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Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution
by David Carter
St. Martin's Press. 352 pages. $24.95
THE STONEWALL RIOTS of June 28 to July 3, 1969, following a police raid on an illegal, Mafia-owned gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village, marked a decisive turning point in gay American history. The unprecedented uprising has taken on mythic dimensions in the succeeding 35 years. Author and eyewitness Edmund White has compared Stonewall to the storming of the Bastille in 1789 Paris. Community lore has focused on the colorful aspects of the mêlée, like the wresting of a parking meter from a sidewalk for use as a battering ram against police, the funeral of Judy Garland, and the Rockette-style street theatre that participants used as a campy rebuke to the authorities. But due to a lack of narrative detail about the riots, Stonewall has become a metaphor for gay liberation while the events themselves are only vaguely understood.
Previous accounts of Stonewall in both the gay and mainstream press, including in Martin Duberman's 1992 book Stonewall, have suffered for the incompleteness of the historical record. There is no film of the riots and only one "frontline" photograph from the critical night of June 28, 1969. Moreover, the Sheridan Square area of New York where the riot was centered afforded few vantage points from which crowd activity could be seen in overview. The insignificant press items from the time are biased and controverted in key particulars. Reconstruction would be impossible since the police lost the initiative soon after the raid, and there was no gay guerilla leader planning or orchestrating the assault from "our" side. Eyewitness accounts remain the primary source about the Stonewall Riots, though each is spotty when considered in isolation. Inferences culled from the context of time and place help fill out the picture.
David Carter's new book, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, which he painstakingly researched over a ten-year period, has seemingly exhausted the storehouse of information about those climactic nights in 1969. Interviewing over forty eyewitnesses and carefully analyzing the times and milieus of Greenwich Village, where he lives, Carter has produced the first work that can be considered a comprehensive factual rendering of the Stonewall riots.
Stonewall settles...