Louder Than A Riot

The fight for equal rights was long and slow until one day a fight broke out with police, culminating in a riot. What happened next is history.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to American Shadows, a production of iHeartRadio and
Grimm and Mild from Air and Manky Lee.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Jamestown, Virginia Courthouse was buzzing with gossip. On April eighth
of sixteen, twenty nine. Thomasin Hall went on trial. That day.
The very nature of their identity was up for debate.
Thomasin had been stirring up whispers with the way they
dressed and how they socialized. Sometimes they wore dresses, other

(00:38):
times they wore pants. It was also rumored that Thomasine
was courting and sleeping with both women and men in
the community. Thomasin lived at a time when gender existed
in a rigid binary, with the two in opposition to
each other. Men had their clothes and their social scripts,
and women did too, But the record tells us that

(01:00):
Thomasine existed somewhat fluidly changing their dress, performance, and pronouns
to suit the moment. At the trial, Thomisine claimed to
have both male and female genitalia, insisting that they were
both a man and a woman. Thomisine underwent a number
of exams and different inspectors drew different conclusions, but what

(01:20):
we now believe is that Thomasin was likely an intersex person.
Determining a single gender for Hall felt essential to the community,
but the court couldn't figure out a satisfying answer, so
it came up with a solution. Instead of forcing Thomasine
to abide by a single set of gender norms, the
court would enforce a simultaneous performance of both. The court

(01:44):
decreed that Thomisine must wear a combination of men and
women's clothing forevermore think trousers, but under an apron Doing
so was meant to humiliate Thomasine and rob them of
the chance to ever blend in fully with society again.
Queerness was not an idea that existed in the early
days of the colonies, but as the colonies developed, so

(02:07):
too did the idea of what it meant to be
a man or a woman. In the late sixteen hundreds,
English philosopher John Locke wrote about the concept of a
tabula rasa or blank slate, which suggested that humans were
not born with inherent traits, but instead were shaped by
their environment. This idea began to take hold in colonial America,

(02:28):
and people started to understand that gender wasn't solely determined
by biology, but rather by social and cultural factors. However,
as we saw with Thomisin in that time and place,
those factors resulted in a strict social code, and as
the concept of gender became more rigid, so too did

(02:49):
the expectations of sexual behavior. In the seventeen hundreds, same
sex relationships were not necessarily seen as immoral, but rather
as a deviation. As medicine professionalized into the mid eighteen hundreds,
the term homosexual was coined, and with it, the idea
of same sex attraction was defined as a pathological condition.

(03:12):
For the stories we're telling today, we're using the reclaimed
umbrella term queer, even though it may feel a bit
ahistorical to cover all people with so called non normative
sexual and gender identities. People of the past didn't have
access to our current language and concepts, and we should
acknowledge that it's usually impossible to know how an individual

(03:35):
would have used these terms if they were available to them.
We know that many people throughout history experienced same gender
attraction and or felt a disconnect from their gender as
assigned at birth, but there's a vast gulf in language
and culture that lets us only speculate most of the
time about who these people were and what they felt.

(03:57):
Queer people have always been here, but in the long
arc of history, queerness has only very recently become a battleground.
I'm lorn vogelbam, Welcome to American shadows. America has never

(04:18):
truly been the land of the free. Since the time
of colonization, wealthy Anglo Saxon landholding men have been fighting
to keep themselves in power for hundreds of years. The
laws they created carefully upheld their positions, often making existence
precarious for people who weren't like them. Love and those

(04:39):
who were lucky enough to find it was likewise a
tightly governed experience. By the mid sixteen hundreds, the American
colonies decreed that any man committing the unnatural and lascivious
act of sodomy, meaning either bestiality or anal sex between
anyone regardless of gender, could be by death. By eighteen

(05:02):
seventy three, Congress passed a federal antisodomy law that applied
to the District of Columbia and US territories, which threatened
any convicted party with up to ten years in prison,
and all the while, a constellation of state laws have
been codified around fraternizing with members of the same gender.
The enforcement of these laws was often characterized by brutality,

(05:25):
but even still, queer folks found ways to find each other,
a first privately and then more publicly. As the tides
of acceptance shifted into the nineteen hundreds, many gathered at
discreete watering holes, members only clubs, and cafes. Pockets of
queerness existed wherever people lived, but the critical masses gathered

(05:47):
in the big cities. There are a number venues that
vie for the title of the oldest gay bar in America,
which cite their inception back to the nineteen thirties. It's
likely that similar establishments existed before then, although they weren't
as visible or well documented. A long running and legendary
favorite was The Child's Cafeteria off Columbus Circle in New

(06:08):
York City. The city felt hard sometimes, but there in
that one chain restaurant nicknamed Mother Child's, it felt safe,
safe to sit, safe to stay, safe to be over
endless cups of coffee. Patrons could often find the same
familiar faces of friends, lovers, family. It had the appeal

(06:33):
of what sociologists call a third space, which is a
location that's not home but not work, where the other
part of your life is lived. One nineteen thirties visitor's
guide to New York even highlighted it and said it
features a dash of lavender, a coded language that suggested
the true character of the place for anyone who was
tuned in for those who loved a spectacle. A handful

(06:55):
of major cities also hosted spectacular drag balls that drew
thousands of attendees. These were modeled on high society debutante balls,
often hosting straight folks as spectators. According to one scholar,
a wild dominant American society largely disapproved of these queer communities.
People sure did like a party. As the queer community

(07:18):
gained visibility alongside other social movements, it began to take
up more space, it became louder, and in doing so,
it often made itself a target for the powers that
hoped to keep them quiet. In nineteen sixty four, Life

(07:39):
magazine described the relationship between the police and the queer
community in San Francisco as a running battle. They reported
that a collective effort was underway by the department to
educate their force on how to readily identify a gay person,
they published and distributed internal materials warning of a gay agenda.

(08:00):
Zine went on to say that while the stance by
the LAPD was unswervingly tough, they believed it reflected the
larger collective attitudes of most American police departments. The article
also quotes LAPD inspector James Fisk as saying, we're barely
touching the surface of the problem. The pervert is no
longer as secretive as he was. He's aggressive, and his

(08:23):
aggressiveness is getting worse because of more homosexual activity. A
year after that article was published in Life magazine, a
New Year's Day costume ball was held at California Hall
in San Francisco. Around six hundred people had purchased tickets
to raise money for the newly formed Council on Religion
and the Homosexual an organization meant to advocate against discrimination

(08:46):
with the help of religious leaders. The party planners and
at ten dees alike knew it was bound to be controversial.
Police had been known to use any kind of touching
by members of the same sex as a reason to
arrest and prosecute them, but those who attended the ball
that day did so enthusiastically, knowing they were taking a stand,

(09:07):
and although the queer activists warned them not to, the
ministers were upfront and told San Francisco police about their
upcoming event, potentially hoping for some kind of honest truce. Naturally,
the police tried to make them cancel it, the organizers refused.
The night of the ball, police officers circled the hall
in their cruisers. They took photographs of everyone going in

(09:29):
and out, and were rumored to have brought large movie cameras.
When the cops demanded to be allowed into the hall,
lawyers who were present on behalf of the council, asked
to see a search warrant. Three of the lawyers, as
well as the woman selling tickets, were arrested on charges
of obstructing an officer. The police were accustomed to exerting
this type of power over the queer community and expected

(09:52):
the typical lack of consequences that came with it. But
the next day the council's ministers held a press conference.
There they excl created the police, accusing them of deliberate harassment,
bad faith, and obvious hostility. The Americans for Civil Liberties
Union or ACLU got involved, and the case came to
trial in February of nineteen sixty five, and before the

(10:15):
defense could even present its case, the judge declared a
not guilty verdict. He declared to the court that this
was a waste of everyone's time. The queer community in
San Francisco perceived this as a turning point. Many felt
encouraged and believed that they were starting to be taken
seriously by the mainstream. The movement was gaining a visible

(10:36):
and collective foothold, moving from the fringes into a larger,
interconnected web of social movements. This would not be the
last skirmish, but the police far from it. The following
New Year's Eve of nineteen sixty six, the Black Cat
Club was set to host another ball. There were balloons
and confetti and revelry, a confidence that the community found

(11:00):
in safety in large numbers. That is, until it was
revealed that the police weren't waiting for them outside. They
had already crossed the threshold and infiltrated the party. Roughly
five minutes after the New year began, the cops made
themselves known. They flipped on all of the lights. One
officer unplugged the jukebox, while another began tearing down the

(11:21):
Christmas decorations, still adorning the bar. The later reports said
that their only identification was their duty weapons. Poor substitute,
if there ever was one. Reports say that they blocked
the exits and began to beat the patrons. The raid
lasted ten minutes. Of these sixteen men arrested that night,
six were convicted of lewd conduct, which meant that the

(11:43):
state of California could require them to register as sex offenders.
Two of those men, Charles Tally and Benny Baker, were
in fact placed on the states first in the nation,
sex offender registry. They had been caught kissing other men
at the party. They appealed the decision, even petitioning Supreme Court,
which decided not to consider the case. Meanwhile, the police

(12:04):
painted themselves as the victims, including a claim that three
officers were injured, with one being hospitalized. In February of
nineteen sixty seven, a queer newsletter named Pride headlined their
story CoP's Start bar brawl, A word spread quickly around
the country. By September of that year, the publication had
morphed into The Advocate, which still exists today. The Black

(12:28):
cat raid was cited as an impetus for creating the
first national, mass circulation gay newspaper, The Advocate became a
central tool of the community. It collected and spread news
of the gay rights movement faster and further than ever before,
and it would end up playing a pivotal role in
informing readers and stoking passion in what came next. Tucked

(12:59):
away behind a descript facade, the Stonewall Inn was the
heart of queer New York, but by the end of
June of nineteen sixty nine, the Stonewall Inn was about
to become the epicenter of a movement. The two room
establishment was dimly lit and cramped with a makeshift bar
constructed from black painted plywood, a few stools, and a

(13:20):
few water buckets used for rinsing dirty glasses. The liquor
was cheap, diluted, and plentiful. A single bare light bulb
hung high on the wall, a flashing beacon that warned
folks when a raid was eminent. It wasn't much, but
to those who came, it was everything. The dance floor
was small, but it was where the patrons came alive,

(13:42):
letting loose in a world where they could be themselves
without fear of persecution. It was illegal in New York
to serve gay people of let alone create a dedicated
space for them, but the padding of police pockets by
mafia owners helped subvert these policies, and the Stonewall Inn
became a haven for those who had been forced to
live in the shadows. They came to the Stonewall In

(14:05):
to escape, to find community, and to express themselves in
a way that was impossible in the outside world. On Tuesday,
June twenty fourth of nineteen sixty nine, police raided the
Stonewall In for operating without a valid liquor license, arresting
several employees and confiscating the boothe Because of a mafia
police agreement, it was arranged that the typical raid would

(14:27):
happen on a weeknight or well before midnight on a weekend,
when fewer customers would be present. This was all standard
operating procedure, but this time something would be different. The
police planned a second raid for the following weekend, which
was part of a concerted campaign to shut down the
village's mafia run gay bars. In the early hours of

(14:48):
the following Saturday morning, they surprised the almost two hundred
patrons inside when they came in and locked the doors
behind them. They started calling for everyone to show in
order to leave, targeting both employees and those dressed in
drag for arrest. A one patron who was there at
the time described it almost like a hostage situation. According

(15:11):
to the deputy police inspector in charge of the raid,
a Seymour Pine, he hadn't been planning on arresting patrons
until they started getting verbal pushback from the gender nonconforming
portion of the crowd. A Pine, a World War Two
veteran who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge
and was a contributing author to the Army manual on
Hand to Hand Combat, later said he had never been

(15:33):
more scared than he was that night. The police had
grown increasingly aggressive in their harassment of the queer community.
As the patrons were rounded up and filed out of
the establishment. Instead of leaving, they stayed something ignited. They
were tired of being pushed around, tired of being beaten

(15:53):
and arrested for simply existing. Maybe it was just that
the crowd inside had been bigger at most raids. Maybe
some patrons were waiting for their friends. Maybe the earlier
raid on the stone Wall, combined with the recent raids
and closures of several other bars in the village, was
finally too much. As more and more people gathered outside.

(16:15):
The people being released from the bar hammed it up
for the assembled crowd, taking bows, throwing up their arms,
and shouting one liners at the police. People began throwing
pennies and beer cans, accompanied by shouts about paying off
the cops. Soon the tension had reached a breaking point.
What happened next has been widely disputed and mythologized. Someone

(16:38):
through a brick, but the number of people who claimed
to have thrown the first brick at Stonewall is staggering,
as is the number who claimed to have been there,
far more than the two hundred or so patrons or
the others who gathered to watch. Some who were there
estimated that the crowd numbered anywhere from around five hundred
to in thousands. The fell into bedlam. Punches were thrown,

(17:03):
people were dragged, tires were slashed. The police eventually barricaded
themselves inside the bar and called for backup. People began
throwing things through the windows, bricks, makeshift moltov cocktails, trash.
The crowd turned a parking meter into a battering ramp.
People would later express the feeling that Stonewall was their
home and the attempt to break down the doors represented

(17:26):
their need to take back a space that was theirs.
Reinforcements in the form of fire trucks and riot cops
eventually arrived, and the cops barricaded in the Stonewall In
were able to exit along with the restees trapped inside. However,
the crowd was still large and had no intention of leaving.
Fire Hoses were used at an attempt to disperse them.

(17:49):
Cops began hitting protesters with billy clubs and dragging them
into squad cars. As dawn broke, the street was covered
in shattered glass. Cops still stood at attention, and groups
of rioters lingered in the nearby park and some with
improvised bandages over bleeding cuts. The news spread rapidly through
New York City. The following day, Protests continued outside the

(18:13):
bar on and off for six days. Groups of queer
people showed up outside the Stonewall Inn, facing off with
and taunting the assembled police. Demonstrators blocked off the road,
shouting Christopher Street belongs to the Queen's and liberate the street.
The poet Alan Ginsburg, having heard about the riots, showed
up on Sunday night to a smaller and calmer crowd.

(18:36):
He was delighted by the energy in the air and
visited the Stonewall Inn for the first time, still open
but reduced to giving away soda for free, where he
danced with abandon. This wasn't the first police raid or
protest in a queer community, and it certainly wouldn't be
the last, but the Stonewall Riot was a turning point

(18:57):
in the fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, asexual,
and otherwise queer rights, and it marked the birth of
the modern day queer liberation movement. Today, one of our

(19:18):
primary metaphors around queerness draws from the visual of a closet,
and if you're a queer person, you might be in
it or coming out of it, or perhaps you're actively
outside of it. But this is a newer turn of phrase,
having only shown up in the nineteen sixties. Then and earlier,
coming out had a larger implication, like a debutante, one

(19:41):
was coming out into the gay world. The closet door
becomes a portal to a world poised with open arms.
A month after the riots, on July twenty seventh of
nineteen sixty nine, a group of about five hundred people
joined a vigil and marched in Greenwich Village Demonstrator's Mind.
Activists gave speeches and shouts of gay power echoed through

(20:04):
the streets. News of what happened at the Stonewall Inn
spread across the country, in part thanks to The Advocate,
which reprinted local reporting about the riots. The community was catalyzed.
Even still, Stonewall Inn couldn't hold on in the aftermath
of the riot because it didn't have a liquor license.
The venue tried to convert itself into a juice bar,

(20:27):
but this venture failed, and just three months later, with
dust settled and activists having gone home, the space went
up for lease. Over the next few decades, it morphed
into all the different things in New Yorker could want,
a bagel shop, a Chinese restaurant, and a shoe store,
among them, But it would be a long time before
the space once again became a safe place for the

(20:49):
queer community to gather. Many local gay rights groups were
invigorated by the events at Stonewall, and newly minted groups
of younger folks took up the cause from their elders.
They created spaces for queer people to take part in
gay run night life in an environment free from mafia control.
On June twenty eighth of nineteen seventy, the Christopher Street

(21:11):
Liberation Day March lined up at noon in Sheridan Square
near the Inn and walked fifty blocks to Central Park's
Sheep Meadow. Estimates of the crowd's size vary, but what
started as a few hundred people quickly ballooned into several
thousand as the march continued. That same day, in Los Angeles,
a Christopher Street West Parade marched down Hollywood Boulevard. The

(21:34):
latter was more a spectacle than a march, with the
Los Angeles Times later reporting queens and drag ferries with
paper wings, clowns, leather jacketed motorcyclists, a lesbian on horseback,
a python, white huskies, American flags, hilarious and somber signs
and chants, and a float depicting a homosexual nailed to

(21:55):
a cross ape. Smaller group marched in San Francisco. Over
the years, more and more cities began holding parades to
coincide with the anniversary of the Stonewall Riot, first Boston,
then London, then Washington, d c. Those nights at the
Inn became a beacon for people the world over, a
source of inspiration and courage that's still drawn from a. Germany,

(22:19):
for example, calls their annual Pride celebration Christopher Street Day,
an homage to the New York City street where American
queer history changed forever. Eventually, in the early nineteen nineties,
part of the space that had been the Stonewall Inn
became a bar again and was once again re christened.
In nineteen ninety nine, it was added to the National

(22:40):
Register of Historic Places, and in two thousand became a
National Historic Landmark, where you too can go enjoy a
cold drink and a slice of history to this very day, safely,
legally and with whomever you so choose. There's more to
this story. Stick around after this brief sponsor break to

(23:01):
hear all about it. Activism doesn't always take place in
the streets. It also takes place in the home. In
the nineteen seventies, Mary Jane Rathbun was a fifty somethingter

(23:22):
iye hop waitress with a side hustle. She was a
grandmotherly type, but perhaps only as far as the gray
hair and glasses went. She was known to swear like
a sailor, hang out in radical left wing circles, and
sell pot brownies. She would carry a big basket of
her wares and sell direct consumers in San Francisco's cast
Her district for two bucks a pop or a dozen

(23:45):
for twenty. She also did brisk business with Dennis Perone's
legendary Big Top cannabis supermarket and the legal dispensary run
out of a Castro apartment. She drummed up business by
posting ads on bulletin boards describing her brownies as magically delicios.
As she had noticed that, in addition to getting people high,

(24:05):
those with chronic illness symptoms seemed to receive relief from
her brownies, she began giving them away for free to
her sick neighbors. Amary inspired a loyal following her only
daughter had been killed by a drunk driver, and soon
her neighbors became her adopted kids, and many of them
were young gay men who had come to San Francisco

(24:26):
to find their chosen family. Soon growers began donating to
help keep her brownie business in the game as she
left ihop after a fall and began working in her
kitchen full time. She was fifty seven when she was
first arrested. According to the San Francisco Examiner, after her
first arrest in January of nineteen eighty one, a police

(24:47):
seized and i quote, twenty pounds of high grade marijuana,
the quantities of psilocybin, mushrooms, cocaine, and second all of
thirty five pounds of margarine, twenty five pounds of sugar,
twenty five pounds of flour, twenty two dozen eggs, and
twenty one thousand square feet of plastic wrap, in addition
to fifty four dozen freshly baked brownies. It was the

(25:09):
same year that AIDS began to be widely reported in
the United States. After completing her mandatory community service, she
began devoting much of her time to volunteer work and baking,
committing herself to a life of service. She was furious
at the government's in action in the AIDS crisis, which
had already killed many of her adopted kids from the castro.

(25:32):
Mary became a fixture of the Shanty Project a hospice
program for folks with terminal illness, including HIV and AIDS.
She took care of the patients there in any way
she could, picking up medication, shopping, and bringing food, and
she continued to bake those brownies. Soon she was baking
dozens a month and distributing them to everyone in need.

(25:54):
She started volunteering at San Francisco General Hospital's Ward eighty six,
the country's first to outpatient clinic for people living with AIDS,
In nineteen eighty six, she won her first of four
Volunteer of the Year awards. In nineteen ninety two, she
was once again arrested while baking, but her time wasn't up.
She was sixty eight years old, and her attitude catapulted

(26:17):
her to fame. The Sonoma County District Attorney was determined
to convict Mary like any other marijuana dealer, a sentence
of about five years in prison, but Mary refused to
take the deal and insisted on going to trial. Meanwhile,
San Francisco declared an official Brownie Mary Day and referred
to her as the city's Mother Teresa. She was insistent

(26:39):
that giving away pop brownies to those suffering from illness
was the right thing to do and pleaded not guilty
while wearing a gold pot leaf necklace and a pot
patterned sweater. The judge was not amused. Mary got out
on bail and continued to be vocal expletives and all
about the medicinal use of the plan. People from San

(27:01):
Francisco and beyond rallied behind her. The DA ended up
dropping all of his charges, fearing an attempted challenge to
cannabis's legal status. In the end, Mary helped countless scores
of people in her immediate orbit and beyond in the
state of California would go on to legalize the plant
for medicinal uses in nineteen ninety six. As for Mary,

(27:22):
she passed away in nineteen ninety nine, and when she did,
her brownie recipe went with.

Speaker 1 (27:28):
Her American Shadows. As hosted by Lauren Vogelbaum. This episode
was written by Robin Minator, researched by Robin Miniator and
Cassandra de Alba, and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Trevor Young,
with executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.

(27:51):
To learn more about the show, visit grimminmile dot com
for more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple
podcasts are where ever you get your podcasts.