"We are the Stonewall Girls... we ain't no wannabes, we pay our Stonewall fees"

At first, everything unfolded according to a time-honored ritual. Seven plain-clothes detectives and a uniformed officer entered and announced their presence. The bar staff stopped serving the watered-down, overpriced drinks, while their Mafia bosses swiftly removed the cigar boxes which functioned as tills. The officers demanded identification papers from the customers and then escorted them outside, throwing some into the bowels of a waiting paddy-wagon and pushing others off the sidewalk.

But at a certain point, the "usual suspects" departed from the script and decided to fight back (Wright, n.d.).

Those familiar with the movement by now know that the scene above discusses that of the Stonewall riots of 1969. On June 27, 2008, forty years will have passed since the riots began to unfold and the gay liberation movement began in earnest. And those thirty-nine years have brought with them changes both great and small to the gay liberation movement and the treatment of gay Americans. So... what started it?

Judy Garland's funeral had been held earlier in the day in Manhattan and many argue that the loss of that gay icon was the catalyst. Others argue the riots were simply a culmination of events; others that gay New Yorkers were simply fed up with the treatment they were given by police officers and decided to fight back; others that the treatment of drag queens being forced into paddy wagons by police officers is the cause. In reality, no one knows exactly what sparked the fire but whatever the cause, the fire spread quickly. By the time the ensuing riots dwindled, thousands of protesters had appeared, 13 people had been arrested, 4 officers had been injured and trash littered the streets of Greenwich Village (Skillings, n.d.).

Over the next week, the protests and demonstrations continued in Greenwich Village, but on a smaller scale. The sense of anger that underlay the riots, the discovery that strength in numbers could match and even defeat the police, and the realization that members of the glbtq community did not have to tolerate meekly the customary bullying and harassment at the hands of the authorities, quickly led to politicization. A new era had begun (GLBTQ, 2008, p. 2).

A month after the riots, the Gay Liberation Front was formed (GLBTQ, 2008, p. 2). From there, the movement continued to gain steam. Nearly 40 years later, we're all familiar with the movement and we all have an opinion. Many of us, however, having never been personally affected by the movement, aren't aware of the history behind the festivals and rallies and the movement that propagates so many of those opinions.

A few years ago, I got the opportunity to research the gay rights movement for a paper I agreed to write. I have to confess, so much of what I uncovered during the research for that paper, I'd never heard of, despite my voice of support for the GLBT community. I knew what the movement was and why it was important in the current sense... but I'd never read about the Riots, about the sodomy laws, the listing of homosexuality as a psychological disorder. I didn't know the name of the first openly gay candidate elected to office, let alone the names Rebecca Wright, Paul Broussard, or Scott Amedure.

Reading Reboloke's post today, I was reminded once again of those things and the way I felt during that research foray. I can't recall ever having felt so angry, so sad, so disappointed, so heartbroken and so uplifted and humbled all at once. If there is any community deserving of remembrance this June, it is the gay community for having persevered, for having believed and for having endured such hatred, intolerance and violence without returning tit for tat. We have had 40 years of the modern gay rights movement, but they've had century upon century of that persecution and violence.

Whether you support the movement or not, I hope that at some point this month, you'll take a few minutes to do your own research, to put things into perspective and to remember how many lives have been lost and how many hearts have been broken because of the violence that hatred breeds. And as progressives, I hope that we can all agree that enough is enough and if not voice our support for the community, voice our appreciation for their willingness to continue fighting even in the face of such adversity and form our own personal commitments to ensuring that the violence ends.

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