Remembering Stonewall

In June 1969, a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations erupted at the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Fifty years later, two rioters share memories of being at the spark of the LGBTQ rights movement.

- David Canfield

IN 1969, THE VERY EXISTENCE OF QUEER PEOPLE WAS ILLEGAL IN AMERICA. THEY COULDN’T DRINK. THEY COULDN’T GATHER PUBLICLY. THEY COULDN’T SHOW AFFECTION WITHOUT FACING A NIGHTSTICK.

Outside of a sliver of Greenwich Village—the famed Christopher Street—to be completely invisible was considered a matter of survival in New York City. Thus, Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn—a dimly lit dive bar, which operated under mob control—was a refuge, the one place where a true rainbow of LGBTQ folks came together to celebrate themselves with (watered-down) drinks in hand and music pulsating through their veins. “You could dance!” Mark Segal, 68, recalls. “It was the only place you could dance.” And when the cops tried to take that away? A movement was born.

Segal was there, fighting and rallying, at the Stonewall Riots on June 28, 1969—an 18-year-old kid who’d run away from his South Philadelphia hometown just six weeks earlier for the promised (relative) freedom of Christopher Street. “If you wanted to find out who or what you were, you went to the only place you could, your local library, where maybe five books even mentioned the word homosexuality—and they most likely told you [that] you were mentally ill,” he recalls. “What most people wanted to do was escape that. I escaped to New York. I had no money, no prospects for work, had no idea what I was going to do.”