Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #163387 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-01
• Released on: 2005-05-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780312342692
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
While the centerpiece here is undoubtedly his hour-by-hour relating of the explosive June 1969 riots, Carter, an editor of Allen Ginsberg's interviews (Spontaneous Mind, 20o1), also provides an extended prelude that highlights the places, activists and others who come to play key roles. Carter's beloved Greenwich Village and what he calls its "queer geography," which enabled gay culture to form, flourish and consolidate itself, emerges as an inimitable, finely detailed hero. But for Carter, the most audacious, energetic and enterprising of riot participants were the drag queens, homeless queer youths and other gender transgressors whose position on the farthest margins of society enabled their radical response to oppression. What they and others managed to do, Carter renders with fresh care and enthusiasm, getting new quotes and offering unfamiliar perspectives, such as the Mafia's role both as a patron of the gay scene in New York City (including the Stonewall Inn, which it owned and operated) and as a blackmailer of famous homosexuals. He ends appropriately with the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance, as well as the first gay pride parade, held in June 1970. While it may distract readers interested only in the story of gay liberation, Carter's logistical history of what gay author Edmund White called "our Bastille Day" will become a permanent addition to the great histories of the civil rights era.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In the late 1960s, homosexual sex was illegal in every state but Illinois; now the news routinely covers the latest on gay marriages. So the subtitle says it all--or does it? The six days of riots sparked by police action in the early morning of June 28, 1969, against a popular Greenwich Village gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, constituted a homosexual "shot heard 'round the world" that transformed an American subculture. Carter's carefully researched, well-crafted writing portrays Stonewall as part of a larger civil and human rights movement and a spur to the gay rights movement. Stonewall precipitated great change--the formation of the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance, for instance--and that leads Carter to examine the socio-politico-cultural convergence that resulted in the riots. Hundred of interviews figure into Carter's thorough exploration that dispels long-held myths and provides fresh facts about a freedom fight some liken to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Customer Reviews

The Definitive History of the Spark to Gay Rights
In the old days (and some would insist they were the good old days) homosexuals were subject to dismissal just because of sexual preference. Sexual acts between members of the same sex were specifically illegal, and cops would bait homosexuals to see if they were interested in such acts. Professionals who were found to be homosexuals lost their licenses. Homosexuality was a diagnosable psychiatric illness. A consensual homosexual act could get even life imprisonment, and a risk of castration. There may still be discrimination against gays in many ways, but some are now even legally married; societal acceptance is not total, but it is vastly better than it was on 28 June 1969. That date, regarded as epochal by homosexuals insisting on their civil rights, saw the Stonewall uprising; in _Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution_ (St. Martin's Press), David Carter has given a spectacularly detailed and well-researched history of an event that has been often misunderstood even by those interested in the history of the gay civil rights movement.

In the sixties, Greenwich Village was a center for homosexual life; the bohemian residents were simply more accepting of unusual behavior. Within Greenwich, the Stonewall Inn was one of the gathering places especially for male homosexuals. The ambience was "trashy, low, and tawdry," but unpretentious, and all from any margins (including the exaggeratedly effeminate men who were a fashion at the time) were free to go there without risk of feeling alienated. Patrons and the bar staff accepted that the place was going to get raided. Police thought of gays as easy targets in their humiliating sweeps of the bar. Carter is careful to show that the confrontation that night was somewhere between inevitable and fortuitous, but what set the crowd off was a lesbian resisting arrest and being beaten. The initial response was tentative; one man could stand it no longer and yelled, "Gay Power!" only to be shushed by his partner. The cry, however, was taken up, and the outcasts stirred into action. The chapters of the book dealing with the riot itself are often tense, with the police being forced back into Stonewall and barricading themselves in, and the gays outside pounding the heavy doors with a parking meter while chanting "Liberate the bar!" Many who were there shared the view of one participant, who called the newspapers during the riot: "I immediately knew this was the spark we had been waiting for for years."

Carter details the changes in attitude that came after the riots, fostered by the too-inclusive Gay Liberation Front through the more successful Gay Activist Alliance. Political action, confrontation, and street theater were taken up by a group of citizens that had previously kept covert ways. Having shown up at the scene of the riot to see what all the fuss was about, Allen Ginsberg himself said of the participants, comparing them to homosexuals a decade before, "They've lost that wounded look." Carter clears up myths that have grown up around the event. It was reported, for instance, that the rioters breaking back into the bar where the police were besieged were merely trying to get back in and party. There was a further widely reported story that the riots were in response to the funeral the day before of Judy Garland, an idol to some gays. These stories represent the sort of trivialization that society might well attempt to impose on a revolution that it found unwelcome. The revolution isn't complete, but at Stonewall the struggle for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights got a real political start. Carter's book is the essential work on an important historical event.

Not just about Stonewall
While the title of the book is, of course, STONEWALL, and a large portion of the book is devoted to an almost minute-by-minute account of the fabled riots, Carter also takes considerable care in detailing all of the many contributing factors that led to the revolt against the police (debunking the ludicrous "because Judy Garland died" myth in the process) as well as the activism of several newly-founded gay groups that resulted from the action. The book is meticulously researched and footnoted and should stand as the definitive account of the subject for a good length of time to come. It took Carter ten years to write the book; it was ten years well spent.

A compelling history of the birth of the gay rights movement
This book reads like a novel; it is compelling and moving and cries out to be turned into a PBS/ David Burns special. An excellent history and a fascinating insight into how much has changed in 40 years.