A policy of harassment of homosexuals resulted in Stonewal riots at the Stonewall Inn in June 1969. A spontaneous show of resistance emerged when the homosexual clientele were being taken to the police wagon, and the police were forced to retreat and called for reinforcements. This resistance at the Stonewall Inn has been given symbolic value and is seen as the birth of the modern gay rights movement, the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance. The 1969 Stonewall riot in New York City is widely celebrated as the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. Homophobia is an uncontrollable fear of homosexuals and Xenophobia is fear of strangers. Gay and lesbian studies or rather Queer Culture studies, is becoming legitimate in the academic community.
Sociology of Sexualities should gain status as an ASA Section. Social workers need to understand how to gain access to and support indigenous social structures to assist oppressed groups to bring about social change. - Sociopolitical antecedents to Stonewall: analysis of the origins of the gay rights movement in the United States. Poindexter CC. School of Social Work, Boston University.
Movements and Memory:
The Making of the Stonewall Myth
Armstrong, Elizabeth A.; Crage, Suzanna M. Abstract: This article examines why the Stonewall riots became central to gay collective
memory while other events did not. It does so through a comparative-historical analysis of
Stonewall and four events similar to it that occurred in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and
New York in the 1960s.
The Stonewall riots were remembered because they were the first to meet two conditions: activists considered the event commemorable and had the mnemonic capacity to create a commemorative vehicle. Gay community members found Stonewall commemorable and the proposed parade an appealing form for commemoration. The Stonewall story is thus an achievement of gay liberation rather than an account of its origins.
Harvard scholars
reflect on the history and legacy of the Stonewall Riots. - Harvard
Gazette 2019.
Today, Bronski, a
Harvard professor of the practice in media and activism in Studies of Women,
Gender, and Sexuality, understands why so many claim to have been present at
such a pivotal moment in the history of the gay rights movement. “It really is like the shot heard around the world, or
the hairpin drop heard round the world,” he said, a cheeky parody coined in
Stonewall’s aftermath of the stanza from “Concord Hymn.” There had been previous
riots in the U.S. involving gays and lesbians fed up with routine harassment,
but Stonewall, erupting when it did amid protests over the Vietnam War and civil
rights and gender equality, marked a decisive break from the more passive
sexual-orientation politics of the day, said Bronski, who has written
extensively on LGBTQ culture and history. “It was really like direct action. It was like the
radical feminists invading the Miss America contest, or the Black Panthers
standing in front of Oakland City Hall with rifles,” he said, and it ran
completely counter to the approach of groups such as the Mattachine Society, one
of the nation’s earliest gay-rights organizations, that preferred to press for
change through legal and political channels.
BIAS CRIME: AMERICAN LAW
ENFORCEMENT AND LEGAL RESPONSES
R J Kelly, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Abstract: This new edition outlines the historic contexts of bias crime against gays and
Jews in the Stonewall Riot and the Holocaust, respectively. The legal resolutions are
discussed for both of these cases.
Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context by Vern L Bullough
Stonewall : The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution - by David Carter
Generation Q: Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals Born Around 1969's Stonewall Riots Tell Their Stories of Growing Up in the Age of Information by Robin Bernstien (Editor), Seth Clark Silberman (Editor)
Stonewall by Martin Duberman.