Stonewall revisited
Eyewitnesses share personal accounts

By Laurel Lundstrom
NLGJA Staff Reporter

Most people who know something about the Stonewall riots associate the public disturbances that occurred on the evening of June 27, 1969, with the funeral services of Judy Garland earlier that day.

The myth that mourning gay men initiated the riots can be attributed to a heterosexual writer from the Village Voice — who connected the two events in an attempt to mock gays, according to historian David Carter, author of “Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution,” which was published in May.

Carter, one of the panelists at “Stonewall 101,” said the patrons of the Stonewall Inn were mostly young people who were more likely to be fans of Janis Joplin than Judy Garland.

The standing-room-only audience had the chance to hear personal accounts of what happened before and during the riot from two men who were at Stonewall. Dick Leitsch, writer of the first eyewitness account, was a leader of the Mattachine Society Inc. of New York, the nation’s first direct-action gay and lesbian civil rights organization. Jack Nichols, who co-wrote the first account, was a co-founder of the Mattachine Society of Washington.

Nichols recounted a time when it was unlawful for gays to gather in bars. In one of the two gay dance clubs he visited in New York, couples danced in the dark. When police were believed to be entering the bar, someone pulled the cord on the single light bulb in the room to cue dancers to sit.

But gay people did not sit forever. Leitsch describes New York in late 1960s as a police state, almost fascist in nature. In reaction to repression, gay people started to follow in the footsteps of the civil rights movement of black men and women.

“The movement prior to our arrival had been social service, research, and education,” said Nichols.

The members of the Mattachine Society and other such activists turned it toward civil rights.

The word “Mattachine” is Italian for masked court jesters, who were the only ones who could tell the truth to the kings, according to Leitsch and Nichols. With the press still using slurs to describe homosexuals and the police making laws against their public assembly, truth became a weapon against society’s prejudices.

“Something touched in the collective psyche of gay people. We just weren’t going to take it anymore,” Carter said.