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In looking back at that night, Boyce recalled one officer's reaction in particular. Boyce told us he and hundreds of others, many of them street kids and transgender people of color, like Sylvia Rivera, fought back against the police, and years of harassment. "But someone passing behind me quickly said 'raid.' And in those days if you weren't in a raid, you watched the raid."īut this time, they didn't watch. "The commotion was unusual, so we went to investigate," Boyce recalled. In the early morning of June 28, 1969, Boyce and a friend were standing on Christopher Street, when they heard noise coming from Stonewall, just a few feet away. If it didn't, there's going to be trouble."īack then, Stonewall was one of those unlicensed bars, owned by members of the mafia.
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"And the first thing you did was grab a seat and separate from whoever you are. "The lights would blink on and off, but unnaturally - strobe-like," Boyce said. Police often raided these bars, arresting people caught without IDs or dancing with someone of the same sex.
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"To end the policing of gay life, to end the raids on gay bars, to end the entrapment of gay men who were trying to pick up a partner."ĭespite the Mattachine Society's protests, police continued to crack down on gay life, particularly on the bars LGBTQ people frequented, which often couldn't get licenses and were run by organized crime. "They were struggling for basic human rights," said George Chauncey, a Columbia University professor who has written about the gay rights movement. In 1966, Mattachine members staged what was called a "sip-in," challenging State Liquor Authority rules prohibiting licensed bars from serving openly gay customers. (Photo courtesy: New York Daily News Archive/Contributor)Įarly gay rights groups, such as the Mattachine Society, had openly protested the discrimination, most famously at Julius', a bar just a block-and-a-half from Stonewall.