That research was curtailed, and largely destroyed, by the rise of the Nazis, who ransacked his institute and burned the contents of its archive and library in the streets. While many of Hirschfeld’s attitudes may seem dated today, they were groundbreaking in providing people with a language to describe and understand their sexual predilections. Hirschfeld’s scientific approach, combined with his sympathetic treatment of LGBTQ+ people – he was himself homosexual – had been key in developing the idea that their shared experiences could be understood not just as discrete sexual (and criminal) acts, nor as psychiatric illness, but as a legible sexual and gender identity, which could be afforded civil rights. It wasn’t the first such movement in the world it was preceded by the prewar campaigning in Weimar Germany around sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which had campaigned for increased rights for, and study of, sexual and gender-variant people.
There had been a gay rights movement in the US among people describing themselves as “homophiles” since the late 40s. Seven years before that, when police had raided Coopers, a donut shop in the city nestled between two gay bars, LGBTQ+ patrons had attacked officers after the arrest of a number of drag queens, sex workers and gay men. In 1966, in the Tenderloin neighbourhood of San Francisco, transgender customers of Compton’s Cafeteria had attacked police, following years of harassment and discrimination by both cops and management. They weren’t even the first time LGBTQ+ people had fought back against police harassment. T he Stonewall riots were not the birth of the gay rights movement. The roots of that debate go back to its earliest days, and suggest that Pride and the Stonewall riots have always been part of a contentious battle for identity and ownership – a battle that has helped produce the very idea of what being a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer person might mean. For decades a debate has raged between different elements of the community: is Pride supposed to be a protest, or a party?
Those who were key to the kickstarting of gay liberation – trans people, people of colour and working-class LGBTQ+ people – have gained the least from the mainstreaming of the struggle. To religious and cultural conservatives, Pride parades are nothing less than the public flaunting of deviancy, while many LGBTQ+ people regard today’s corporate-sponsored parades as having sold out the radical, revolutionary demands of the gay liberation movement. Yet Pride marches, and the legacy of Stonewall, remain contentious even within the LGBTQ+ community.įor all its talk of unity, Pride can still divide. Within a single lifetime, homosexuality has moved from being a crime and a psychiatric disorder, punished in the US by imprisonment, chemical castration, social ostracisation and a lifetime as a registered sex offender, to a socially and legally recognised sexual identity. The five decades of struggle that have followed the riots have sometimes lent the impression that the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend towards justice. Last year, on the 50th anniversary of the riots, more than 5 million people took part in New York’s annual Pride events.
As the gay rights movement grew, so did the marches, which came to be collectively known as Gay Pride and then Pride parades. (Christopher Street was the location of the Stonewall Inn, and epicentre of the riots.) Similar small events were held in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. On 28 June 1970, exactly a year to the day since the police raid, the first Christopher Street Liberation Day was held, attracting a few thousand LGBTQ+ activists. Soon they were advocating nothing less than “gay liberation”.įrom consciousness-raising groups to fundraising dances, protests outside hostile newspapers to refuges for homeless trans and queer people, this surge in LGBTQ+ organising took many forms, and as the first anniversary of the riots came into view, some in the community began discussing how best to mark what was becoming regarded as the “Bastille day” of gay rights. Following this explosion of rage, LGBTQ+ people in New York and further afield transformed the small pre-existing gay rights movement. While the Stonewall riots were a spontaneous eruption of anger against police harassment, they had been a long time in the making, and while the riots lasted only a few days, their repercussions continue to this day. After Stonewall, things could never go back to how they were before. Baird’s story is echoed in the accounts of thousands of LGBTQ+ people across the the world.