THE MAN BEHIND STONEWALL.

JUDY GARLAND WASN'T THE ONLY ONE TO HAVE SPARKED THE 1969 RIOT. THOSE WHO WERE THERE SAY MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. INSPIRED THEM

What sparked the explosion in Manhattan on the streets: surrounding Sheridan Square on June 28, 1969?

The Stonewall riot, whose aftershocks would eventually be felt by gay people on every continent, had a hundred different origins--everything from the sexual revolution to the antiwar movement, the assassinations of our heroes, and the soulful music of rock and roll.

If you were a teenager in the 1960s, there were a thousand things that made you feel for a moment like you belonged to a generation apart. We wore wild clothes, we grew our hair down to our shoulders (and beyond), we smoked marijuana and popped tabs of acid, and we compulsively questioned authority. Our ambition was nothing less than the reinvention of the world, and gay people would come closer to achieving that ambition than anyone else. We reveled in every difference we could identify between ourselves and our parents, and we worshiped iconoclasts like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Laura Nyro, and Allen Ginsberg. But the person who was most important to everyone who believed we were born to build a revolution was the man who did nothing less than set the moral tone for the entire decade.

That man was Martin Luther King Jr.

King had been dead 14 months when the drag queens, the hippies, the hustlers, and even the men in suits poured out of a mundane watering hole to transform the way the world perceived us and the way we perceived ourselves. But it was what King and his followers gave us through their example that made all of that possible.

America in the 1950s was a country in which almost all power was reserved for straight, white, Protestant men. Until 1961 not even a Catholic had been allowed to occupy the White House. Black people went to separate schools and drank from separate water fountains while gay people were invisible pariahs.

The sea change in American life began on December 1, 1955, when a 42-year-old seamstress named Rosa Parks, with "no previous resolution until it happened," refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., merely to spare a white man the indignity of sitting in the same row as herself. Her impulsive act of conscience sparked a black boycott of the bus system for 381 days, until Montgomery's resistance collapsed and a 27-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. became the first black man to sit in one of the first ten rows of one of the city's buses.

According to his biographer David J. Garrow, King's own experience with gay people was limited because his only important gay lieutenant was Bayard Rustin, who became the de facto director of the march on Washington in 1963. But many lesbians and gay men joined in the fight for racial equality, partly because they were not yet ready to fight for themselves.

"Many of us who went south to work with Dr. King in the '60s were gay," says Grant Gallup, a priest who was active in the civil rights movement. "I remember a plane going down from Chicago, and three of us were gay. A lot of gay people who could not come out for their own liberation could invest the same energies in the liberation of black people. I think the connections between black liberation and women's liberation and gay liberation are very deep."

Historian Joan Nestle, a lesbian who went to Alabama to do voter registration in the 1960s, puts it most succinctly: "America changed because of working black Southerners who decided they were going to take on America's apartheid." It was the example of African-Americans that gradually convinced every other disenfranchised group to fight for the right to participate more fully in the American dream.

The other action that cemented King's primacy as the moral figure of his time was his decision to add the burden of opposition to the war in Vietnam to his commitment to equality between blacks and whites. While the rest of the old-line civil rights leaders remained silent about Vietnam, King demanded that the nation live up to the rest of its principles. On April 4, 1967, King gave a speech that historian Thomas Powers believes marked "a kind of turning point in the country's attitude toward the war" because he "spoke out more clearly and passionately against the fighting in Vietnam than" any other national figure had.

"Somehow this madness must cease," King declared. "We must stop now.... The great initiative in this war is ours.... The initiative to stop it must be ours.... Every man of human convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest."

Why is King's opposition to the war relevant to the gay rights movement, which was born after his death? Because our country's foolish participation in that war acted as the most powerful intellectual corrosive of the decade--a corrosive that dissolved every kind of conventional wisdom in America. Once it became clear that the establishment could be so disastrously wrong about the war, its convictions about everything else--including homosexuality--suddenly became vulnerable to determined assaults.

After King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, the nation was convulsed by the worst riots in its history. Forty-six people were killed, nearly 28,000 were arrested, and 70,000 troops were needed to quell disturbances in 130 cities across the country. And those riots were still fresh in the minds of the men and women of Stonewall 14 months later, when, I believe, at least some of them were propelled into action by the death of their own unlikely icon--Judy Garland.

Storme Delarverie is the cross-dressing African-American lesbian who may have sparked the Stonewall riot by hitting a cop after a cop hit her in the street outside the bar--and she has no doubt about where most of that anger came from on that fateful Saturday in June.

"Stonewall was just the flip side of the black revolt when Rosa Parks took a stand," Delarverie told me. "Finally the kids down there took a stand. The police got the shock of their lives when those queens came out of the bar and pulled off their wigs and went after them. I knew sooner or later people were going to get the same attitude that I had. They had just pushed once too often."

Indeed they had--and the world has been a better place ever since because they did.

Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America.