Abstract
Abstract Around 1:20 a.m., early on Saturday, June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a homosexual bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village in New York City. Customers included homeless teens, drag queens, and others unwelcome elsewhere. Patrons initiated a riot that lasted into the night and resumed the next day. The Stonewall riots are often viewed as the spark of the gay liberation movement (Duberman 1993 Teal 1995; Carter 2004). This is not historically accurate: gay liberation was already well underway. The riots were not the first time gays fought back against police, nor were they the first raid to generate political organizing (D'Emilio 1983; Stryker & Van Buskirk 1996; Epstein 1999; Armstrong 2002; Bernstein 2002; Silverman & Stryker 2005; Stryker 2005). The Stonewall riots are of interest because of their symbolic importance to gay movements in the US and around the globe. The processes through which the riots acquired this salience provide insight into the creation of collective memory within social movements.
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