Fifty years ago, Edmund White witnessed the Stonewall riots. Here, he pays homage to the LGBT people of color, drag queens and tough kids of Harlem who paved the way to freedom
I was at the Stonewall Riots 50 years ago, the beginning of the current gay rights movement. Not because I was a radical. Quite the contrary. As a middle-class white 29-year-old who’d been in therapy for years trying to go straight, I was initially disturbed by seeing all these black and brown people resisting the police, of all things! I had at one time been a regular patron of this Greenwich Village bar, but in recent months the crowd had changed to kids mainly from Harlem, many in drag.
In the early 1960s, Mayor Robert Wagner had closed all gay and lesbian bars in a misguided effort to “clean up” the city for tourists visiting the World’s Fair. But by 1969 those days seemed long gone. We had a new mayor, John Lindsay, who looked like a Kennedy and we assumed to be liberal. We gays weren’t in a good mood. Judy Garland (the equivalent of Lady Gaga today) had just died and was lying in state in a funeral home on the Upper West Side. It was very, very hot and everyone was sitting out on stoops. And then this! A crowded gay bar had just been raided, a reminder of the recent past.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Rp54OB
