‘The Stonewall Riots could only be started by someone who was tired and black’

The first thing I noticed about the Greenwich Village neighborhood in New York City was its cleanliness. It was, in fact, beyond clean. It was sterile. Sanitized. Throngs of gay white men poured out of bars and restaurants. Beer-stained voices seemed to echo from the buildings. I had never been there before. I walked the streets alone listening to conversations about jobs and luxury clothing labels, searching for a reasonable drink in the very part of town that I was promised I would feel a deep connection to.

In the Summer of 1969, this neighborhood, these streets were the site of the Stonewall riots, the event that launched the the gay liberation movement. It now looked gutted and cleaned like a lot of the cities currently look where the militant uprisings of 1967 (commonly referred to as The Long Hot Summer of 1967) took place. I do not think it is coincidental that the places of yesterday’s resistance and radicalism are now merely strip malls, which feel as radical as the clever name of the coffee shop allows them to be. I was promised to feel transported, and in a way I was.

I thought about a person who lived at the meeting of both of these pivotal moments in American resistance movements: Marsha P. Johnson. I thought about how in a lot of ways Johnson’s body is a bridge that makes sense of two movements that inform each other, but are often pitted against each other. Before Kimberle Crenshaw named intersectionality as an academic theory, Marsha P. Johnson lived and practiced in the odd places we find ourselves when our identities are deemed complex. I could imagine what Marsha P. Johnson would think of the place where she once strolled as a holy person and agitator. I could feel the disappointment.

I was told by gay elders and peers that I’d be able to journey back to the birth of gay radicalism. But instead of transporting me back in time, the modern day West Village reminded me of a theme park—something that was nominally based on history yet entirely removed from it. I felt like an atheist in a church, forcing myself to feel feelings that simply weren’t there. And the drinks were expensive, not just expensive in a way that New York City is commonly expensive, but expensive in a way that reminds you that Greenwich Village is now classed. The very people that made this place historic and gay wouldn’t be able to afford it if they lived here today. Greenwich Village is pricey, white, and sanitized. It is simply a shell of its former self. The irony is the intense violence and bloody abandoned fervor of that day in 1968 have become a movement which has become a neighborhood which has become a lifestyle brand. And the brand is monied and white, but the movement itself began almost entirely because of the black uprisings that preceded it.

In the 1960s, The Stonewall Inn was a bar where the outcasts of the outcasts came to socialize. Gay people were already living on the margins of straight society, but Stonewall was for people who were on the margins of gayness: the trans, the feminine men, the masculine women, the sex workers, the black, the Latino, the poor. Perhaps most importantly, the Stonewall was a home to the homeless. Dick Leitch, the first gay journalist to report on Stonewall recalled in David Carter’s oral history, Stonewall The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution:

“Most of them are between 16 and 25, and came here from other places without jobs, money or contacts…Some got thrown out of school or the service for being gay and couldn’t face going home. Some were even thrown out of their homes…They came to New York with the clothes on their backs. Some of them hustled, or had skills enough to get a job. Others weren’t attractive enough to hustle, and didn’t manage to fall in with people who could help them. Some of them, giddy at the openness of gay life in New York, got caught up in it and some are on pills and drugs. Some are still wearing the clothes in which they came here a year or more ago.”

For the single price of $3, a kid such as this could gain access to The Stonewall and stay there all night and all day. To the patrons, when police raided, they were not raiding a bar, they were raiding the closest thing they had to a home.

And police raids of the Stonewall were not uncommon, typically for serving without a license. The New York State Liquor Authority frequently refused licenses to gay establishments, forcing them to operate as illegal saloons, usually protected by mafia or underworld opportunists. Periodic raids saw arrests, handcuffs, drinks crashing to floors, and guns on temples, turning a place for queer relief into a site for state violence. As it so often does, the continued terror began to transform into ideas of resistance. The rest of the country openly rejected gay people from establishments and places of employment, and the police terror at the Stonewall became a lightening rod for an entire life’s worth of rejection. It was more than an evening spoiled or a few bad cops; it was the physical manifestation of a world invested in a gay annihilation.

On June 28, 1969, the police conducted yet another raid on The Stonewall Inn, which this time proved the breaking point. An angry crowd gathered and a brick was thrown, starting what is now known as The Stonewall Riots. The brick was thrown by Marsha P. Johnson. Johnson’s identity varies depending on who you ask. Some elders say she was an effeminate gay man. She is even recorded declaring her manhood and denying any association with a transgender experience. Some attribute Johnson’s rejection of transgender identity to various things, including but not limited to a lack of education around what identities could be housed underneath transgender and mental illness. What we do know for sure about Marsha P. Johnson was she was known as a neighborhood eccentric and holy person. We also know that Marsha P. Johnson, born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, by all historical records and witnesses, was the person who decided to create justice on that summer night in 1969. And we also know that she was a black person in America.

Two years earlier, as part of what came to be known as The Long Hot Summer, near simultaneous riots broke out in both Plainfield and Newark, New Jersey. Marsha P. Johnson’s hometown of Elizabeth was almost directly between the two burning cities, no more than 30 miles from either. That year’s uprisings, which numbered 159 in total, were the result of years of institutionalized racism, poverty, unemployment, police brutality, unfair sentencing, and the festering anger these conditions created in the black community. Black America was emboldened, and White America was terrified. But something changed over the course of that year for all Black Americans, including Marsha P. Johnson. Like soul food and jazz, the riot was becoming a type of black tradition created out of necessity, out of the desire to turn the lack of human rights into something powerful and meaningful.

The Watts Riots occurred two summers before the Long Hot Summer of 1967, and America watched the black community of Los Angeles react to the rough treatment of a black motorist. These uprisings had the effect of educating black observers on what the protocol might be when they wanted to be heard. The line is direct from The Haitian Revolution, to Nat Turner to Watts to the Long Hot Summer of black uprisings, as a means to freedom through blood and disruption. They do not happen in a vacuum, but are born of the various moments of violent and disruptive events of the past.

When we consider Marsha P. Johnson, we must consider her proximity to the events of 1967. We must consider that she picked up the brick because she was perhaps the only person who could pick up the brick, who could transfer the frustration of diffuse and institutional oppression into violent action. The Stonewall Riots could only be started by someone who was tired and black. She applied the black tradition of rioting when unheard, adopted it, and gave it to the gay community. She threw the brick in the tradition of Plainfield and Newark in 1967, and Watts in 1965. In this very real, historical sense, the Gay Liberation movement is not only a movement about queer gender, romance, and sexuality performances, identities, and practices, it is also an undeniably black movement.

It is odd to return to Greenwich Village in 2017 and observe that gay has become synonymous with rich, cis, male, and white. It is curious to remember that “liberation,” or at least how it is defined in the American project, is synonymous with black. It was black people, from chattel slavery to segregation to gay liberation to Black Lives Matter, who have had to define and imagine what liberation is, not just for ourselves but for all of America. To see a community that began imagining freedom and justice because of a gender-failing, poor, black person now transformed into the socio-political opposite is emotionally disheartening and politically infuriating. Infuriating because it represents a moment of black liberation turned lifeless theme park, with a white man as the proprietor, logo, and sole beneficiary. I walk around the sterile Greenwich Village and want to break things, make it dirty and radical again, make it mine again. But it does not belong to me. It belongs to the thing that Marsha P. Johnson threw the brick at. It belongs to the forces that made the summer of 1967 so hot, and the memory of Stonewall reduced to just an echo of the past.