Stonewall at 40

The 40th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising has been well marked by leading media outlets, among them The New York Times and The New Yorker. Before June 28, 1969, the NYPD vice squad routinely raided bars known to serve a gay clientele, and patrons unlucky enough to be arrested meekly submitted to their fate, often pulling jackets over their faces to hide their shame from photojournalists’ cameras. For whatever reason, patrons at the Stonewall Inn in the West Village rioted instead, and the United States was never again the same.

Many accounts of the anniversary have focused on gay activists’ sense of betrayal at President Obama’s unwillingness to take bold action to end the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy or to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act. While it’s easy to be disappointed about the halting pace of official progress this year, it’s stunning to think how dramatically public attitudes about homosexuality have changed since Stonewall. Hendrik Hertzberg notes in his July 6 New Yorker commentary that Time magazine trashed homosexuality three years before Stonewall as

a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste — and, above all, no pretense that it is anything by a pernicious sickness.

Back then, gays didn’t have the ear of presidents or senators, or the hope of changing the law. The only tool at their disposal was breaking the law in a dramatic and life-affirming display of rage.

Which makes it all the more remarkable to me that I shared an airplane seat on a flight from Tucson, Ariz. to Atlanta on June 28, 2009 with a middle-aged, gay truck driver from Michigan who told me without prompting about his Dachshunds, his supportive circle of friends and his aging out of the bar scene.