Time passed in three-minute intervals at the Stonewall, give or take a few seconds. Cue “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones (3 minutes, 44 seconds). Maybe Diana Ross and the Supremes sang “Stop! In the Name of Love” (2 minutes, 52 seconds) . . . Ten cents bought one song; a quarter paid for three. Dancers weaved in and out of spotlight beams, performing for the crowd. Men danced with men, often for the first time in their lives.
—from Ann Bausum’s Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall . . .
—from President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address, 2013
The dancing turned to defiance at New York City’s Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969, when a routine police raid triggered the riots that are regarded as the beginning of the Gay Pride movement. Within days there were sympathetic demonstrations in other major American cities; over the next few weeks a number of important gay publications and organizations were formed to lobby for the cause, and on the first anniversary of Stonewall the first Gay Pride parades were held.
The Orlando tragedy and reactions to it emphasize that the battle for acceptance and equality continues, but the half century since Stonewall has brought significant change, as measured not only by Obama’s comments but by the School Library Journal, describing Bausum’s Stonewall, the first history of gay rights aimed at young readers, as “an essential purchase.”
David Carter’s Stonewall describes the legendary events of June 28th in the style of an oral history, with recollections from many of those present: “Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back. It was like the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us.” Lillian Faderman’s history The Gay Revolution places Stonewall within a larger framework, chronicling the earlier decades of homophobic persecution that fueled it, and the later decades of civic and legal challenges it fueled in turn.
Faderman’s book ends with the Supreme Court judgment in United States v. Windsor, rendered three years ago this week, which ruled that the federal Defense of Marriage Act was in violation of the rights of same-sex couples — in this case, that Edie Windsor was not only denied the right to marry her decades-long partner, the psychologist Thea Spyer, but denied the spousal status that would have exempted her from paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate tax upon Spyer’s death. In Then Comes Marriage, Diane Kaplan, the lawyer representing Windsor, tells the full story of that landmark case as a tale of two generations, and a very personal journey. This begins with the moment Kaplan, upon her first meeting with the seventy-nine-year-old Windsor at the New York apartment she had shared with Spyer, opens the door to her own past:
The doorman sent me up, and as I knocked, I was expecting to be greeted by a nerdy elderly lesbian in a flannel shirt and comfortable shoes. But when Edie opened the door, I stared at her, dumbfounded. She was a knockout — a slender, impeccably dressed woman with a blond bob, a string of pearls, and perfectly manicured nails. It took me a moment to compose myself, but after Edie’s “Come in,” I followed her into the apartment. And then I was dumbfounded all over again. The apartment looked exactly as I remembered it from the summer of 1991, the first time I had been there . . . And as I looked at the chair where Thea had sat while I, sitting across from her, had poured out my fears, my heart began to pound.
Kaplan’s therapy sessions with Spyer in 1991 were triggered by her own coming-out as a lesbian at age twenty-four — her anguished admission to her horrified mother made on June 28th, as the Gay Pride Parade wound through the New York streets.
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Sig Nordal 