In the early hours of 28th June 1969 police unremarkably raided a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York City. But those in the bar did something unusual, something which changed history. They fought back. Today Defend the Right to Protest would like to commemorate those who fought back but also those who were criminalised for fighting for their future. The first pride was a protest, defend the right to protest.
Written by Rachel Harger
Photo by Joseph Ambrosini in the New York Daily News on Sunday, June 29, 2021
Nine pages of police records were published for the first time three years ago. Seven pages were released after a freedom of information request. They were obtained by Jonathan Katz (Director of OutHistory.org), with help from David Carter (author of Stonewall: The riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution). Two pages had already been obtained by Michael Scherker in 1988 who sued the city to obtain some police records of the uprisings. You can read the police records in full here.
It will come as little surprise to anyone with any experience of dealing with the police that the police records have been found by many historians and critics to be poorly and incompletely documented. However, they do help us put some names to the six day uprising for sake of remembering a few of those who were criminalised for resisting.
There are six names which are mentioned of those who were arrested:
Raymond Castro, Vincent DePaul, Marilyn Fowler, Wolfgang Podolski, Thomas Staton and David Van Ronk.
It’s worth noting that police records confirmed the arrest of a woman, Marilyn Fowler. Many eyewitnesses from the Stonewall riots have previously said the arresting of a lesbian woman intensified people’s resistance to the police.
Raymond Castro died at 68 years old in 2010, a Puerto Rican semi-retired baker who lived with his partner for 30 years. He previously spoke about his experience of police harassment and Stonewall before and after the uprising:
“We went to the Stonewall because it was one of the few places where you could be yourself. You could dance, you could hold hands with someone you liked. In most other places, you could not show any signs of emotional expression. If you were walking along the street and you put your arm around somebody else the police would harass you. They would pull you over, see if you had drugs. And if a gay guy was beaten by a straight guy nothing happened, you couldn’t even press charges,” Raymond recalled.
It has been well documented- the fear that many LGBT people felt towards the police. David Carter (author of Stonewall: The riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution) wrote, “it was considered so outrageous for gay men to gather on the street. It was common for a police officer to take a club out and hit a gay man on the legs and say ‘Move on, f*****t.’ Carter added that in some cases, “Undercover cops chatted up the men, even followed them from bar to bar. When a gay man accepted a ‘drink’ or an invitation, they were arrested. In the mid-1960s, more than 100 men were arrested every week in New York City for gross indecency and public lewdness. After some of these arrests employers would get calls; many lost jobs, were disbarred or had licenses taken away.”
This was the context of being LGBT in 1969, making the resistance to such treatment in the early hours of 28th June 1969 all the more remarkable.
“When the police raided the place, I was outside,” Raymond Castro remembered. “Then I remembered a friend inside who did not have a false ID and he was going to get in trouble, so I went inside to give him one.” (Many of the police raids, he said, resulted in arrests for underage drinking). “Once I got inside, the police wouldn’t let us out, they held us hostage. It got really hot. I remember throwing punches and resisting arrest.” Castro recalled an officer commenting on his struggle with several policemen: “You must be some kind of animal!” Raymond spent the rest of that night in jail. He was given a weekend court date, (the day after) Sunday 29th June but luckily his lawyer managed to adjourn the case hoping to get a more sympathetic judge and a later trial date, therefore giving a bigger time gap from the uprising. Raymond said he was urged by police at his hearing to plead guilty and be pardoned but he was defiant and pleaded “not guilty”, citing that officers had pushed him around and he had not been read his rights.
David Carter’s book on Stonewall provides a brilliant account of the resistance to police harassment and violence that night:
There were around 200 people in Stonewall at the time of the raid at 1:20am. As soon as people realised what was happening many ran for windows and doors but the police immediately barred them. However the raid did not go as the police planned. Standard procedure was to line up customers, check their ID, and have female police officers take customers dressed as women to the bathroom to verify their sex, upon which any men dressed as women would be arrested. Those dressed as women, that night, refused to go with the officers. Men in line began to refuse to produce their identification. The police decided to take everyone present to the police station, after separating those cross-dressing in a room in the back of the bar. Maria Ritter, who was known as Steve to her family, recalled, “My biggest fear was that I would get arrested. My second biggest fear was that my picture would be in a newspaper or on a television report in my mother’s dress”.
Eyewitness accounts show that a sense of discomfort spread very quickly, spurred by police who began to assault some of the lesbians, by feeling some of them up inappropriately while frisking them.
When the first patrol wagon arrived it was recalled that the crowd gathering outside Stonewall —most of whom were homosexual—had grown to at least ten times the number of people who were arrested, and they all had become very quiet. As people were led out of the bar and arrested a bystander shouted, “Gay power!” and someone began singing “We Shall Overcome”. An officer shoved a transvestite, who responded by hitting him on the head with her purse as the crowd began to boo. Author Edmund White who had been passing through recollected, “Everyone’s restless, angry, and high-spirited… something’s brewing.” Pennies then beer bottles were thrown as a rumor spread through the crowd that customers still inside the bar were being beaten. A scuffle then broke out as a woman (who is now believed to be Marilyn Fowler) was escorted by police, whilst resisting arrest. She was struck around the head, a witness states it was because of “complaining her handcuffs were too tight”. She then shouted to the bystanders, “why don’t you guys do something?”, which is alleged to have led to the explosive scenes of the Stonewall uprisings, as she was thrown into the back of a police wagon.
Today, we remember those who fought back and therefore inevitably those who were criminalised or targeted with police violence as a result. The uprisings are recognised, by many of us, as the first series of spontaneous protests against a system which persecuted people on the basis of their sexual orientation. When we remember the Stonewall riots we should remember they were made up of ordinary people who were fed up but fought back against police harassment and state persecution. Whenever we think of fighting for liberation or for a better world, we should remember that the struggle has always begun and always will begin on the streets and we must defend our right to be there and our right to fight for the world we want to see and be part of.
As Raymond Castro himself said the year before his death, “We’ve come a long way, but we still have far to go.”
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