The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier.
I didn't know of any homophile movements pre-Stonewall.
Gays have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, all they seem to crave nowadays is the State's pension and seal of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police's violations of privacy and private property were the object of their anger and activism.
I'd been going to jail for like, 10 years before the Stonewall.
Pride is a time to celebrate our community, publicly display our love for one another, and continue our protest of equality that stems back to the BlackCat and Stonewall Riots.
Pride, to me, is a celebration of the past because we have come such a long way from the very first Pride parade marking the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, so it's a celebration of all that we've accomplished.
The queers of the sixties, like those since, have connived with their repression under a veneer of respectability. Good mannered city queens in suits and pinstripes, so busy establishing themselves, were useless at changing anything.
For a long time, I lived in West Hollywood and watched young gay men strolling through life having no idea what came before. They didn't know about the riots at Stonewall, the vice squad, the raids.
We have to fight for what's right the same way the brothers and sisters that came before us did. The ultimate example, and there are many others, was The Stonewall Inn. They were pushed until they could take no more.
I'm still stuck in the Stonewall in 1968. I never left the Stonewall.
It's not often that you get to read something that just feels very original for a star but also something that feels like it's more than just a movie or entertainment. Even though the riots were one of the most pivotal riots in civil rights history, especially for the LGBT community, I knew surprisingly very little about them. You don't learn about Stonewall in schools. It's a bit gross really! So it certainly felt like something that was quite important.
While we have come a long way since the Stonewall riots in 1969, we still have a lot of work to do. Too often, the issue of LGBT rights is exploited by those seeking to divide us. But at its core, this issue is about who we are as Americans. It's about whether this nation is going to live up to its founding promise of equality by treating all its citizens with dignity and respect.
