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Title: Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution
ISBN: 0312200250
Author:
David Carter
Publicate Date: 2004-06-01
Publish: 2004-06-01
List Price: $24.95
Average Customer Rating: 5.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $39.39
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $24.19
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1: A Definitive Account of the Stonewall Riots
The so-called Stonewall riots occurred over a period of a week, perhaps ignited in part by the June 28 police raid having been the second in the same week. (The first was on a Tuesday night).
Although I was present that night, and on many of the following nights, I was until last week not aware of this book's existence. Frankly, almost every account I had read previously was misinformed at best.
I heard about the book only because I saw an exhibit at the New York Public Library ("1969: The Year of Gay Liberation") and decided to read it. I'm so glad I did.
Its one of few works of serious research that also tells a great story. And it is indeed thoroughly researched (and foot-noted) by Mr Carter. Since no one could possibly have been present on Christopher Street for every minute of every night of the riots, this page-turner tells the story as it unfolded.
It enabled me to finally piece together all the events into a cohesive image of a week to remember. I can certainly vouch for the books's accuracy insofar as I recall the events I witnessed in late June and early July.
For those interested in the LGBT history, this book is simply indispensible.
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2: Fascinating glimps into history of gay rights...
STONEWALL is a must-read for anyone with any interest in the gay community or in civil rights as a whole.
Carter examines the personal lives of a number of gay people and sets their stories against a wider examination of gay history. He begins with New York City becoming a main center of gay life and illustrates how badly gay eople were treated by the police. Although a closer examination of police actions from the side of the police would be nice, Carter is mainly fair in his portrayal. He then moves on discuss the title of the book, the Stonewall riots. I don't want to give away too much about that part, but the book is full of surprises and historical gems.
Great read.
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3: Of Queens and Heroism
The Stonewall Riots of June 28-July 3, 1969, following a police raid on an illegal, mafia-owned gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village, mark the decisive turning point in gay American history. The unprecedented uprising has taken on mythic dimension over the succeeding 35 years. Author and eyewitness Edmund White has compared Stonewall to the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Community lore has focused on colorful aspects of the melee, like the wresting of a parking meter from a sidewalk for use as a battering ram against police, the contemporaneous passing of Judy Garland, and the Rockette-style street theater participants used as a campy rebuke to the authorities. Yet given a lack of narrative detail about the events of the riots, Stonewall has become a metaphor for gay liberation while remaining vaguely understood.
Previous accounts of Stonewall, in the gay and mainstream press, and in Martin Duberman's 1992 book Stonewall, have suffered from the paucity of the historical record of the riots themselves. There is no film of the riots, and only one "frontline" picture survives from the critical night of June 28, 1969. Moreover the Sheridan Square area of New York where the riot was centered affords few vantage points from which crowd activity could be seen in overview. The insignificant press items from the time are bias-ridden 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 orchestrating the assault from "our " side according to some strategic plan. Given the dearth of historical data, the feature film Stonewall purported merely to be one queen's story, and is fictionalized at that.
Eyewitness accounts--though each is spotty considered in isolation--remain the primary information source about the Stonewall Riots themselves, while context of time and place help fill in interstitial detail. David Carter's masterful study, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, researched painstakingly over a ten-year period, has finally exhausted the store of information to be had about those climatic nights in 1969. Interviewing over 40 eyewitnesses and carefully analyzing the times and the milieu of Greenwich Village, where he lives, Carter has produced the first work that can be considered a comprehensive factual rendering of the Stonewall phenomenon. With so many witness accounts to work with he is able to sketch a breathtaking overview in his synthesis. Even with the scholarly pedigree the book is lively, readable, and at times downright fascinating.
The Stonewall Inn filled a unique niche in the gay scene of the time. Carter's witness accounts stress the centrality of dance to gay experience and interaction at the club. He theorizes that unfettered same-sex dancing to the music then-popular--a rarity at the time--created a unique social environment distinguishing the Stonewall and giving it its principal draw. Some observers saw a nascent gay tribal impulse incubating amidst the lights, sound, motion, and sensation--that group instinct subsequently animating the invisible hand that coalesced and coordinated the feverish gay assault on abusive law enforcement.
Carter has written what is sure to become the definitive history of the seminal event in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender struggle for civil rights and liberation. Both scholarly and highly readable, the book deserves attention from all who have benefited from the historical events Carter so faithfully recounts.
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4: Riveting.
I thought this book was excellent. It read like fiction, and was a real page turner. The book was unbelievably well researched, and I enjoyed very much reading about this critical turning point in history. My only query to the author is this: (as Marty Robinson's niece), why didn't you contact any of his family members? You did all of this amazing research... yet missed pieces of the puzzle by failing to contact those who new him in a way that others didn't. I wonder if you did the same with other central heroes in the book... Otherwise, I think this book should be required reading in every high school history class. Bravo.
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5: A Pivotal Event
The Stonewall riots, beginning on June 27, 1969, in and around the Stonewall Inn in lower Manhattan, are pivotal at least in memory because they galvanized the gay liberation movement, which in the last generation has profoundly altered social attitudes toward gays and lesbians. The story is therefore well worth telling in itself, and particularly so since the original event has gradually become the subject of legend; further, the number of eyewitnesses who still survive is now beginning to dwindle.
Carter's narrative is very wide sweeping, particularly as to the background of the riots: the extensive persecution of gays in the 1950s and 1960s both nation-wide and in New York; the emergence of seedy Mafia-owned bars, such as the Stonewall, as a place of refuge; the incipient pre-Stonewall gay rights coalitions in New York and in San Francisco and Los Angeles; and so on. But Carter is also extremely sensitive to the individual stories of gays who migrated to large cities seeking at least a measure of freedom.
Carter's narrative, particularly of the riots, is not at all triumphalistic, nor is it weighted unfairly against the police and city authorities (who, even on the most neutral account, do not come off well). Often the narrative disintegrates into short bursts of conflicting story-telling from various viewpoints, but this just feeds the excitement. It is a very powerful saga, and Carter tells it well.
This book was helpful to me even though I lived through the riots; like many others, I'd bought into much of the false mythology about what happened that night. But it will be especially attractive to anyone who came of age after 1969, and who wants to know something about what the pre-Stonewall era is like. Just one small sample, from page 117: in 1968 a gay activist named Leo Laurence "had a picture of himself and his lover, Gale Whittington, with the latter shirtless and Laurence embracing him, published in the Barb [of Berkeley, CA]. Gale, who worked as an accounting clerk at the States Steamphip Line, was immediately fired from his job." That is very much how things once were.
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