IN THE FORTY YEARS since the Stonewall Rebellion, an event that achieved legendary status almost before it was over, its power as a symbol has continued to rise more or less unabated. Four decades later-after two books, one film, several radio documentaries, countless articles and news stories; after hundreds of gay events and organizations named in its honor; and after becoming the first gay and lesbian site to be designated a national historic landmark-Stonewall retains its power to fascinate and inspire.

… if you find yourself hankering for some gay history on the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots this summer, here are some spots where you can pay tribute to our collective past.

Note from the author: The first half of this article originally appeared in the December-January 1970 issue of ComeOut! The second half was to have been published in a 1972 issue of ComeOut! Some time before production, the print shop that housed the galleys was raided (perpetrators unknown-at least to me) and the galleys were destroyed. The latter half of this article, tracing the rise and fall of Radicalesbians, never made it to press.

VIEWED THROUGH THE PRISM of the eight issues of the newspaper Come Out! that were published by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in New York from 1969 to 1972, the Stonewall Riots ignited a decisive and twofold political trajectory that has endured for forty years. Two political models, distinct and dissimilar but not mutually exclusive, developed simultaneously. The first approach sustained and refined the paradigm of identity politics rooted in the homophile movement. The second introduced a critical reformulation of gender and sexuality that evolved from feminism into the matrix of academia as lesbian and gay studies and subsequently queer theory.

THE 1960’S IN AMERICA, when I was an adolescent, was a dark time for gay men. A man’s life could be ruined if it were known that he harbored homoerotic desires, even if just in the head. In the political hysteria fostered by Senator Joseph McCarthy, gay men people were purged from government jobs and driven to suicide. Men who loved other men were incarcerated in mental asylums, castrated and given electric shock treatment.

… Henry James was a gay man, albeit a rather closeted one, and in this respect he is not alone in showing an uncanny insight into the subjectivities of women … Many of his novels and short stories have been studied by GLBT scholars for their gay subtext, including strong lesbian undertones in his novel The Bostonians …