The Stonewall Reader: Foreword: White, Edmund (Penguin classics) - Softcover

 
9780143133513: The Stonewall Reader: Foreword: White, Edmund (Penguin classics)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0143133519 ISBN 13: 9780143133513
Verlag: Penguin Classics, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an anthology chronicling the tumultuous fight for LGBTQ rights in the 1960s and the activists who spearheaded it

June 28, 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising - the most significant event in the gay liberation movement and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from
the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of firsthand accounts, diaries, periodic literature and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots. Most importantly, this anthology shines a light on forgotten figures who were pivotal in the movement, such as Lee Brewster, head of the Queens Liberation Front and Ernestine Eckstine, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jason Baumann (External Editor)
Jason Baumann is coordinator of humanities and LGBT Collections at the New York Public Library, where he develops and promotes literature, philosophy, and religion collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.
Baumann coordinates the Library's LGBT Initiative, for which he has curated two exhibitions--1969: The Year of Gay Liberation and Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism. Baumann will curate a major Stonewall exhibit at NYPL for 2019.

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For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an anthology chronicling the tumultuous fight for LGBTQ rights in the 1960s and the activists who spearheaded it, with a foreword by Edmund White.



Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, presented by The Publishing Triangle

Tor.com, Best Books of 2019 (So Far)

Harper's Bazaar, The 20 Best LGBTQ Books of 2019

The Advocate, The Best Queer(ish) Non-Fiction Tomes We Read in 2019



June 28, 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots. Most importantly the anthology spotlights both iconic activists who were pivotal in the movement, such as Sylvia Rivera, co-founder of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), as well as forgotten figures like Ernestine Eckstein, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s. The anthology focuses on the events of 1969, the five years before, and the five years after. Jason Baumann, the NYPL coordinator of humanities and LGBTQ collections, has edited and introduced the volume to coincide with the NYPL exhibition he has curated on the Stonewall uprising and gay liberation movement of 1969.

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Introduction
 
Twenty-five years ago, the New York Public Library presented the exhibition Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall, cu- rated by Molly McGarry and Fred Wasserman, as well as an accompanying catalog. Planned to commemorate Stonewall 25, it was the first exhibition devoted to LGBTQ history by a major New York cultural institution. It had the highest atten- dance of any NYPL exhibition except the Dead Sea Scrolls. In my years working on LGBTQ collections at the library, I have had countless people tell me that the exhibition changed their lives because it was the first time they felt that their history was publicly embraced and treated with the seriousness it deserved. The exhibition was an opportunity to show the riches of the library’s LGBTQ archives, which had then recently been ac- quired by farsighted curators in partnership with grassroots activists. Now with the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, the library is able to open those archives through this anthology to give contemporary readers insight into this pivotal era in LGBTQ history through firsthand accounts of the actual participants.

The Stonewall Inn, located at 53 Christopher Street in New York City, began as a teahouse, Bonnie’s Stone Wall, in 1930, and later evolved into a restaurant. After a fire destroyed the interior in the early 1960s, the Stonewall was reopened by Fat Tony Lauria as a gay bar in 1967. Part of a network of Mafia-controlled, illegal gay clubs and after-hours joints in the Village (like the Bon Soir, the Tenth of Always, and Kooky’s), the Stonewall was operated as a private club, rather than a pub- licly open bar, to evade the control of the State Liquor Author- ity. Every weekend patrons paid three dollars and signed the club register—often as Judy Garland or Donald Duck—to get into the Stonewall, drink watered-down liquor, and dance to the music of the Ronettes and the Shangri-Las. Despite the burnt interior, dirty glasses, and surly staff, the Stonewall— one of the few gay clubs in the Village where patrons could dance—drew a devoted young clientele. Many cross-dressed, wearing makeup or their own personal mix of men’s and women’s attire.

The police routinely raided the Stonewall, but the management, always mysteriously tipped off in advance, would turn up the lights to warn the crowd to stop any open displays of affection, slow dancing, or use of illicit drugs. According to most historians, the Stonewall’s management bribed the police for protection, and the raids were merely for show. But on Tuesday, June 24, 1969, there was another kind of raid, orga- nized by the NYPD’s First Division, rather than the usual and local Sixth Precinct. When the club was back up and running a few days later, the police decided to go in again on Friday, June 27, and shut it down for good.

The police were accustomed to handling a large gay crowd with only a handful of officers, but this night the raid went very differently. Rather than leave, a crowd of patrons and on- lookers gathered in front of the bar and waited for their friends held inside to be released. When the police van came to take away those who had been arrested, the crowd fought back, forcing the police into the bar. The riot gathered force from onlookers, who turned on the barricaded bar with garbage cans and fire. The drag queens were said to have given the po- lice both the fiercest resistance and a dose of humor, facing them down in a chorus line as they sang, “We are the Stone- wall Girls . . .” The crowd was controlled and dispersed in the early hours of Saturday morning, only to reemerge later that night as several thousand people took to the streets chanting, “Gay power!” and “Liberate Christopher Street!” Riots and demonstrations continued throughout the following week. In the end, the arrests and damage were minimal. What shocked both gays and the straight establishment was that queers had openly fought back.

That is the story in a nutshell. Everything else has become the stuff of queer legend and debate. First, we cannot agree on what to call this series of events. Was it a “riot” or an “uprising”? The activists and reporters at the time called it a riot, eager to compare it to the many other historic riots of the 1960s, such as those against racial oppression in Watts, New- ark, Detroit, and Harlem. Many later historians and critics have preferred to call it an uprising, insisting either that the level of violence and the size of the crowd did not warrant the use of the term riot or, conversely, that calling it a riot denigrated the importance of the events. Stonewall is often marked as the beginning of the LGBTQ civil rights movement, but that is of course not true. LGBTQ people had been organizing politically since at least the 1950s, with the emergence of organizations such as the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, the Janus Society, the Society for Individual Rights, and the Erickson Educational Foundation. Although these organizations were small, there were chapters of the fledgling groups across the United States by the mid-1960s. These organizations had magazines and conventions, and even staged demonstrations at the Pentagon, the White House, and Philadelphia’s In- dependence Hall. Some say that Stonewall was the first time LGBTQ people fought back, which is also not true. Stonewall was preceded by earlier queer revolts such as the Cooper Do- nuts Riot in Los Angeles in 1959, the Dewey’s restaurant sit-in in Philadelphia in 1965, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco in 1966, and the protests against the raid of the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles in 1967, among many others. Scholars, participants, and the interested public also debate how many days the uprising lasted and who threw the first brick, the first bottle, or the first punch. And more, beyond any of these questions we wonder what these events that transpired fifty years ago mean to us today.

With all these contradictions, scholars and documentarians have struggled to sort out the truth. In his pioneering account, Stonewall, historian Martin Duberman provides an inside view of the lead-up to and impact of the uprising through the lives of six LGBTQ activists. David Carter, in his thorough history, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay  Revolution, painstakingly compares the testimony of eyewitnesses in order to reconstruct the events. They have been followed by numerous documentarians and everyday people who have tried to piece together what happened, why, and what it ulti- mately means for LGBTQ people and the world. Rather than provide another closed narrative of these tumultuous events, my purpose with this anthology has been to allow the reader to sort these mysteries out for themselves by reading the memoirs and testimony of the participants and those immediately touched by these historic events.

The anthology has been organized into three main sections: before, during, and after the Stonewall uprising. In the “Before Stonewall” section, I have attempted to provide a range of narratives that give insight into what it felt like to be LGBTQ in the 1950s and ’60s, as well as give an inkling of the range of activism that was emerging across the country before the up- rising. We have focused on but not limited ourselves to New York City. Given the tremendous range of stories, this selection cannot be representative, but only hopes to demonstrate a breadth of experiences and introduce some key LGBTQ politi- cal figures of the time, such as Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny, and Del Martin, as well as some possibly less well-known figures such as Ernestine Eckstein and Mario Martino. There are many challenges to producing an anthology like...

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Verlag
Penguin Classics
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143133519
ISBN 13 
9780143133513
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Herausgeber
Baumann Jason
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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