Stonewall Quotes

“Now tell me, briefly, what the word ‘homosexuality’ means to you, in your own words."

"Love flowers pearl, of delighted arms. Warm and water. Melting of vanilla wafer in the pants. Pink petal roses trembling overdew on the lips, soft and juicy fruit. No teeth. No nasty spit. Lips chewing oysters without grimy sand or whiskers. Pastry. Gingerbread. Warm, sweet bread. Cinnamon toast poetry. Justice equality higher wages. Independent angel song. It means I can do what I want.”
― Judy Grahn, Edward the Dyke and Other Poems

“No matter that we were defending a Mafia club. The Stonewall was a symbol, just as the leveling of the Bastille had been. No matter that only six prisoners had been in the Bastille and one of those was Sade, who clearly deserved being locked up. No one chooses the right symbolic occasion; one takes what’s available.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“The spirit that emerged outside a Mafia-run bar in 1969 became the pulse of the gay community and inspired not just an annual parade but ways to express gay pride in individual lives.
Stonewall happens every day.”
― Ann Bausum, Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights

“Sing a song of Tar Ponds City, party full of lies! Four and twenty liars, seventeen hands caught in pies! When the pie was cut, Hugh Briss began to sing! Wasn't that a stonewall rat to set before the Fossil's ding?”
― Beatrice Rose Roberts, Twin Loyalties: From The Chronicles Of Tar Ponds City

“For some historians, drag queens are not the ideal representatives of the LGBT community. Oppression within oppression was and is still of concern. Even recently, with the transgender issue finally being taken seriously, there is still a backlash from the community about including them in the general gay movement.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“Then everything changed with the Stonewall uprising toward the end of June 1969. And it wasn’t all those crewnecked white boys in the Hamptons and the Pines who changed things, but the black kids and Puerto Rican transvestites who came down to the Village on the subway...”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“I was with a group of queens, and we started walking up Christopher Street going, “Gay power! Gay power! Gay power!” We walked all the way to Eighth Avenue, and then we all looked at each other and said, “What do we do now?” So we turned round and walked all the way back down Christopher Street, still yelling, “Gay power!”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“The queens took the lead in the Stonewall Riots. They walked around in semi-drag with teased hair and false eyelashes on and they didn’t give a shit what anybody thought about them. What did they have to lose? Absolutely fucking nothing.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“This place was the “ART” that gave form to the feelings of our heartbeats. Here the consciousness of knowing you “belonged” nestled into that warm feeling of finally being HOME. And Home engenders love and loyalty quite naturally. So, we loved the Stonewall.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“No, this wasn’t a 1960s student riot. Out there were the streets. There were no nice dorms for sleeping. No school cafeteria for certain food. No affluent parents to send us checks. There was a ghetto riot on home turf. We already had our war wounds. So this was just another battle. Nobody thought of it as history, herstory, my-story, your-story, or our-story. We were being denied a place to dance together. That’s all. The total charisma of a revolution in our CONSCIOUSNESS rising from the gutter to the gut to the heart and the mind was here. Non-existence (or part existence) was coming into being, and being into becoming. Our Mother Stonewall was giving birth to a new era and we were the midwives.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“Masquerading in the attire of the opposite sex was a criminal offense, except on Halloween.”
― Ann Bausum, Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights

“Change does come.”
― Ann Bausum, Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights

“For some people the march was and will be one of the highest points in their lives. The courage that it took for some people to make those first steps from Sheridan Square into Sixth Avenue and out of the Village was the summoning up of a whole lifetime’s desire to finally come clear, to say the truth as it is, to expose themselves nakeder than any pinup boy in any flesh book, to show their heads as well as their bodies and to put their heads and souls where their bodies have been for so many years.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“One of the things I think about is if you were to take a history book and pull the bullshit out of it, find the truth, snatch out all the bullshit that’s in there, then you’re going to wind up with two or three pages.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“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.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“In that bar, we were going to smash that rainbow.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“Then there was the raid, the whimper heard round the world, the fall of our gay Bastille.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“GLBT leaders like to criticize young gays for not taking the movement seriously, but don’t listen to them. Just remember that at Stonewall we were defending our right to have fun, to meet each other, and to have sex.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“When people are feeling fabulous, they don’t want to take any crap from anybody, particularly the cops.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“LGBT history is written, like most history, by the victors, those with the means and those with connections to power.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“It has been over forty years since the Gay Liberation Front first took trans seriously, but the gay men who wore those shirts with the polo players or alligator emblems didn't want trans people as the representation of their community.
Their revisionist history has been accepted into popular culture because they were the ones with connections to publishers, the influence, as well as the money and time to sit back and write about what "really" happened.”
― New York Public Library, The Stonewall Reader

“You’re not a woman!” I say, “I don’t know what I
am if I’m not a woman.”
― Marsha P. Johnson, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR): Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle

“I’m not even in the back of the bus. My community is being pulled by a rope around our neck by the bumper of the damn bus that stays in the front. Gay liberation but transgender nothing!”
― Sylvia Rivera, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR): Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle

“Men danced with men, often for the first time in their lives.”
― Ann Bausum, Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights

“When Clinton took office, members of that community still faced a host of legal and cultural barriers. Sodomy laws banned same-sex acts, even in the privacy of one’s bedroom, in more than half of the country’s states plus the nation’s capital.”
― Ann Bausum, Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights

“For if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”
― Barack Obama

“We are following the blacks ... And we will follow, entering, perhaps, the same time as women.”
― Ann Bausum, Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights

“Paradoxically, America appears to many gays not as an imperialist nation, but since Stonewall as a symbol of their liberation.”
― Frédéric Martel‏, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“Changing the social order in one fell swoop, Henry Gerber wrote in 1940, is “like trying to push over a big stone wall with your skull.” It can’t be done. But “we can undermine the wall by little individual blasts and it will topple down by-and-by.” Or, as Del Shearer said in 1965, social revolution required at least “a century of subtle attack” on the dominant culture.
As riots engulfed the United States in 1968, Frank Kameny saw similarities between homophiles and those Black Americans taking to the streets to express centuries of anger. “BUT,” Kameny said, “the Negro has truly explored and exhausted well-neigh, if not actually all, other avenues, and has gotten to the firm, unyielding stone wall of prejudice which blocks them. WE have run into this, but have not yet reached the end of all avenues.”
Queer people soon hit the end of all avenues, crashing into an unyielding stone wall.”
― Leighton Brown, We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride In The History of Queer Liberation

“They have been brainwashed by this fucked up system that has condemened us and by doctors that call us a disease and a bunch
of freaks. Our family and friends have also condemned us because of their lack
of true knowledge.”
― Sylvia Rivera, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR): Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle