The day after the homos rioted in Greenwich Village, the New York newspapers barely mentioned it.  But that was par for the course back in the 60s.  I was a fifteen year old kid when it happened, growing up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C., and didn’t hear about the riots until I was well into my own coming out to myself process in 1971.  By then, the scruffy, angry, younger gay liberation front was rudely elbowing aside an older generation of more genteel suit and tie activists, who had tried with painfully little to show for it, to work within the system for change. 

You’d have thought the gay civil rights movement had begun on the street in front of the Stonewall Inn.  It didn’t.   In the lightning flash of the Stonewall riots we lost sight for a while of how much courage it would have taken to picket for gay rights in front of the White House, as activist Frank Kameny and members of the Mattachine Society of Washington did on April 17, 1965.  Kameny was rightfully honored recently at a White House ceremony, and received an official apology for being fired in 1957 from his position as an astronomer for the Army map service.  People think the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s were all about ferreting out communists in government and industy.  But homosexuals were just as much, if not more of a target then.  We need to remember the staggering courage it took for those early pioneers in the struggle to come forward, and push back against the hate.  But we also need to remember this…

A prominent Stonewall myth holds that the riots were an uprising by the gay community against decades of oppression. This would be true if the “gay community” consisted of Stonewall patrons. The bar’s regulars, though, were mostly teenagers from Queens, Long Island and New Jersey, with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower East Side.

I was there on the Saturday and Sunday nights when the Village’s established gay community, having heard about the incidents of Friday night, rushed back from vacation rentals on Fire Island and elsewhere. Although several older activists participated in the riots, most stood on the edges and watched.

Many told me they were put off by the way the younger gays were taunting the police — forming chorus lines and singing, “We are the Stonewall girls, we wear our hair in curls!” Many of the older gay men lived largely closeted lives, had careers to protect and years of experience with discrimination. They believed the younger generation’s behavior would lead to even more oppression…

And thus the phrase "militant homosexuals" entered the vernacular.  But all it takes to become a Militant Homosexual is to simply believe there is nothing wrong with you and behave accordingly.  There is nothing unusual about people getting angry when they are mistreated.  There is nothing remarkable about people fighting back when their basic human rights are denied them.  There is nothing less surprising then to witness lovers protecting and defending the sacred ground between them.  Especially young lovers.  When someone utters the phrase "militant homosexuals", what you should be hearing is: I Can’t See The People For The Homosexuals.

The older generation had grown up in a time when homosexuality was almost universally regarded as a dirty secret, a filthy perversion, the less spoken of the better.  As new studies began to show that we were a natural part of the human family after all, that generation began, very courageously, to take that message to the public.  See…we’re just like you after all…  And so we are, the ordinary among us and the exotic both.  But you can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into. 

As long as the rest of society could look the other way while our lives were drowned in a sea of prejudice and hate, we would never make any progress.  As long as the rest of society could ignore the toll prejudice was taking on our lives, that prejudice would keep doing its work on us.  That night in June of 1969, the frustration of the young and outcast simply boiled over.  And the rest of us saw something we had never seen before: gay people, angry gay people, fighting back.  And it lit a fire in us.  And we would never be the same.  Because a few street kids and drag queens simply had enough, that one night, that one time.

There are times when it’s wise to listen to what the older generation has to say.  We’ve been there…we took the hits…we saw it all with our own eyes.  But never…Never…let someone old enough to have achieved some measure of success, and made a good and comfortable life for themselves, tell You what you have to put up with. 

[Edited…much…]