\n\ni worry that the way we talk about stonewall decontextualizes the event itself - that saying\u00a0\u201cthe first pride was a riot\u201d implicitly disconnects the raid on stonewall from the fact that similar raids on gay bars had been happening for decades prior, and that lgbt activists had been actively resisting police violence all the while, at the risk of their lives and livelihoods and reputations.
\npolice oppression of gay people did not begin in 1969, and gay resistance to police oppression did not begin with the stonewall riots. that\u2019s not to minimize the extreme importance of stonewall, of course, or the indelible contributions to our history and safety that were made by activists like sylvia rivera and marsha p. johnson and miss major griffin-gracy and storm\u00e9 delarverie. but they were standing on the shoulders of decades and decades of leaders and activists who had come before them, who had fought and died and endured total brutality at the hands of homophobic police.
\ngay bars, as much as they were allowed to exist in the decades prior to stonewall, were persistently targeted by undercover police officers and by violent raids. in los angeles, from the mid-1940s onward, the LAPD employed out-of-work actors to pretend to be gay and infiltrate these spaces, solicit men for sex, and then book them on charges of public indecency.
\nthe police department would give these officers quotas to meet on a weekly basis - round up and jail a certain number of homosexuals, or else. frequently, they would arrest men simply for appearing gay, or for having the bad luck to walk through a park or use a bathroom known as a gay cruising spot. this policy\u00a0was a cash cow like none other, because these men would always plead guilty, would always agree to pay hefty fines in order to settle the matter and keep it quiet and avoid having their reputations ruined.
\nand the police would stop at nothing to bully people into pleading guilty. it was commonplace for police to handcuff their charges, shove them into the backseat of their cruisers, and then drive in circles for hours, looping to the outskirts and back, intimidating and harassing them all the way. by the time they finally pulled up at the police station and booked their charges, they would be so shaken by the abuse they\u2019d just experienced that they\u2019d plead guilty without a second thought, cough up whatever money they could spare in order to go free.\u00a0
\nin less extreme cases, police officers would simply verbally abuse the men they\u2019d arrested, but just as often, the officers would physically beat, sexually abuse, or rape these men. oftentimes, the sexual abuse and rape would be part of the arrest itself - an officer would solicit sex from a man, the man would turn him down, and the officer would force him into sex anyway and then report that the man had initiated it.
\nlike, this was daily fucking life for lgbt people for decades before stonewall. and fledgling gay activists fought it with everything they had, early. in 1952, the los angeles mattachine society established the Citizens Committee to Outlaw Police Entrapment\u00a0after one of their founders, dale jennings, was stalked home by an officer, sexually assaulted in his own bedroom, and then booked for public indecency. rather than simply plead guilty, jennings chose to contest the charges and take them to trial - a totally unprecedented move - with the aid of socialist lawyer george shibley. and the jury voted 11-1 for acquittal, and he walked free. in 1952. seventeen years before stonewall.
\nbut this shit kept happening, everywhere, for decades - new york city didn\u2019t end its policy of police entrapment of lgbt citizens until the mid-1970s. and all the while, there was organized resistance. all the while, organizations like the mattachine society and street transvestite action revolutionaries fought back.\u00a0
\nit\u2019s super, super convenient for heterosexual society to claim that there was just one inciting incident, and one moment of spontaneous, courageous resistance, that sparked the gay rights movement as we know it today. but we can\u2019t fall into that trap. there were decades of brutal, violent police oppression, and there were decades of structured, well-organized resistance to that oppression.\u00a0
\nfor a long time, the gay struggle against police violence was the only fight there was. in the late 1940s, at the dawn of formal organization, nobody was agitating for their right to live openly as gay or avoid employment discrimination or get married or adopt children. the movement emerged in opposition to the systematized detainment and torture and rape of gay people by police.\u00a0
\nand that is why lgbt people don\u2019t owe the police shit, and why any police department with the audacity to demand time and space in a pride parade needs to be met with loud, unequivocal resistance. not because of one raid or one riot, but because of decades and decades of unapologetic brutality.
\n
Do you wonder why, if the police were set against gay culture and they knew how to get to the Stonewall, it wasn\u2019t raided every other night until it shut down?
\n\nBecause like so much at the time, vice laws weren\u2019t enforced consistently for the sake of it so much as opportunistically as a lever for official corruption.
\n\nThe Stonewall Inn was allowed to exist because it had a mafia krysha, same as other gay bars. The raid that night was to - huh, shake some more payouts loose? Shake some headlines loose to boost their political capital? Game-theory up their credibility? But the Stonewall riots weren\u2019t against a state implacably committed to their repression but a state opportunistically given to their exploitation, that\u2019s important.
\nWest Hollywood was LA\u2019s gay mecca for the same reason it was a liquor/gambling/prostitution mecca, because as county land (and later an independent municipality) it was under the LA County Sheriff and not the LAPD
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