In Greenwich Village, here
in New York City, Christopher Park and Sheridan Square, and
the area around the Stonewall Inn, is a place where the
LGBT community gathered to celebrate our victories,
to mourn our losses. But mostly, to protest. It was a place where
the community felt comfortable and safe, because
we were all among ourselves. Well, the 1960s,
it was a city sport to attack gay people. We were the
lowest of the scum of the Earth at that time. You're sick. You're a sinner. And some therapists said,
well, if you get married, it’ll go away. We were thrown into
a general category of people who needed to be
cleaned up out of New York City. Well, I understand that
we’re being picketed by a group of homosexuals. [laughter] The policy
of the department is that we do not employ
homosexuals knowingly. And if we discover
homosexuals in our department, we discharge them. Homosexuality is a problem. And these people are
really advocating that we don’t solve the problem. They’re advocating that
we tolerate the problem. And I think these
people are a fit subject for a mental health program. Our life was kind of
isolated and secret. But everyone knew
that Greenwich Village was where we hung out. Every type of gay person
that existed in the city, at one night could
really be found there. In this particular
area here, it was kind of liberating
to be myself. People who are
younger may not remember what it was like to
go to a gay bar in the 60s. It was a very special
thing to go to a bar. Bars always were dark on the
outside, in some kind of way, so people couldn’t see in. They never had names. Christopher Park was
a touch seedy. It was a park across
from Stonewall, so was occupied by the
street kids, the drag queens, or whoever was around. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t beautiful. It was just a rest
stop for people to talk and take a break
from the bars, sometimes. There were always stories
coming out of Stonewall. It was a dancing bar. At first, it was
just a gay men’s bar, and they didn’t
allow no women in. And then they started
allowing women in, and then they let
drag queens in. I was one of the first drag
queens to go to that place. This area was the only real
turf we had in the city. At the time, gay bars
could not serve legally. So it was run by the
mafia, and they paid off the police. But the police raided
the bars all the time. We were afraid we
would be arrested. But we went because we
had no other place to go. June 28, 1969. It was a weekend. The neighborhood
cops came in and they started pushing people. There was some
commotion inside. Then there was the raid. Everybody just
like, why the fuck are we doing all this for? I don’t know if it
was the customers or it was the police. It just [makes snapping sound]
everything clicked. We just was saying, no
more police brutality, and we had enough police
harassment in the village. Things escalated in different
areas at the same time. A riot has movement
and energy, and you’re not in
one place to observe. What you ever observe
is the place you’re in. And where you’re in, in
two minutes could change. A drag queen had kicked
a cop in the shoulder. The cop turned to us
and did what they always did, and said, all right,
you fags saw enough. The show’s over. Now get the fuck out of here. But for some
reason, all of us, without telling each other,
without communicating, even bodily, moved forward. All of a sudden, things were
flying all over the place. The cops, they
just panicked. We knew the land. They could not catch us. They could not trap us. They couldn’t arrest the
leaders because we had none. They could do nothing
but chase us. Two queens pulled a parking
meter out of the ground, concrete and all, used
it as a battering ram. Oh, it was so exciting. It was like, wow,
we’re doing it. We’re doing it. The riot lasted for
hours and hours. Finally, the first
hint of dawn was coming. I sat down on a stoop. And I looked across and there
was this other queen sitting on a stoop, exhausted. And six feet away on the
fence was a cop, exhausted. No longer enemies,
just exhausted people. And the first
beginnings of the sun were catching all
the smashed glass. It’s like diamonds lit up. It was one of most beautiful
things I’d ever seen. Well, the next
few nights really were a repetition
of the rioting. All of a sudden,
a lot of gay people appeared on the streets,
in this whole area, not just in front
of Stonewall. This was our
neighborhood, and we weren’t going to let them
take it away from us. We knew this is it. This is what we’ve
been waiting for. After the uprising,
the bar closed. And activists realized that
this was a really important turning point. A year after the riots, that
whole area by the Stonewall became the gathering
point of the kickoff for the first gay
pride parade. Craig Rodwell of the
Oscar Wilde Bookshop putting up a sign in
his window and saying, hey, kids, let’s
put on a show. And they were
going to commemorate Stonewall as an event. For lack of a better
term, they branded it. It was our desire not to
let any of this be forgotten. Sticking our torches in
the ashes of the Stonewall, to say, we are walking
away from the darkness of the bars. And we can have
another life together. The remarkable first march
I think brought a lot of us to our senses as to
what we could do. And then, all of a
sudden, everything seemed to be in place. [crowd noises] Everybody was into
changing the system. But, there were a lot of drag
queens behind the scenes that could not be seen
in front, like myself or Marsha. The community is
always embarrassed by the drag queens. It was always, we have to
look part of their world. And that’s what really hurt. In many ways, the Stonewall
became an icon and a beacon for the LGBTQ movement. People would head
to Sheridan Square and gather in front
of the Stonewall with their anger, their
love, their concerns. And in the latest chapter
of her war on homosexuals, Anita Bryant says
she’s in favor of having homosexual
acts treated as felonies, even though that might
mean prison terms of as much as 20 years. We thought Anita Bryant
was a threat to us, and we only became stronger. [crowd noises] Dan White has been
found guilty of one count each of voluntary manslaughter
in the shooting death of Mayor George Moscone
and Supervisor Harvey Milk. The jury chose the least
serious crime of the options given to them. Some 200 gays marched
to Sheridan Square in the Village to
stage a rally. [crowd noises] It will be a
demonstration that will gather in Sheridan
Square and march to the shoot site, where we
will try to disrupt the filming in every
legal way possible. We have to start laying
our lives on the line if people are going
to take us seriously, and this whole movement. We told you earlier
that two men died and six others were
wounded in a machine gun attack on two homosexual bars
in the Village last night. Well, tonight
about 1,500 people staged a march from Sheridan
Square to those two bars. There were many gatherings
at Sheridan Square, even though the
Stonewall closed shortly after the uprising. For many years, there
was a bagel place where the original
Stonewall had been. You want a revolution
with a schmear, we’d say. [crowd] Fight back,
fight back, fight back, fight back. Take heart, take courage. You’re on the streets today. You’ll be on the
streets again next year, and the year after, and the
year after, until all of us have all of the freedoms. [crowd cheering] The number of AIDS cases here
is doubling every two years. 10,116 people living in
New York have gotten it. And more than half of
them are already dead. You couldn’t go
to the hospital. Some doctors weren’t
going to treat you, so you’d see them walking
around here, looking gaunt, very thin, wasting. And this is all we
had, was the Village. I’ve learned, from
the Stonewall Riots, that you have to
keep fighting. And we have to stick
together because there’s power in numbers. [crowd chanting]
We say fight back. We say fight back. We’re here to say it’s not
open season in this city on gays and lesbians. [crowd chanting]
Hey, hey, ho, ho. Homophobia’s got to go. A lot of the bashing
that goes on, I think has been made worse because
of the threat of AIDS. June 1994, New York
City, 25 years later, lesbians and gays
from every state and a hundred countries fill
the streets and stadiums. Thousands of people
skipped the official parade and staged a protest
march instead. Revelers gathered at the
scene of the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village, and made
their way up Fifth Avenue. The Fifth Avenue March,
organized mostly by ACT UP, took place without a license. Because AIDS has largely
been rendered invisible by the official Stonewall
25 establishment. They wanted to put a
certain image on Stonewall 25 because they
expected to attract a lot of money that way. The decision
that Stonewall 25 made to exclude
transsexuals and bisexuals as official participants
in the March on the U.N. was a problematic decision. Don’t push us on the
back of your history. We are part of this movement. I am proud to announce that
Stonewall and its surrounding area are hereby added to the
National Register of Historic Places as the first
such historic site of national
significance for lesbian and gay men in America. Good evening, everyone. History unfolding
tonight in New York. The Empire State now
the sixth and largest state to legalize
same sex marriage. We really wanted
to be in a place where history was made,
as history is made. We come today because we
want to value the people who were lost in Orlando,
because whether we are happy, whether we are sad,
this is where we come. The story of America
is a story of progress. Sometimes we can
mark that progress in special places,
hallowed ground where our history was written. Well, one of these special
places is the Stonewall Inn. Unveil the sign. We are here to
celebrate and recognize the first national
monument dedicated to the story of the lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender community, and their
fight for equal rights. Stonewall National
Monument is much wider than Christopher Park. The boundaries include some
of the surrounding streets, where some of the
participants in the uprising fled to during those
nights of the event. Using a model,
literally, of Civil War battlefields,
because the battles took place on the
streets around Stonewall, not just the bar
building itself. In 1969, the Park was full
of LGBTQ youth who had been kicked out on the street. And they’re seeing
some activity, they’re seeing people
get a little rowdy. What do they have to lose? So they were a
huge part of it. I served in the Coast
Guard under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy as someone
who identifies as queer. Getting to wear the uniform
and coming full circle, really was life changing. There’s nothing like
walking on the street and knowing this is
where this happened, this is where that happened. [crowd chanting] No wall. We want peace for all. We have fought. No one has given us this. No one has suddenly
woken up one day and decided, oh, we think
we’ll stop discriminating. We have demonstrated
in the streets, come out to our
friends, and families, and bosses to demand respect. We have fought for our
dignity and our rights. And maybe most of
all, we have had to fight for our
own self-respect in the face of a world telling
us we are sick, disgusting, lawbreaking human beings. It is a wonder that any
of us have survived. Whenever we have
Pride, I don’t feel like celebrating
because we don’t have justice, especially
the trans community and women of color. We’ve won many battles. But unfortunately, the
war still keeps on. And you’re not only
fighting for yourself. You’re fighting for the
people coming behind you. One of the things that I’ve
learned from the gay movement is that the things
that you think are going to take five
years, take 50 years. That in fact, hearts,
and minds, and politics change very slowly. I had this sentiment
that it was already our monument, before it got
the National Park Service designation. We just knew. [crowd chanting]
What have you got? Gay power. What have you got? Gay power. Gay power.
