Stonewall Riots

The Stonewall Riots, also called the Stonewall Uprising, began in the early hours of June 28, 1969 when New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay club located in Greenwich Village in New York City. The raid sparked a riot among bar patrons and neighborhood residents as police roughly hauled employees and patrons out of the bar, leading to six days of protests and violent clashes with law enforcement outside the bar on Christopher Street, in neighboring streets and in nearby Christopher Park. The Stonewall Riots served as a catalyst for the gay rights movement in the United States and around the world.

After the bar was cleared, patrons didn’t leave. They fought back. Fed up, they rioted, threw debris at police officers, and set fires. The crowd grew as local residents joined the protest, and rioting continued outside the bar for a week before the crowds dispersed. In the wake of the Stonewall uprising, as it became known, several gay rights organizations were started, including the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance. Later, groups such as the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, and Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) were formed.

Explore more history of the LGBTQ movement in America here.

Who was the real mother of Pride?

A Bronx-born woman named Brenda Howard.

A month after the three-day Stonewall riots of 1969 occurred, Howard participated in a march honoring the event. Then for the one-year anniversary in June 1970, Howard organized the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. This March then became a historic marker and precedent for several others in history, much like other LGBT organizer Bayard Rustin did for the March on Washington.

Just as the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a yellow Star of David, they also forced people they labeled as gay to wear inverted pink triangles (or ‘die Rosa-Winkel’). Those thus branded were treated as “the lowest of the low in the camp hierarchy,” as one scholar put it.

The roots of the Nazi persecution of gay people are deep. Since German unification in 1871, a section of the country’s criminal law widely known as “paragraph 175” had said that men who engaged in acts of “unnatural indecency” could go to jail. In 1877, the German Supreme Court of Justice clarified that to mean evidence of an “intercourse-like act.” But the law was only enforced sporadically. And the fact that it was almost impossible to convict anyone unless he confessed to such a crime in court meant that police just kept a watchful eye on gay bars and events, and Germany ended up becoming home to a vibrant gay community. Historian Robert Beachy argues that, ironically, the law spurred scientific interest in the study of sexual preferences, and that research tended to encourage a more scientific understanding of human sexuality, which further allowed the idea of gay rights to flourish.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), that changed when the Nazis came into power in the 1930s. Hitler saw gay men as a threat to his campaign to purify Germany, especially because their partnerships could not bear children who would grow the Aryan race he wanted to cultivate. During that period, gay-friendly bars and clubs started being shut down, authorities burned the books at a major research institution devoted to the study of sexuality, and gay fraternal organizations were shuttered. These efforts only increased after the Night of the Long Knives, the 1934 purge of Nazi leaders who were accused of trying to overthrow Hitler; they included Storm Troopers leader Ernst Röhm, whom the SS murdered, later citing his homosexuality as justification for his murder. A Nazi revision of the 1871 law took effect in September of 1935, outlawing anything as simple as men looking at or touching one another in a sexually suggestive way, and enabled authorities to arrest people even if they had only heard rumors that people had been engaging in such behavior. (Lesbians, however, didn’t face the same criminal penalties.) The Gestapo began to keep “pink lists” of violators.

Between 1933 and 1945, by the USHMM’s count, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested for violating this law, and about half went to prison. It’s thought that somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps for reasons related to sexuality, but exactly how many died in them may never be known, between the scant documentation that survived and the sense of shame that kept many survivors silent for years after their ordeal.

From the few survivors and prison guards who have shared their stories, it’s been learned that those sent to concentration camps were segregated, for fear that their sexual preference was contagious. Many were castrated. Some were used as guinea pigs in various medical experiments to find a cure for typhus fever and a cure for homosexuality, the latter of which led the SS to inject them with testosterone to see if it would make them straight. At the same time, some Kapos (prisoners selected by the SS to keep fellow prisoners in line) are said to have demanded sexual favors from prisoners, who were known as “doll boys,” in exchange for extra food or protection from hard labor.

Yet in the post-war years, fear of arrest and imprisonment didn’t go away. The Nazi law stayed in place until a 1969 West German law decriminalized gay relationships among men over 21. As one of the USHMM’s curators has pointed out, even as the Allied powers carefully worked to scrub Nazism from Germany, they left that part alone — perhaps because they had anti-gay and anti-sodomy laws of their own. Paragraph 175 wasn’t repealed until 1994. 

 -Via OLIVIA B. WAXMAN AT OLIVIA.WAXMAN@TIME.COM