Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [27]
For the movement, that moment occurred on June 27, 1969. When police raided the Stonewall Inn, gay patrons of the bar refused to go quietly. Barricading themselves inside, they hurled out beer bottles and slogans like “Gay power.” Systematic resistance to the demand to pass rightfully began in a bar, as the bar itself was a symbolic closet, over which gays had finally wrested control.
Stonewall brought a new militancy to gay rights. The riots generated a fresh set of organizations, including the Gay Liberation Front, Radicalesbians, and the Third World Gay Revolution. These groups spoke prose. As journalists Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney note, “There was no talk among these new activists of disguising their mission with ambiguous titles—no homophile, no Mattachine, no Bilitis.” Stonewall also birthed new publications that, unlike the homophile periodicals One or the Ladder, sported the word “gay” in their titles—Gay Times, Gay Flames, Gay Sunshine.
The riots inaugurated the gay rights movement. As Cindy Patton describes it, “Stonewall divides a timeless time of oppression from the entry into the Time of History. Before 1969: we could only chafe and give up our fullest possibilities. After 1969: we could say who we are and in the unifying power of our speech, fight back.” I used to find it bizarre that Stonewall has been elevated as the cusp on which gay history breaks. The riots did not last the week, and the mainstream press accorded them no significance. Then I came to see. We have fixed on this moment because we need, as a community, a moment that replicates the moment of coming out in our individual lives.
The story, however, cannot end there. Even after gays first come out of the closet, we often reenter it. Again, the issue is one of audience. Days after I came out to my parents, I went to see a mentor from college. John and I had not been personally close, but he had supported me intellectually and smoothed my way to Oxford. As he had ties with my professors there, I knew he knew I was in trouble. I owed him an explanation.
I did not think it would be hard, at least compared to coming out to my parents. Yet I had not counted on how much being back in the States would cast me back in the heterosexual role. Wretched as I had been at Oxford, I had also experienced the liberation of anonymity there. As I returned to my old haunts, I was tied back into place. I felt like Gulliver waking in the land of the Lilliputians, battened down by infinite and infinitesimal threads. Any one of them would have been easy to break, but collectively they immobilized me.
As soon as I walked into John’s home, I felt a constraint. He was a jowly man who always looked freshly boiled. As if to soften his alarming mien, his manner was bonhomous, and that day was no exception. He asked after a college friend of mine, whom he kept referring to as my “girlfriend,” and gaps in conversation were instantly filled with professional gossip. His living room was crowded with pictures of his children, and at one point he said, apropos of nothing, that having children was the achievement of his life. I became certain he knew I was gay and did not want to be told. That was the first time I experienced a person willing me not to come out to him by fashioning a field of resistance around himself. It is an effect that always enrages me, particularly when achieved through garrulity that feigns the communication it forecloses. As I tried to push through his gabble, he shook my hand and ushered me out.
Even when people were eager to know, or even when they knew, I had difficulty telling. Months into my friendship with Maureen, I still had not come out to her, even though she quickly