WHY DID the Stonewall Riots occur when and where they did? When historians have tried to address this question, they have come up with several plausible answers. Few give much credence to the popular myth that the riots in 1969, when thousands of people protested in the streets of Greenwich Village in response to a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, were a completely spontaneous and entirely unprecedented reaction to the oppression faced by LGBT people.
With varying degrees of persuasiveness, historians have settled on essentially three alternative explanations, each of which contributes to our understanding of the rebellion. First is the argument that the uprising was the culmination of political organizing by the “homophile” movement that began in the early 1950s and radicalized in the mid-1960s. Second, there’s the idea that the riots were profoundly influenced by a long tradition of bar-based oppression and resistance and the distinct factors that shaped that tradition in New York City. A third explanation stresses that the rebellion was influenced by the radicalization of other social movements in the late 1960s and inspired by the wave of urban riots that began with the Watts rebellion in Los Angeles in 1965.
In The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History, which will be published by NYU Press in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising, I present 200 documents from 1965 to 1973 that illuminate developments before, during, and after the LGBT movement’s most important turning point. The first three chapters, which address bars and policing, agendas and visions, and political protests before the riots, provide ample evidence for supporters of all three explanations. They also challenge simplistic portrayals of the pre-Stonewall era as relentlessly oppressive, as well as the widely held belief that the homophile movement was consistently small, accommodationist, and ineffective.
In the course of working on The Stonewall Riots, I came across an early report on the rebellion that pointed to a fourth possible interpretation of why the uprising occurred when and where it did. I discuss this interpretation (along with the others referenced above) in my book’s introduction and I reprint the report in the book’s fifth chapter, but my discussion of the document below serves as an excellent illustration of how I hope The Stonewall Riotswill be used to inspire further research and analysis.
When I first read Don Jackson’s “Reflections on the N.Y. Riots” in the October 1969 issue of the Los Angeles Advocate, I was intrigued by his discussion of the uprising’s “sociological implications.” Today, Jackson is perhaps best known for proposing in late 1969 that gay liberationists migrate to and take control of California’s sparsely populated Alpine County. Jackson’s “Stonewall Nation” project never reached fruition, but it garnered extensive national media attention and stimulated wide-ranging debates about “gay power,” political separatism, and indigenous land in LGBT and other communities. (Jackson was later known as a strong advocate for LGBT inmates, prisoners, and homeless people, and as a strong opponent of affirmative action.) Jackson’s report was one of the most widely-circulated accounts of the Stonewall rebellion in the LGBT press. What caught my attention was this line: “Experts in group behavior say that tensions in a minority group become most acute at times when the minority group members see their status suddenly take a turn for the worse after a long period of improvement. This exactly describes the situation in New York, preceding the riots.”
There were three aspects of this formulation that intrigued me. Who were Jackson’s “experts in group behavior” and what other “minority groups” had they studied? What did Jackson mean when he referred to “a long period of improvement”? And what was the sudden turn for the worse that Jackson was referencing?
My search for Jackson’s experts in group behavior ultimately led me to political scientist James Chowning Davies (1918-2012), who earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1952, taught at the California Institute of Technology in the early 1960s, and spent much of his career at the University of Oregon. Davies’ best-known publication, “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” was published in the American Sociological Reviewin 1962; it was widely taught in history, political science, and sociology courses in the ’60s and ’70s. In a wide-ranging essay that challenged the theories of both Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, Davies used case studies of Dorr’s Rebellion in 1842, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 to support his “J-Curve” theory.
According to this theory, revolutions are most likely to occur not when conditions are at their worst, and not when conditions are improving at an insufficient pace, but instead when “a prolonged period of objective economic and social development is followed by a short period of sharp reversal.” Influenced by the African American urban rebellions of the 1960s, Davies later elaborated on his theory in a chapter published in The History of Violence in America, an influential 1969 report submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Here Davies used case studies of the French Revolution, the U.S. Civil War, the Nazi’s rise to power, and the urban riots of the 1960s to support his argument that “revolution is most likely to take place when a prolonged period of rising expectations and rising gratifications is followed by a short period of sharp reversal, during which the gap between expectations and gratifications quickly widens and becomes intolerable.”
The value and validity of Davies’ theory have been thoroughly debated for decades; the question for us is why Don Jackson thought it might be applicable to Stonewall. Unfortunately, he did not explain what he meant in suggesting that New York’s gay community had experienced a “long period of improvement” in the years leading up to the Stonewall riots, but he might have been referring to the reforms achieved by the homophile movement in the latter half of the 1960s. In 1966 and ’67, for example, Mattachine Society and other activists had convinced New York City’s mayor and police commissioner to limit the use of police entrapment practices and the enforcement of sexual solicitation laws. In 1967 and ’68, New York state activists had helped secure a new law that further constrained police entrapment practices and a court decision (Matter of Kerma) that provided increased protection to gay bars. TheNew York Times Magazinein 1967 and The Wall Street Journalin 1968 had published major articles that seemed to predict further advances for gay rights. Just weeks before the Stonewall Riots, the city’s Civil Service Commission had agreed to end its ban on hiring homosexuals in most city government jobs.
There were also signs of improvement elsewhere. In 1967, a federal district court in Minnesota had ruled in favor of a major gay publisher in an obscenity case. In the same year, England and Wales had decriminalized private and consensual same-sex sexual activity for non-military adults over the age of 21. In the early days of 1969, the Los Angeles Police Commission dropped its prohibition on cross-gender impersonation by entertainers. In the early days of June 1969, Connecticut became the second U.S. state (after Illinois) to repeal its sodomy law. Around the same time San Francisco’s Committee for Homosexual Freedom declared victory in its fight to secure the reinstatement of a fired bisexual worker at Tower Records. West Germany partially decriminalized sodomy three days before the Christopher Street riots began and Canada did so just hours before the police raided the Stonewall Inn. While they could not have known this when the riots erupted, theSan Francisco Chroniclebegan a groundbreaking three-part series on lesbians on June 30th and gay activists won a major federal court ruling against employment discrimination by the U.S. Civil Service Commission on July 1st.
If all of this sustains the notion that LGBT people had reasons for perceiving major improvements in their status in the years, months, and weeks before the rebellion (and that New Yorkers had reasons for feeling frustrated because some of this did not apply to them), are there grounds for thinking that they might have seen the raid on the Stonewall as part of Jackson’s “turn for the worse”? Much of the country had grown darkly pessimistic in the preceding eighteen months. In 1968, the Tet Offensive had raised the prospects of an escalation of the Vietnam War in January and February; civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in April; Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June; and Chicago police violently attacked protesters at the Democratic Party convention in August. For many observers, these were bloody new chapters in the long and brutal history of American violence. In November 1968, Republican Richard Nixon was elected U.S. president on a law-and-order platform that promised to reverse the reforms of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; he took office in January 1969.
For New Yorkers, this was the first time since 1903 that Republicans had held executive power at the local, state, and national levels. Governor Nelson Rockefeller (elected 1959) and Mayor John Lindsay (elected 1966) may have been known as liberal or moderate Republicans, but Nixon’s election seemed to threaten the future of progressive reform, and Lindsay was defeated by a more conservative candidate in the Republican primary on June 17th (though he later ran and won as the candidate of the Liberal Party). Fears about the future of reform were confirmed in May, when Nixon nominated conservative Warren Burger to replace liberal Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Burger was sworn in five days before the riots began.
There were other reasons for believing that conditions were deteriorating. In the weeks and months leading up to the Stonewall Riots, a series of police raids on New York bars and bathhouses, including one on the Stonewall Inn just a few days before the riots, had inspired new anger and frustration about gender and sexual oppression. Some blamed the raids on the upcoming mayoral election, but the crackdown caught many by surprise, since LGBT people had come to expect better treatment from Mayor Lindsay. In May, local, state, and federal prosecutors used obscenity laws to force the closure of one of the country’s most popular and sex-positive gay periodicals, the Philadelphia-based Drummagazine. In the weeks leading up to the Stonewall Riots, vigilantes in Kew Gardens (a neighborhood in Queens, one of New York City’s five boroughs) initiated a campaign of harassment against men who cruised for sex in a local park; when those efforts failed, axe-wielding men chopped down several dozen of the park’s trees just a few days before the riots began.
Also in June, the Mattachine Society of New York’s newsletter reported on three recent killings of gay men. In New York, police had discovered the body of a man strangled to death in March; his corpse was found in the Hudson River near a popular gay cruising spot. In Los Angeles, police had violently attacked and killed Howard Efland during a March raid on a gay hotel. In the Bay Area, in April, Frank Bartley had been shot and killed by an undercover policeman who sexually entrapped him in a Berkeley cruising park. Then, on June 21st, Philip Caplan died after a public toilet beating by vice squad officers in Oakland, California.
We cannot know whether the Stonewall rioters knew about these developments, whether they were part of a larger trend of increased hate and hostility, or whether the media stories that reported on these incidents reflected or produced increased public attention to violence against LGBT people. We can only imagine what the mood was like in the bar and on the streets during and after the raid. The existing social and political conditions, however, seem to fit Davies’ and Jackson’s profile of a revolutionary situation, when “minority group members see their status suddenly take a turn for the worse after a long period of improvement.” This is especially true if we think about the street people, trans people, and people of color who played distinctly prominent roles in the riots.
Whether or not we are persuaded by Jackson’s interpretation of the Stonewall Riots, I think this example makes a persuasive case for revisiting the documentary sources from the late 1960s and early ’70s that help us situate the rebellion in its historical context. Each of the documents reprinted in my book has the potential to inspire new interpretations of the Stonewall Riots, new explorations of LGBT history, and new ideas about social change.
Parts of this essay are adapted from the introduction to The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History (NYU Press, 2019).
Marc Stein is the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of History at San Francisco State University. He is the author of City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves (2000), Sexual Injustice(2010), and Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement(2012).
