Stonewall - Softcover

Duberman, Martin Bauml

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452272068 ISBN 13: 9780452272064

Publisher: Plume, 1994

Synopsis

The definitive history of the Stonewall riots, the first Gay Rights March, and the LGBTQ people at the center of the movement. 

On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village, was raided by police. But instead of submitting to the routine compliance the NYPD expected, patrons and a growing crowd decided to fight back. The five days of rioting that ensued changed forever the face of gay and lesbian life.

In Stonewall, renowned historian and activist Martin Duberman tells the full story of this pivotal moment in history. With riveting narrative skill, he recreates those revolutionary, sweltering nights in vivid detail through the lives of six people who were drawn into the struggle for LGBTQ rights. Their stories combine into an unforgettable portrait of the repression that led up to the riots, which  culminates when they triumphantly participate in the first Gay Rights March of 1970, the roots of today's Pride Marches.

Fifty years after the riots, Stonewall remains a rare work that evokes with a human touch an event in history that still profoundly affects life today.

About this title

About the Author

Historian, biographer, essayist, playwright, and academic, Martin Bauml Duberman is the author of many books, among them Haymarket; Left Out: The Politics of Exclusion; and Midlife Queer: Autobiography of a Decade. Duberman is an award-winning scholar on gender and race issues and a pioneer in LGBTQ studies. He received his undergraduate degree in 1952 from Yale, and later earned a PhD in American history from Harvard in 1957.

From Kirkus Reviews

An engrossing--and long-overdue--look at one of the seminal events in the history of gay activism: the Stonewall Riots of June 27-July 2, 1969. By filtering the genesis and events of the riots through the lives of four gay men and two lesbians who were participants, Duberman (Cures, 1991, etc.; History/CUNY) lends immediacy and emotional impact to his narrative. In addition, the diversity of the protagonists' backgrounds--black, Hispanic, WASP, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Christian Scientist--underscores the commonality of the homosexual experience and of gay reactions to legalized intolerance of homosexuality. Of special relevance is Duberman's concise overview of the period in general and of the frequently collaborative but occasionally oppositional agendas that characterized the pre-Stonewall homophile organizations and that laid the groundwork for the love/hate relationship marking many of today's gay-liberation groups. The six featured here range from Foster Gunnison, Jr., a meticulous, buttoned-up Ph.D., to Sylvia Rivera, an in-your-face transvestite and Times Square hustler. Duberman points out that the uprising that erupted outside the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village was a spontaneous expression of gay frustration, as well as a refusal to put up with the police harassment that was a commonplace of gay life during the 1960's. It's uncertain who first lashed back at police manhandling when the bar was raided. The Stonewall itself- -grubby, Mafia-run, overpriced--was an unlikely candidate for historic landmark status. Duberman argues that the management, by paying off police officials, had been warned about earlier raids but that this time, federal agents--aware of the police bribes and informed that the liquor served at the bar was bootlegged or hijacked--conducted the raid suddenly and unexpectedly. And so it was that police corruption indirectly contributed to the emergence of gay liberation. An important and absorbing addition to gay studies. (B&w photos--not seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0452272068
• ISBN 13: 9780452272064
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368