegal to wear clothing that wasn’t in
line with your legally assigned gender, so you could be arrested for crossdressing.”
Fed up, the people revolted. Glasses and beer cans flew through the air. The melee spilled out into Christopher St., lasted for hours and picked up again in the nights that followed.
“We've had all we can take from the Gestapo,” a woman told The News after the riot.
After the Stonewall uprising, the Mattachine Society — founded in 1950 and one of the first LGBTQ organizations in the U.S. — released a flyer to lure those affected by the riots to get involved in LGBTQ activism.
Two groups were spawned, the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance, both more progressive than the more conservative Mattachine Society.
“A lot of these younger people came from the peace movement, came from the anti-war movement, from other civil rights movements, from the feminist movement and couldn't be contained in that kind of structure that Mattachine had before,” Baumann said.
Activists also ditched their buttoned-up look after Stonewall, wearing whatever suited them. A man in one photo taken by Diana Davies, one of two photographers whose works are featured prominently in the exhibit, sports a “Gay Revolution” T-shirt. It's believed to be associated with Third
. “People from Gay Liberation Front who wanted to focus on the oppression faced by queer people of color,” Baumann explained.
The exhibit, which stretches along a third floor hallway in the library, is separated into four sections: Resistance, Bars, In Print and Love.
The In Print area shows how magazine covers marketed to the LGBTQ community got more bold and provocative over the years. The 1950s and '60s era Grecian Guild mag portrayed shirtless guys in god-like neoclassical poses that seem mild next to later S&M themed glossies that emerged in the '70s like Drummer and Straight to Hell.
The Love section of the showcase includes a shot of Michael McConnell and Jack Baker, who became the first same-sex couple to marry. The pair wed in 1971 in Minnesota, because Baker changed his name to a genderneutral Pat Lyn McConnell. The picture was captured by Kay Tobin Lahusen, the other photographer whose work appears throughout the exhibit.
McConnell and Baker were still a couple in 2015 when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.
The library free exhibit, which runs until July 14, is hosting a $15 21-andover event Friday from 7 to 10 p.m.