Reported one customer: “I’ll bet the pigs didn’t tell you what they did to the Stonewall. The beer can didn’t miss it hit me right above the temple.” So a police officer reported to Jerry Lisker of the New York Daily News, the morning after a Tactical Patrol Force had raided The Stonewall Inn , in the heart of a three-block homosexual community in Greenwich Village.” Lisker called the Inn , “a mecca for the homosexual element… who wanted nothing but a private place where they could congregate, drink, dance and do whatever little girls do when they get together.” The raid came after two years of peaceful operation. It was thrown like a discus and just missed my throat by inches. I was almost decapitated by a slab of thick glass. … “They were throwing more than lace hankies. “The first gay riots in the history of man turned New York City streets into a bloody confrontation between NYC pigs and thousands of gays and sympathizers last month.
Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, September 1992įor instance, a month after Stonewall, a queer publication called Tangents covered the Stonewall uprising in their August-September 1969 issue like so:
