Resting at Stonewall Inn on the path to LGBT rights

ike the song that goes, “If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair,” I often tell my friends, half-jokingly, “If you are coming to New York, do three things: Meet Hasan Mujtaba, visit the Strand Book Store— the legendary bookstore of new, used, and rare books —and see the Stonewall Inn.”

- Hasan Mujtaba

For me, the Stonewall Inn is a pilgrimage, a rainbow of history, and the Mecca of the gay liberation movement, where even straight people are warmly welcomed. It is where it all happened.

Many historians of the LGBTQIA+ movement recount that during the uprising at the Stonewall Inn, a defiant act by the legendary drag queen Marsha P Johnson became a symbol of resistance. The police raid on the bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village ignited a movement that changed not only the days and nights of New York's LGBTQIA+ community but transformed the struggle for gay rights across the world.

It was June 28, 1969, around 1:20 am. The police stormed both the front premises and the back room. What followed on Christopher Street and the adjoining streets and sidewalks became one of the most significant uprisings of modern times.

Yet I knew very little about Stonewall’s history before I set foot in Chicago.

There, I first met my friend Ifti Nasim — poet, short-story writer, and celebrated member of the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame — on the evening of April 30, 1999, at his apartment overlooking Lake Michigan, which he fondly called “the mirror of God”.

He took me to the balcony of his apartment on the 40th floor. Gazing at the vast expanse of the lake, he said, “You have come to America. If, while being in America, you shut your mouth and don't live free, then there is no point in coming to America.”