I was there at Stonewall. This is the truth I saw with my own eyes.

Fred W. McDarrah for the Village Voice

From yesterday’s Washington Post:

The National Park Service has removed transgender references from its website commemorating the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, erasing transgender activists such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who were central to the movement for LGBTQ+ rights.

After President Donald Trump’s executive order recognizing only two genders, the page for the National Monument now describes an “LGB” milestone.

This outrageous move to erase history is bullshit. Let me tell you the story of what I saw with my own eyes in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, outside the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in New York City.

Friday, the 27^th, was the hottest day of the year in New York, still in the mid-90s by early evening. The loft I had sublet down on Broome Street didn't have air conditioning, so when the heat got too oppressive, I headed out intending to check out what was going on at the Lion’s Head, the bar on Christopher Street where Voice writers and other journalists hung out. I made my way through the dark canyons of Soho, which was still a largely industrial area filled with light manufacturing companies, scrap merchants, and even one place that made the mannequins used to display clothes in uptown department stores like Macy's and Bloomingdale's.

As I turned uptown on 6th Avenue, the street was crowded with people having finished late dinners at local joints like O’Henrys. I turned left on Waverly Place and walked the short block to Christopher Street straight into a packed crowd that was blocking the sidewalk on either side and across the street from the Stonewall, two doors down from the Lion’s Head. I asked someone what was going on, and he said the cops had busted the Stonewall. Just then, a Paddy wagon pulled up on Christopher, and cops began leading patrons in handcuffs out of the bar and putting them into the back of the Paddy wagon.

The crowd was jeering and calling the cops pigs. The arrested patrons, all of whom seemed to be young gay men, some of them clearly underage, were calling to friends in the crowd, asking if anybody had money for bail. Somebody started throwing pennies at the cops, who threatened the crowd with their night sticks, telling them to knock it off.

Then the cops brought out a tall, gaudily dressed man in women's clothing wearing a wild flowered headdress of some kind, a person who in those days would have been referred to as a transvestite or a drag queen. It was obvious she was a popular figure at the Stonewall, as cheers went up and she called out the friends in the crowd. One of the cops jabbed her in the back with his nightstick, and she turned around and said something to the cop that I couldn't hear over the crowd noise. The cop grabbed her roughly and she resisted. He yelled for help from another cop, and the two of them pushed her violently into the back of the Paddy wagon, as she yelled at them loudly.

That did it. The crowd reacted with fury. People started picking up cobblestones from a pile on the sidewalk and hurling them at the Paddy wagon and the front of the Stonewall. One of the stones broke the front window of the Stonewall, shards of glass covering the sidewalk and the street. One of the cops slapped his hand on the side of the Paddy wagon. It took off down the street with sirens screaming, as the cops retreated into the Stonewall and barricaded the front door.

The crowd surged, filling the street, throwing more cobblestones through the front window. The stones bounced harmlessly off a thick piece of plywood that had been nailed in place on the inside of the glass to block views of the bar from the street. When the crowd saw that the cobblestones weren't working, someone picked up a parking meter that the city was preparing to install and used it as a battering ram against the front door.

I crossed the street and got on top of a garbage can outside the Stonewall for a better view. Just then, someone overturned the garbage can next to me, grabbed an armful of old newspapers and other trash and threw it into the gap between the window frame and the plywood and lit the pile on fire. Flames shot up, licking the plywood and the window frame. What had been a noisy but benign mob scene had turned into a full-fledged riot.

One of the cops barricaded inside the Stonewall somehow managed to use a hose to put out the fire. They must have called for reinforcements, because just then, five or six squad cars from the 6th Precinct came speeding down Christopher Street from 6th Avenue with lights ablaze. Cops poured out of the squad cars and started swinging night sticks, and the crowd scattered.

There would be a larger riot the next night on the 28th with more than a thousand gay people in the street facing at least a hundred Tactical Patrol Force cops armed with night sticks and tear gas. The riot spilled out into 7th Avenue, down Christopher St. all the way to 6th Avenue, around the corner onto 10th Street and up West 4th until the entire area around Sheridan Square was filled with rioters and cops and tear gas. What became known as the Stonewall uprising continued on Sunday, and there were smaller demonstrations around the Village and in front of the Stonewall for the next several days. I wrote a story called “Gay power comes to Sheridan Square” that ran on the front page of the Village Voice on Wednesday.

Several gay activist organizations would be formed in the days following Stonewall, including GAA, the Gay Activist Alliance; GLF, the Gay Liberation Front; and STAR, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, one of whose founders was Marsha P. Johnson, the defiant transvestite whose arrest on the first night that the cops busted the Stonewall set off the riots that began the gay rights movement.

I have described elsewhere the Stonewall uprising as the Rosa Parks moment for gay people. It was indeed that, and more -- much more. It wasn't just gay men in the streets over that weekend. There were also hundreds of lesbians and transvestites and drag performers who poured out of gay bars around the village to join the uprising on Saturday night and Sunday. Later, members of the gay rights movement would refer to themselves as queer and transgender and bisexual and any number of other ways. That's why there is a “+” at the end of LGBTQ+, the acronym which came into broad use to describe people who do not conform to norms of gender identity or sexual persuasion.

That the Trump administration would even think that it could erase trans people and queers and anybody else from the history of Stonewall by removing two letters and a + sign from the National Park website commemorating the Stonewall uprising is like deleting the word “Holocaust” from memorials at Dachau and Bergen Belsen and Auschwitz.

Donald Trump believes that he can erase black history and gay history and the history of slavery and the history of other oppressed people by issuing executive orders. He can't. That history is not just commemorated by statues in Sheridan Square Park and plaques on the outside of the Stonewall Inn. It is burned into the experiences and memories of the unnamed people shown in the photograph taken by Village Voice photographer Fred W. McDarrah outside the Stonewall on Saturday night, the 28th of June, 1969, and in the lives of those who put their bodies in the streets during the Stonewall uprising such as my friend Jim Fouratt, and Sylvia Rivera, and yes, Marsha P. Johnson.

To be gay, or lesbian, or trans, or queer in those days took a measure of courage that the likes of Donald Trump has never known and never will know. Just as you cannot erase history, you cannot erase the courage of those who started out in the streets of Greenwich Village and ended up serving openly in the United States military and standing in line with their same sex partners at marriage bureaus in every state in this country. Rights cannot be recognized or denied by the governments of man any more than they can be conveyed or condemned from a pulpit. Rights belong to those who take and hold onto them against the forces of intolerance and oppression and hate.

Rosa Parks and Marsha P. Johnson and many, many more brave and nameless people taught us that. It’s up to us to live up to their memories and preserve their history.