Free The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts Page A

to catch a last glimpse. Many were homosexuals, swarming around the funeral home like so many shirtless ones for that last moment of reverence to the woman who seemed the metaphor for their existence: put-upon and therefore self-destructive, a victim with a nebulous vision of Oz over the rainbow.
    The next night, some of the still-disconsolate made their way to the Stonewall Bar at 53 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. Police arrived for a raid at 2 A.M. The ostensible charge was selling liquor without a license. The Stonewall had been peddling booze for three years only a few blocks from precinct headquarters, so the real offense was probably failure to pay off the police that week. No difference. This was to be a typical raid, the kind that had been going on in New York City for decades, the kind that had been coming down in every major American city for decades.
    The crowd moved out of the Stonewall and lingered on the street outside. A few drag queens campily entertained them. More men came from the other bars to see what was happening at Sheridan Square, under the bright, full moon of June 28, 1969.
    When the police began to come out with the arrested bartenders, a few people tossed coins at them. Then beer cans. Then rocks. Someone shouted, “Christopher Street belongs to the queens.” A full-scale riot erupted. The outnumbered police officers barricaded themselves in the Stonewall for protection.
    Craig Rodwell and his lover were wandering home from a bridge game when police sirens and clamoring crowds drew them toward Christopher Street. Rodwell was amazed at what he saw. The crowd was bombarding the Stonewall with bricks. Some were trying to batter down the doors to get at the police who cowered inside. Rodwell started leading chants: “Police and Mafia out of the bars” and “Christopher Street belongs to the queens.” Craig hadn’t had so much fun since he was a kid cheering the Chicago Cubs.
    Buses ferried in the city’s tactical police force to disperse the crowd. Gay rioters played cat and mouse with patrolmen through the night on the twisted narrow streets of the Village.
    When the bars closed the next night, over two thousand restless gays gathered again outside the Stonewall. Again, helmeted police returned, brandishing nightsticks and finally forming a flying wedge to break up the rioters.
    This undoubtedly was the first American riot with a schedule determined by when the bars closed and staffed by soldiers who retreated to cruise the nearby docks when the serious business was over. Craig Rodwell saw it as the opportunity for which he had long waited. By the third night of rioting, he had printed up fliers decrying both the organized crime control of gay bars and police harassment of gays. Other fliers appeared when the riots reached their fourth and final day. Newly radicalized gays soon formed the first Gay Liberation Front and talked optimistically about new ideas like gay power and even gay revolution.
    For gays like Rodwell, the burst of gay militance couldn’t have come at a more fortuitous time. Ever since his suicide attempt, Rodwell had devoted his energies to trying to create the gay movement he had discussed with Harvey in 1962. He had tried working with the Mattachine Society, but quit when he met resistance to a resolution he had penned, stating that Mattachine’s position should be that homosexuality was equal to, on a par with, and no different in kind from heterosexuality. That Mattachine even hesitated to approve such a statement nauseated Rodwell.
    Few alternatives, however, existed then. Rodwell worked two summers as a Fire Island bartender to save enough money to open the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore on Mercer Street in 1967 (later moved to Christopher Street). The first openly gay business in New York, the bookstore published its own newsletter, The Hymnal, prodding gays to do things like register to vote and pressure political candidates.