Stonewall is just a creation myth

Martha's Quest for the Gold Lamé Fleece

 [NB: I use "gay" as the catchall because I really hate the word queer. Sew me]

The more I've looked at gay history the more that I've come to the conclusion that Stonewall the event was really pretty irrelevant. That goes counter to the popular narrative that it was an inflection point in gay history and that we really need to know about the exact history of the drag queens and transsexuals that spearheaded it, and who threw the first brick is super-duper important. It isn't. Stonewall was one of many uprisings that happened in the 60's across the country like Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco and the Black Cat protests in LA. And let's not forget that whatever happened at Stonewall had very little relevance outside of America in the western world at the time. A short NY Times blurb about a riot in New York did not ignite an international movement in London, Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin. Yet.

A net.acquaintance by the name of Jack Carroll wrote a  fascinating diary of gay life in New York City  in the 60's through the 90's. He was actually in the West Village during one of the nights (first?) of the Stonewall riots but didn't witness it firsthand (he had a dinner reservation). It didn't even make much buzz at the time. He lived on the Upper West Side which had its own gay scene far removed from the Village. It's easy to forget in the age of the internet that information traveled really slowly even in a metropolis like NYC and a smallish community like gay people.

Stonewall itself as described by Jack was a complete shithole run by the mob with disgusting toilets, watered down booze and generally awful ambiance. It seemed to have a good jukebox which was something of the currency of the realm in those days. It wasn't some haven of drag queens, transsexuals, people of color and was instead mostly white bridge and tunnel gay men from like New Jersey and Long Island slumming and locals looking to score on them. Ironically Stonewall didn't even need to exist because of the Sip-In at Julius's lawsuit made it legal for gay people to gather and carouse. The lawsuit was brought by the Mattachine Society and was pivotal for NYC gay life. The thing that Jack points out is that gay life was getting much better under Mayor Lindsey so there wasn't some sort of then-and-now inflection point. It was just a progression of things getting better for gay people incrementally. But nobody really knows what happened at Stonewall those nights because it was... a riot and chaotic and over several days. Nobody's iPhone was slipped out to record it.

But it wasn't just in NYC and Stonewall. Change was happening in many cities with large gay populations like LA, San Francisco, Chicago and more. More important is that we were starting to organize behind the scenes. Harry Hay lived in Los Angeles and was part of the Mattachine. The Mattachine itself was very much a Good Cop organization in that if they asked nicely they thought they could get their rights. There was almost certainly internal division on the good cop bad cop tension and Stonewall may have been a symbol that some amount of bad cop was good too. Harry Hay went on to be one of the founders of the Radical Faeries so he was clearly open to evolving away from the Good Cop strategy eventually. A lot of these organizations had a shelf life anyway and the Mattachine's was due to expire.

The Mattachine Society had an annual protest in Philadelphia called the Annual Reminder where they all silently in their Sunday best marched up and down protesting the lack of gay rights. It was conformist to a fault with all kinds of rules of what gays and lesbians were allowed to wear and how to behave. They predictably didn't achieve much. But one thing happened after Stonewall that did change things pretty much forever: the Annual Reminder was transmogrified into a march commemorating the Stonewall riots in late June the next year. The march started as a smallish number of people marching down from Sheridan Square in the West Village but gathered steam as people joined in along the way to Central Park. Similar marches happened simultaneously in LA, San Francisco and Chicago of various sizes and coordination. Stonewall would have been a historical footnote too were it not for the Pride that followed.

Pride parades are what actually changed everything in several ways. The first and foremost was giving the middle finger to erasure. Coming out has always been by far our most potent weapon. When people are given a concrete that their son or their loved uncle or their granddaughter is gay, it's much, much more difficult to reject than from the abstract. Yes, of course that rejection happened in droves and drove generations of gay people to gay friendly neighborhoods, but it also put a fine point on it: I will not hide for your sake. It's not surprising that other cities and countries picked up on this. Pride was a potent expression of that openness to show that we are people too. The second is that Pride is extremely important for gay people for our own reasons. I like to say that Pride is actually for young gay people to show them how very much they are not alone. That their alienation has an exit. That a better life is possible. Maybe not easy, but yes the Emerald City exists. The third is that it gives frothers something to froth about. We seriously don't give a fuck about how hard you clutch your pearls. We're just having fun and you're scandalized. By what? Anything you'd see at any beach? Let them froth: it's keeps us in the news and makes them look silly.

But Pride parades were really part of a larger phenomenon of coming out in general. Pride just memorializes why we need to. They are the beautiful amalgam of us being out and having fun to celebrate that we aren't just freaks, but living and breathing beings that deserve to be happy just like anybody else does. Part of happiness is having sex with our loved ones -- just like everybody else. Fuck your heterosexual norms being forced on us -- especially the part about having to be heterosexual. We can figure things out for ourselves, thankyouverymuch including wanting those same heterosexual norms if we choose. Or not. And neither is wrong. But the openness of the 70's is what really changed and made the gay rights movement look much more like what we know today. By the time I came around in 1978 gay culture and the way we live and find each other was already fully formed. Pride was an annual -- and very visible -- marker of that progress. But was it Stonewall itself that affected our general openness and coming out? Color me dubious. I am very certain that it didn't color anything at all for me and I really don't recall when I first even heard about it. I doubt it colored many other young gay people either.

But back to Stonewall itself. It's just a totem. A MacGuffin used to move the plot along. And just like Hitchcock's famous use of his Maltese Falcon MacGuffin it doesn't actually matter what the dreams were made of, or that our actual MacGuffin is largely ethereal. And that's OK. We need our creation myths even if they are vague and probably inaccurate as passed down over the ages and glorify their actual importance. The scholarly accounts trying to tease out the angels on a pinhead are charmingly funny if not rather pointless (or self-serving as is supposed to be the case with Martin Duberman's account). Let's have Martha P Washington and her quest for the Gold Lamé Fleece as part of our lore. Let's have the gay Trojan Horse filled with condoms and gay glam twinks storming the West Village overrunning the NYPD. Let's have José Sarria's The Widow Norton calling on her inherited empire's gay militia to muster and put on their feather boa'd tricorns and repulsing the homophobe army. Let's have the Daughters of Bilitis as a lesbian Spartan Army of Lovers. We're fabulous and we are allowed to make up our own myths and fudged history and we shouldn't care about whether it's literally true. The proof is in the pudding: Stonewall itself didn't change much itself, but it gave an entire movement something to hang its hat on: a shared myth. Something that the rest of the world embraced as a convenient myth too. Pride and the general "not taking it" feeling that was in the air gave us the courage to come out and change our world in unimaginable ways that even in the 10 short years later when I came onto the scene, that things were very different. Myths serve purposes. The stuff of dreams, indeed. Symbolism matters but we should also keep in mind what our actual history is too and not get too worked up over the literal truth that we'll never really know.