Homosexuals are coming together at last,” stated a flyer created by the Mattachine Society of New York. This flyer was given to people at a rally in New York City on Sunday, July 27, 1969, one month after the Stonewall riots of June 28, 1969. These words sum up the trajectory of the LGBTQ+ movement after the riots.
The Stonewall riots have served as a dividing line in the history of the LGBTQ+ movement, dividing history neatly into the before and after. Yet these words were written by members of the Mattachine Society, a group of gay men led by Harry Hay. In 1950, nineteen years before the Stonewall riots, Hay had established the society to educate mainstream society about matters to do with gay men. They had already come together before Stonewall, in groups, bars, and homes. And they had already had conflict with local authorities, such as during the Black Cat Tavern riot in 1967.
And yet something was different about Stonewall. Part of that difference is made clear by examining the years immediately before and after it, around 1965 to 1980. These years spanned the height of the African American civil rights movement; the anticapitalist antiwar movement that ended US involvement in the Vietnam War; the women’s liberation movement, and the student and counterculture movements. The protest methods, rhetoric, and liberation ideology for these movements were similar. Each wanted civil rights to be more inclusive of previously excluded populations, and each included the participants forming a core group identity for themselves. Each movement also built on the achievements and issues of the others. These years were crucial to the development of modern LGBTQ+ identity, culture, and legal status and have deeply influenced mainstream culture in many ways.
Seen here from left to right are Chuck Rowland, an unidentified man, Rudi Gernreich, Tony Reyes, and Don Slater. They were members of the Mattachine Society, the first American homophile group.
Many changes came about because of these events and the people involved in them. Along the way, there was much social and legal persecution against LGBTQ+ people. This persecution served as the basic “why” of the movement. People often hate what is different from them, and as a result persecution becomes enshrined for various reasons in culture, religion, and law. But no one likes to be bullied, and it is important to know what resistance looks like as well as what successes and failures result from that resistance.
While movements are a collective effort, they never involve fully uniform actors. LGBTQ+ people in particular are not and have never been a monolithic group. They are composed of many different types of people, with their own points of view that sometimes conflict.
Determining the events of history involves examining secondary sources written by expert scholars and news or media sources and interpreting the meaning of primary sources. Primary sources give us a better understanding of what occurred than secondary sources alone. However, all primary sources must still be interpreted with care because sometimes their information conflicts with other sources, is biased, or is unreliable in some other manner.