Time And Death Blur Memories Of Stonewall Riot -- Event Was Coming- Out Party For Gays

NEW YORK - As the crowd outside the bar roared "Kill the cops!" a half dozen officers cowered inside, their guns drawn.

A trash can had shattered the front window, and now the mob was ramming down the front door with an uprooted parking meter. Someone squirted lighter fluid inside, then tossed in lighted matches.

"I'd been in combat situations, and there was no time I'd ever felt more scared than I felt that night," the police commander recalled years after his rescue by reinforcements.

It was the '60s, but these were not typical '60's rioters. They were homosexuals - teenaged transvestite prostitutes in makeup and frilly shirts, college boys in penny loafers, a few longhairs - the ones who always had gone quietly.

This was Stonewall, the bar that became gay America's Lexington and Concord, the time and place where homosexuals came out of the closet and into the street.

The Stonewall riot on June 27, 1969, didn't begin the gay-rights movement - four years earlier, a group of men and women in suits and dresses had picketed soberly outside the White House - but it transformed it.

Before Stonewall, homosexuality was described as a crime, sickness or both. People of the same sex could not dance together or wear "unusual or unnatural attire," and police confidently could send two officers to raid a gay bar with 200 patrons.

After Stonewall, gay men and women held hands and kissed in the street. They chanted "Gay Power!" They flaunted what their predecessors hid.

But 25 years later, no one knows who threw the first bottle or hit the first cop, or just why a routine police raid on a sleazy, Mafia-run bar turned into the signal event of the gay-liberation movement.

Historians, witnesses and police still argue over how many people were at the bar, which mob family controlled it, what kind of a clientele it attracted.

But because of AIDS, because of who the rioters were, and because of a movement's need for a usable past, it's hard to know exactly what happened at 53 Christopher St. in Greenwich Village that night.

The streets are thick with 40ish people who were at Woodstock, or claim they were. But among the witnesses of Stonewall - most in their teens or 20s in '69 - the ghosts outnumber the living.

Historian Martin Duberman, author of "Stonewall," says that at least half the 200 people inside the bar that night have died, many from AIDS.

The riot was spearheaded by young transvestites, many of them black and Hispanic, many of them drug addicts, many of them missing for years.

Today, the Stonewall riot has become a pawn in the struggle to define the gay movement. Those who seek broad social acceptance of homosexuality tend to downplay the role of drag queens and street hustlers at Stonewall; those more radical tend to exaggerate it.

"There's no real chance of getting to the absolute truth anymore," says Bob Kohler, a Village resident who joined the riot after coming upon it while walking his dog. "It's just too late."

HAD TO GET BY THE DOORMAN

The Stonewall Inn was a gay speak-easy, frequented by a range of young men. You approached the heavy blue front door and knocked; a doorman peered through a peephole and decided whether to admit you.

Inside, you were scrutinized by several hostile, heterosexual Mafia wannabes, one of whom kept a baseball bat handy. If you passed muster, you paid a few dollars for a ticket good for a couple of watered-down drinks.

And, because Stonewall had no liquor license, you had to sign your name in a book, thereby maintaining the legal fiction that you were joining a private "bottle club."

Stonewall was no hotbed of revolution. But the night of June 27 was different.

Judy Garland's funeral took place in New York that day. Many of the gay men who adored her were overwrought. . . . The police already had raided Stonewall once that week. (Raids were a regular occurrence, despite the $2,000 a week paid to the local police precinct.) . . . It was hot and muggy, something people always mention when they recall the night. . . . There was a full moon.

In Stonewall that night, the hours before midnight felt like the minutes before a summer thunderstorm, when the coming tempest, no matter how violent, at least offers the prospect of relief.

Gay liberation was ready to lurch to life - violently, awkwardly, almost accidentally.

Shortly after midnight, the vice squad barged in and filtered through the crowd, checking identification, muttering insults, but detaining only employees and a few transvestites.

But after patrons left the bar, they didn't flee the area, as they usually did, happy to have escaped exposure; instead, they gathered in a small park across the street and waited.

The mood was still light. The crowd cheered and whistled at transvestites as they were escorted from the bar toward a police van; the queens responded with campy poses.

Then, something happened that changed everything. Just what depends on the witness:

-- A cop smacked a masculine-looking lesbian who complained her handcuffs were too tight.

-- A transvestite was roughed up en route to the van, began swinging, and escaped.

-- Someone threw a bottle against the wall of the Stonewall, almost hitting one cop and drawing others from inside the bar.

Craig Rodwell, a gay activist who watched from a building stoop, said, "There was no one thing that happened, or one person. There was just . . . a flash of group - of mass - anger."

In any case, the crowd's mood quickly turned. Boos, coins and debris rained down on the police, forcing them to retreat inside the bar to wait for backup.

The crowd became angrier and larger, swelling to more than 1,000.

The police were ready to shoot when they heard sirens - the riot squad. The troopers, equipped with shields, batons and visored helmets, advanced down Christopher Street in V formation. But the crowd refused to disperse; it simply circled around behind them.

It was 4 a.m. before police finally cleared the streets. Thirteen people were arrested, and roughly as many officers and civilians injured.

On Saturday night the rebels were back, and so were police. This time rebels closed Christopher Street by surrounding and rocking cars that dared to venture forward.

That night the crowd was larger, more diverse. There were lesbians, anarchists from the East Village, and gays versed in the street tactics of the anti-war and civil-rights movements.

After several hours of jeering and rock-throwing, the streets were cleared.

Sunday night was relatively quiet, and the bar reopened.

THE STONEWALL IS A BAR AGAIN

Today, the street sign on the bar's block on Christopher says "Stonewall Place," and statues in the park mark the rebellion.

In the years since Stonewall, 53 Christopher has housed a clothing store, a bagel shop and a Chinese restaurant. Now it is the Stonewall again, a gay bar that opens at 4 p.m. and closes at 4 a.m.

The new Stonewall is a diminished version of the old, with about half the space and a pool table instead of a dance floor.

The bar will be packed at the end of the month, as gay men and women from around the world gather in New York to mark the 25th anniversary of Stonewall.

They will debate the legacy of Stonewall - whether the riot is a millstone around the neck of a movement that now must reach beyond the gay ghetto or whether it is a important reminder of homosexuals' history of persecution.

Kohler, now 67, runs a gift shop in the Village. For him, the most poignant aspect of the anniversary is its missing veterans, especially the young transvestites.

"I hope in the last week of June they'll turn up as members of society, having become hairdressers or something," he says.

But he's pessimistic. "Every year someone tells me about this drag queen from Indianapolis or somewhere who was at Stonewall, and who's going to come in for Gay Pride Day" at the end of June.

Then he adds, in a voice knowing and sad, "But that queen from Indianapolis never gets here."