The Promise of Stonewall.

On a visit to New York City two l years ago, I was intent on seeing Stonewall, a bar where three days of rioting in June 1969 touched off the grassroots gay and lesbian movement. So I asked a friend to go with me.

It was a Thursday afternoon about 4:00 P.M. The place was quiet, with three patrons besides us and a bartender. This was where it started--"the hairpin drop heard `round the world," as it was called by the New York Mattachine Society, a gay civil rights group.

There should be something here, I told my friend, some recognition of what this place has meant to so many people. But it looked like any other dive. I drank a soda, bought a T-shirt, and we left.

This past June was the thirtieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. And Stonewall, the building, did receive recognition in the National Register of Historic Places. There are 70,000 or so national landmarks, and this is the first one associated with gays and lesbians, says the bar's present owner, Bob Gurecki.

On June 28, 1969, the police raided the Stonewall Inn, one of many police busts in an era when it was illegal to cross-dress or dance with a partner of the same sex. But this time, the people fought back, and their defiance was contagious. Theirs was the desperate resistance of those who had learned to love the only corner that would shelter them--a seedy, mafia-run bar.

"Why the Stonewall and not the Sewer or the Snake Pit?" asked the New York Mattachine Newsletter shortly after the riots. "The answer lies, we believe, in the unique nature of the Stonewall.... It catered to a large group of people who are not welcome in, or cannot afford, other places of homosexual social gathering.... When it was raided, they fought for it.... They had nothing to lose other than the most tolerant and open-minded gay place in town."

The riots ended, amazingly, with no one dead. But the impact was immediate. "For those of us in Public Morals, after the Stonewall incident things were completely changed," said Seymour Pine, who was deputy inspector in charge of the New York City Police Department's vice squad. "They suddenly were not submissive anymore." The news spread, and four months later, Time and Newsweek featured stories entitled "The Homosexual: Newly Visible, Newly Understood" and "Policing the Third Sex."

In the early days of the popular gay and lesbian movement, there were gay be-ins in Central Park, with thousands together for the first time--many of them crying with exhilaration and grief that I can only begin to understand. There were rallies, there were organizations. And yet, as Gurecki said to me over the phone shortly after the building was recognized as a historic property, "They will always remember Stonewall, just like they remember Rosa Parks."

Stonewall matters to me--as it does to the thousands who visit the bar every weekend and the thousands more who can't get there but think of it with gratitude and affection as "our place."

I was three-and-a-half years old during the Stonewall riots. I had no idea that it happened until after I came out as a lesbian in my mid-twenties. Even so, it made the life I live possible. Stonewall, and the burgeoning movement that followed it, inspired many gay and lesbian people to live openly. Their visibility, in turn, helped me to understand that it was possible to live a different sort of life--which became for me a lesbian life. When I walk hand-in-hand with my girlfriend through the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, I credit Stonewall.

Sometimes, I think of how I might have lived had it not been for Stonewall. I imagine a civil, but quietly unhappy, married life. Who knows if that's accurate? I do know, however, that I might have suppressed any desires or ideas that didn't feel right. Others--the more visibly queer, the people who couldn't have denied their feelings even if they tried, and the outrageously brave--wouldn't have. They would have chosen lives of greater risk.

The mainstream has recently declared gays and lesbians to be a significant, meaningful, and, in some cases, ordinary segment of the population. We're on TV. We have access to the President. We're a marketing niche.

But while some lesbians and gay people celebrate our current popularity and search for "good representatives of our community," the newly legitimate gay movement seems to want to leave some members behind. I'm talking about the drag queens, who helped start the Stonewall riots (like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera), the bull dykes, bisexuals, and many others. Transgendered people, in particular, are the siblings many would rather forget about. They are the flamboyant people who show up in the newspaper photos and "don't really represent the lesbian and gay movement," some of us tell ourselves. They don't blend in well. They don't take the trouble to camouflage themselves, or they can't. Crossdressers and transsexuals are also murdered frequently, though these killings get little media attention.

Why this embarrassment while we march on toward freedom? What does this mean?

I think it means that sexual desire--that mysterious, seemingly uncontrollable, and beautiful thing--still frightens most of us. And I think it means that some lesbian and gay people still dislike and fear themselves. By taking out their nervousness on the more visibly sissy, butchy, campy, bisexual, or transgendered, they give the rest of the world license to hate.

"What do you think would happen if a bunch of queens started a riot to protect a bar tonight?" I recently asked my coworker who is a queer activist.

"I don't know," she said. "What do you think?"

"I think it would seriously divide the gay movement," I said.

She paused and looked at me. "I think so, too," she said finally.

The Stonewall we celebrate represents our hidden past, when the safest places for people who were sexually different were the places heterosexuals abhorred. But Stonewall, the bar, accepted all kinds--at least in legend. According to Gurecki, it still does.

"Anybody can come in and not feel uncomfortable," he says. "That's what we were fighting about to begin with."

The promise of Stonewall is a promise of radical sexual equality. It excludes no one. It's a promise we have yet to fulfill.

Anne-Marie Cusac is Managing Editor of The Progressive.