Sunday, June 28, 2009

40 Year Anniversary of Stonewall Riots

Today Mario and I have been together for twenty-nine years and married for twenty-eight of those years. We never had anyone harass us or try to keep us apart. Besides an old boyfriend, but he doesn't count. OK, my father was a bit concerned that Mario was an atheist. But those were all pretty normal things for a couple like us. We didn't have the law or much of the world condemning and judging us. On June 28th, 1969, a riot spontaneously erupted in New York city when police raided a gay bar.

Wiki quotes David Carter's book Stonewall where he quotes Michael Fader, "We all had a collective feeling like we'd had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn't anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration.... Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back. It was like the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us....

"All kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined, and everything just kind of ran its course. It was the police who were doing most of the destruction. We were really trying to get back in and break free. And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We weren't going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around—it's like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way, and that's what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom a long time overdue, and we're going to fight for it. It took different forms, but the bottom line was, we weren't going to go away. And we didn't."

We don't always know what will change history.

Blessings on lovers everywhere!

2 comments:

kerrdelune said...

Happy anniversary my sweet mermaid sister, and may there years and years and years of happiness ahead of you and Mario.

Kevin said...

Congrats you two! Vicki and I celebrated 32 years on June 4. I didn't realize we were so close in years. Where did the time go? We've spent the last 22 of those years here in Hawaii. Amazing!!

 
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