S01E07 - The STONEWALL Uprising 1969 & The Christopher Street Liberation Day March 1970

In Season 1 Episode 6, we discussed how the police and state liquor authorities worked to repress Gay nightlife in America throughout the 20th Century, and how the political activism that developed in response to this repression achieved significant legal reforms that enabled Gay people to congregate socially. Despite a steady expansion of the Gay Rights movement during this period, the situation was far from ideal by the end of the 1960s. Gay bars and nightclubs were still subject to regular police raids and the relative invisibility of LGBT people in public life meant there was lack of protection from both the state authorities and the criminal underworld.

Vulnerability to harassment and liquor licence revocation allowed the New York City Mafia, ever the entrepreneurs, and corrupt police authorities to stake their claim to exploiting Gay bars in the City for profit. The Mafia created members-only ‘bottle clubs’, thereby avoiding the legal requirement to obtain a liquor licence, with the deliberate strategy of attracting Gay patrons who could meet and socialize in a private and, supposedly, safe environment. Protection payments remained necessary to keep local police away or at least to allow for advance notification of planned phony inspections.

The Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in the West Village was one of the few Gay venues in New York where dancing was permitted by the owners, and actively encouraged. The oddness of a Gay nightclub where dancing was the central activity underlines how nascent the notion of Gay nightclubs and discotheques was at this point in time, and the extent to which social dancing had been effectively reserved as a solely heterosexual entitlement in America. During an unexpected raid on 28 June 1969 simmering tensions at The Stonewall escalated, prompting full scale riots that stretched across several nights. Eventually celebrated as ‘The Stonewall Uprising’, the riots served as an indicator of the growing dissatisfaction of Gay people with being marginalised and denied equality in their own society. This collective willingness not just to be tolerated but to express and celebrate Gay culture would drive the emergent Disco movement and permanently revolutionize dance music, culture, and wider American Society.

Organisations formed in the wake of Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA), were committed to transforming, rather than being subsumed within, conventional society. These organisations started their own dance nights at grassroots Gay community centres like Alternative University in Greenwich Village and the Firehouse at Wooster Street in SoHo, serving as the gateway for many entering into the new nightlife facilitated by legendary disco venues such as The Sanctuary, The Loft, The Gallery, and later the Paradise Garage.