Stonewall Riots

The 1960s and preceding decades were not welcoming times for gay, lesbian and transgender Americans. For instance, solicitation of same-sex relations was illegal in New York City.

For such reasons, gay and lesbian individuals flocked to gay bars and clubs, places of refuge where they could express themselves openly and socialize without worry. However, the New York State Liquor Authority penalized and shut down establishments that served alcohol to known or suspected gay patrons, arguing that their mere gathering was “disorderly.”

In 1966, three years before Stonewall, members of The Mattachine Society, an organization dedicated to gay rights, staged a “sip-in” where they openly declared their sexuality at New York City taverns, daring staff to turn them away and suing establishments who did. Their strategy worked. In 1967, a ruling from New York’s highest court affirmed gay individuals had the right to be served in bars.

Police raids were temporarily reduced after the lawsuit. But engaging in gay behavior in public—such as holding hands, kissing or dancing with someone of the same sex—was still illegal, so police harassment of gay bars continued. Many bars still operated without liquor licenses, in part because they were owned by the Mafia.

The Mafia saw profit in catering to shunned gay clientele, and by the mid-1960s, the Genovese crime family controlled most Greenwich Village gay bars. In 1966, they purchased Stonewall Inn (a “straight” bar and restaurant), cheaply renovated it and reopened it the next year as a gay bar.

Stonewall Inn was registered as a type of private “bottle bar,” which did not require a liquor license because patrons were supposed to bring their own liquor. Club attendees had to sign their names in a book upon entry to maintain the club’s false exclusivity. The Genovese family bribed New York’s Sixth Police Precinct to ignore the activities occurring within the club.

Without police interference, the crime family could cut costs how they saw fit: The club lacked a fire exit, running water behind the bar to wash glasses, clean toilets that didn’t routinely overflow and palatable drinks that weren’t watered down beyond recognition. What’s more, the Mafia reportedly blackmailed the club’s wealthier patrons who wanted to keep their sexuality a secret.

Nonetheless, Stonewall Inn quickly became an important Greenwich Village institution. It was large and relatively cheap to enter. It welcomed drag queens, who received a bitter reception at other gay bars and clubs. It was a nightly home for many runaways and homeless gay youths, who panhandled or shoplifted to afford the entry fee. And it was one of the few—if not the only—gay bar left that allowed dancing.

Raids were still a fact of life, but usually, corrupt cops would tip off Mafia-run bars before they occurred, allowing owners to stash any alcohol sold without a liquor license and hide other illegal activities. In fact, the New York Police Department had stormed Stonewall Inn just a few days before the riot-inducing raid.

When police raided Stonewall Inn on the morning of June 28, it came as a surprise—the bar wasn’t tipped off this time. Armed with a warrant, police officers entered the club, roughed up patrons and arrested 13 people after finding bootlegged alcohol. Among those detained were employees and people violating the state’s vagrancy disguise law. Although the 1845 statute didn’t mention gendered dressing, New York City police had long used it to penalize cross-dressing. At Stonewall, female officers took suspected cross-dressing patrons into the bathroom to check their sex.

Fed up with constant police harassment and social discrimination, angry patrons and neighborhood residents hung around outside of the bar instead of leaving. The crowd became increasingly agitated as the events unfolded and people were aggressively manhandled. At one point, an officer hit a woman over the head as he forced her into the police van. She shouted to onlookers to act, inciting the crowd to begin throw pennies, bottles, cobblestones and other objects at the police.

Within minutes, a full-blown riot involving hundreds of people began. The police, a few prisoners and a Village Voice writer barricaded themselves in the bar, which the mob attempted to set on fire after repeatedly breaching the barricade.

The fire department and a riot squad were eventually able to douse the flames, rescue the people inside Stonewall and disperse the crowd. But the protests, sometimes involving thousands of people, continued in the area for five more days, flaring up at one point after the Village Voice published its account of the riots.

Although the Stonewall Uprising didn’t start the gay rights movement, it was a galvanizing force for modern LGBTQ+ political activism. Within a year, thousands of gay rights organizations formed, including the Gay Liberation Front, Gay Activists Alliance, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson’s STAR, Queens Liberation Front, Radicalesbians, PFLAG and what became the National LGBTQ Task Force.

On the one-year anniversary of the riots on June 28, 1970, a couple thousand people marched in the streets of Manhattan from the Stonewall Inn to Central Park in what was then called the Christopher Street Liberation Day March (now the NYC Pride March). The parade’s official chant was: “Say it loud, gay is proud.”

Stonewall inspired similar marches in Chicago—which held the first gay pride parade in the United States on June 27, 1970—San Francisco and Los Angeles that year. Activists in other cities across the nation and the world began organizing their own pride parades after that.

Over time, other gay pride events were planned throughout June. In 1999, President Bill Clinton declared that June as Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, formalizing a tradition that activists and community members had been honoring for decades.

Fifty years after the Stonewall Riots, NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill apologized for the raid. “What happened should not have happened,” O’Neill said in June 2019. “The actions taken by the NYPD were wrong, plain and simple. The actions and the laws were discriminatory and oppressive, and for that, I apologize.”

Stonewall Inn was added to National Register of Historic Places in 1999. It became a National Historic Landmark the following year.

In 2016, President Barack Obama designated the site of the riots—Stonewall Inn, Christopher Park and the surrounding streets and sidewalks—a national monument in recognition of the area’s contribution to gay rights. The Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center opened in June 2024.