The Stonewall Reader

Lange Beschreibung
For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an anthology chronicling the tumultuous fight for LGBTQ rights in the 1960s and the activists who spearheaded it, with a foreword by Edmund White.

Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, presented by The Publishing Triangle
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June 28, 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots. Most importantly the anthology spotlights both iconic activists who were pivotal in the movement, such as Sylvia Rivera, co-founder of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), as well as forgotten figures like Ernestine Eckstein, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s. The anthology focuses on the events of 1969, the five years before, and the five years after. Jason Baumann, the NYPL coordinator of humanities and LGBTQ collections, has edited and introduced the volume to coincide with the NYPL exhibition he has curated on the Stonewall uprising and gay liberation movement of 1969.

Rezensierung
This window into the daily lives of activists and ordinary people fighting passionately against injustice is illuminating and inspiring.
Publishers Weekly

Through his skillful curation, [editor Jason Baumann] offers a corrective for what is too often a sanitized, homogenous, and whitewashed portrayal of academics and professionals about the event sometimes termed 'the hairpin drop heard around the world.' ... The first-person narratives collected here effectively spotlight the social inequalities surrounding the LGBTQ community, many of which persist today. A bold rallying cry that should help in the continuing fight for LGBTQ rights.
Kirkus Reviews

This masterful collection is perhaps one of the most exhaustive looks at the events surrounding Stonewall from the LGBTQ perspective and provides a wonderfully diverse cast of voices.
Library Journal

Excellent compilation of first-person accounts from before, during, and after the pivotal 1969 riot THE STONEWALL READER features a diverse array of voices folks from across the LGBTQ spectrum telling their stories over decades in essays and interviews and letters.
The Atlantic

This significant book does welcome justice to an event that author Edmund White, who wrote the foreword, says sparked 'an oceanic change in thinking.'
Booklist

The Stonewall Reader gives us a richer, messier, more dangerous picture of the Stonewall uprising, its foreground, and aftermath. The book wonderfully reflects how revolutionary moments rarely get portrayed accurately through single voices, and Baumann has produced here a history worth revisiting again and again.
Lambda Literary

An excellent companion to those famous bricks the patrons threw at police that night in June 1969 ( ) aims to correct a narrative that has so often excluded LGBTQ people of color. ( ) The book de-gentrifies the narrative, returning the street-smart stories of the original protesters to history. The inclusion of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson in the During and After sections also subtly underlines the role of transgender people, as they tell the story first of that night and then of how their abandonment by the movement began almost immediately. The book s mix of familiar and unfamiliar didn t just re-contextualize the riots for me. I came to understand myself and my life differently. I didn t even know what I d lost or gained from these stories and their contexts. The Stonewall Reader seems designed to be widely adopted in classrooms and should be, but, to be sure, it is for anyone, even those who think they know this history.
Alexander Chee, The New Republic

An essential read for any member of the community who wants to learn about those who paved the way before us.
Harper s Bazaar

Brush up on your LGBTQ history with this definitive collection of first-hand accounts, diary entries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented the years leading up to and immediately following the Stonewall riots.
Queerty

The Stonewall Reader, a collection featuring works by figures such as the writer Audre Lorde and the activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya, demonstrates this expansiveness in the variety of experiences it chronicles. The book is named for one of history s most powerful displays of queer protest, but focuses instead on intimate self-reckoning. The pieces in it ponder visibility, self-understanding, and the development of queerness as an identity.
The Atlantic

A compilation of first-person accounts and diary entries from activists and participants, along with news articles, essays and more, this work tells the story of events that surrounded the 1969 Stonewall riots, largely seen as the start of the nation s LGBT civil rights movement.
CNN.com

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riot, Jason Baumann, New York Public Library coordinator of humanities and LGBTQ collections, edited a volume drawing from the NYPL archives that includes first accounts, diaries, newspaper articles, and more chronicling the years leading up to the riots and documenting the fight itself. It also spotlights iconic activists who were pivotal to the movement, giving room and space for the forgotten figures of the fight. It features a ton of diverse voices and interviews and helps to paint a crucial moment in queer history in the voices and contexts of the people who were there.
Book Riot


Buchausschnitt
Introduction
 
Twenty-five years ago, the New York Public Library presented the exhibition Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall, cu- rated by Molly McGarry and Fred Wasserman, as well as an accompanying catalog. Planned to commemorate Stonewall 25, it was the first exhibition devoted to LGBTQ history by a major New York cultural institution. It had the highest atten- dance of any NYPL exhibition except the Dead Sea Scrolls. In my years working on LGBTQ collections at the library, I have had countless people tell me that the exhibition changed their lives because it was the first time they felt that their history was publicly embraced and treated with the seriousness it deserved. The exhibition was an opportunity to show the riches of the library s LGBTQ archives, which had then recently been ac- quired by farsighted curators in partnership with grassroots activists. Now with the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, the library is able to open those archives through this anthology to give contemporary readers insight into this pivotal era in LGBTQ history through firsthand accounts of the actual participants.

The Stonewall Inn, located at 53 Christopher Street in New York City, began as a teahouse, Bonnie s Stone Wall, in 1930, and later evolved into a restaurant. After a fire destroyed the interior in the early 1960s, the Stonewall was reopened by Fat Tony Lauria as a gay bar in 1967. Part of a network of Mafia-controlled, illegal gay clubs and after-hours joints in the Village (like the Bon Soir, the Tenth of Always, and Kooky s), the Stonewall was operated as a private club, rather than a pub- licly open bar, to evade the control of the State Liquor Author- ity. Every weekend patrons paid three dollars and signed the club register often as Judy Garland or Donald Duck to get into the Stonewall, drink watered-down liquor, and dance to the music of the Ronettes and the Shangri-Las. Despite the burnt interior, dirty glasses, and surly staff, the Stonewall one of the few gay clubs in the Village where patrons could dance drew a devoted young clientele. Many cross-dressed, wearing makeup or their own personal mix of men s and women s attire.

The police routinely raided the Stonewall, but the management, always mysteriously tipped off in advance, would turn up the lights to warn the crowd to stop any open displays of affection, slow dancing, or use of illicit drugs. According to most historians, the Stonewall s management bribed the police for protection, and the raids were merely for show. But on Tuesday, June 24, 1969, there was another kind of raid, orga- nized by the NYPD s First Division, rather than the usual and local Sixth Precinct. When the club was back up and running a few days later, the police decided to go in again on Friday, June 27, and shut it down for good.

The police were accustomed to handling a large gay crowd with only a handful of officers, but this night the raid went very differently. Rather than leave, a crowd of patrons and on- lookers gathered in front of the bar and waited for their friends held inside to be released. When the police van came to take away those who had been arrested, the crowd fought back, forcing the police into the bar. The riot gathered force from onlookers, who turned on the barricaded bar with garbage cans and fire. The drag queens were said to have given the po- lice both the fiercest resistance and a dose of humor, facing them down in a chorus line as they sang, We are the Stone- wall Girls . . . The crowd was controlled and dispersed in the early hours of Saturday morning, only to reemerge later that night as several thousand people took to the streets chanting, Gay power! and Liberate Christopher Street! Riots and demonstrations continued throughout the following week. In the end, the arrests and damage were minimal.