San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
50 years after Stonewall riots
How LGBTQ life has changed after melee sparked a movement
How gay life has changed since the Stonewall Inn riots in 1969. At left, “Pose” actor Billy Porter at the 2019 Tonys.
There’s a slogan that has been making the rounds in meme and T-shirt form in the LGBTQ community this year: “The first Pride was a riot.”
Yaas, queen, it was.
On June 28, 1969, a spontaneous act of resistance by queer patrons against a police raid at the Stonewall Inn bar in New York’s Greenwich Village neighborhood sparked the gay liberation movement. After generations of legal and social persecution, the queers had simply had enough. The two-night Stonewall riots continue to be seen as one of the seminal events in LGBTQ history in the United States and beyond: The event’s impact is so major that most chroniclers of LGBTQ history view queer life in pre- and post-Stonewall contexts. Now, 50 years later, we can examine how far the LGBTQ community has advanced not just socially and politically, but also in mainstream culture.
In 1969, queer representation was limited to innuendo in most popular media, while 2019 grapples with how to represent a wider spectrum of LGBTQ people that includes more people of color and people who identify outside the gender binary. Same-sex relationships were mostly in the closet in 1969; now, marriage equality is the law throughout the United States. The LGBTQ community is a hot marketing demographic as well as a social one: Every June, capitalism turns rainbow-hued as brands release Gay Pride collections and big corporations prepare to march in Gay Pride parades.
Of course queer people still face legal and social challenges in the U.S. In many states, people can still be denied housing or be fired for their sexuality or gender identity, and the Trump administration continues to roll back Obama-era policies protecting LGBTQ people. But the tide hasn’t just turned in the culture — it’s become a wave. Queers aren’t just out
of the closet; the LGBTQ community is a force that shapes the fabric of American life more than ever before. It’s a far cry from the riot 50 years ago in which a group of patrons at a gay bar, now the first U.S. national monument dedicated to the LGBTQ rights movement, refused to be pushed to the margins any longer.
Representation in media
THEN In 1969, there were almost no out-of-the-closet, say-it-loud-and-proud queer celebrities. Sure, you had flamboyant personalities like character actor Paul Lynde camping it up on television and the odd popular musician like Little Richard or Liberace whose stage flames burned bright, but public declarations about gay lives were just not happening. Christine Jorgensen was one of the only public trans people in media culture, and when magazines like Life occasionally showed glimpses of queers in bars and community meetings, they presented the issue as niche, and even morally abhorrent. Queer characters in films like “The Children’s Hour,” “The Detective” and the appropriately named “Victim” fell into the following categories: suffering deviants, punch lines and villains. The year before Stonewall, there was one major work that went beyond these cliches: Mart Crowley’s off-Broadway play “The Boys in the Band,” considered a groundbreaking depiction of gay men. But by the time the play was made into a film in 1970, it had already become dated and was considered a work of gay “Uncle Tomism” that traded too much on antediluvian stereotypes.
NOW Major segments of mainstream popular culture are here, queer and general audiences are more than used to it, according to the ratings and box office. In 2017, a GLAAD study showed more LGBTQ characters on broadcast television than ever before. Representation also now stretches beyond simply white, cisgender queer portrayals after years of calls for more depictions of queer people of color and of a broader range of gender identities from within the LGBTQ community. The cast of Ryan Murphy’s cable ballroom drama “Pose” is one of the most visible groups of trans women of color and queer performers today. Billy Porter, the gay male star of “Pose,” has also blazed a new trail on the celebrity red carpet with a series of binary-pushing looks ranging from tuxedo-gown combi
Bars in unofficial “gay neighborhoods” were major centers of queer social life, along with some queer-friendly or gay-centric bookstores. These were primarily spaces that were not officially gay or that were underground. Gay bars were frequently subject to raids by police (like the raid the night of the Stonewall riots), and the fear of exposure was constant. Exposure could mean loss of housing, employment and social stigmatization. Going out for a night at the bars