During this NYC Pride Week, Stonewall, the name of the place and event that gave birth to it, has been more in the air than usual, and efforts to commemorate it continue. There's news that a local subway station will be renamed after him (new name: Christopher Street-Stonewall National Monument Station), and an entirely new cultural venue called the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center opens in the neighborhood today.
Do you know the Stonewall story? On the night of June 28, 1969, 55 years ago Friday, LGBT people at a Greenwich Village dance bar called the Stonewall Inn were outraged. They finally got tired of the police showing up with batons and handcuffs because of how they dressed, who they kissed, and who they were. So they fought back, screamed, broke things, threw things and gave them a taste of what it was like to be chased and treated like dirt by the police.
What you don't know is how dangerous it is to do so. The police had almost unaccountable power. They may lock you up, beat you up, and make you disappear. Who cares, especially if you’re queer? Your very existence is against the law. Did you sleep well.
Photos of the Stonewall push-back, variously called riot, treason, and uprising, make it look like a rave, but it wasn't. It was a loud and fierce “no” to the history of oppression and persecution. And the “no” didn’t end that night.
Skirmishes continued on the streets of Greenwich Village for several days. (There had already been explosions of resistance in other cities.) Then, pretty quickly, organized protests broke out. Some were tight and targeted, others were spread out and processional and continued into the following year.
When AIDS hit the gay community in the 1980s and the government did nothing to help, the gut-wrenching anger returned. People again began throwing objects, including the ashes of AIDS victims, on the White House lawn.
The history we tell is difficult, not easy, not fun, not good. It has a celebratory dimension, because it is the story of vulnerable people who, over half a century and against great odds, achieved a measure of political and social justice. But it is also the story of people who are threatened even when they think they are safe (the delusion of “acceptance”), and of others who are better informed, more vigilant, and more powerful from their outsider status.
What’s puzzling is why New York City, the epicenter of the LGBTQ saga, has yet to create a public monument worthy of its history.
Built in 2016, the official New York City AIDS Memorial stands across the street from what was once St. Vincent's Hospital (now replaced by luxury condos), which housed the city's first and largest AIDS unit. But the monument, a warehouse-like white steel canopy on a traffic island at West 12th Street and Seventh Avenue, is visually tepid and politically neutral.
A few blocks south is Stonewall National Monument, part of the Village area designated a U.S. national park by Barack Obama in 2016. In the center is another traffic island, this one a green little Christopher Park surrounded by rainbow flags and home to a sleepy 1980 sculpture of a gay couple by George Segal. And the original Stonewall Inn building facing the park is now divided into two addresses, one as a gay bar-restaurant and the other as the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, which opens to the public today, Pride Day.
As the first LGBTQ-focused visitor center in the National Park Service and a gateway to information about this complex history in progress, expectations for this center were high. I wish I could say they met.
Designed by LGBTQ advocacy group Pride Live, the center naturally emphasizes the authenticity of the place. The back of the large, deep single room was once the bar’s dance floor. The current reception desk/gift shop (staffed by a park ranger) is where the bar once was. There’s a jukebox with a 1960s playlist, the same playlist that was originally played in the abandoned bar during the 1969 brawl.
The mural, printed with images and text, outlines the history of the building, a late 19th-century stable eventually converted into a restaurant, and a mafia-controlled gay bar in the 1960s. And here is the familiar textbook account of the events of June 1969: There is no new information here.
Many of the people who were there that night and are still with us may be able to provide a new first-hand view of what happened. But only one, Mark Siegel, a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front that the uprising spawned, was included in a series of short films called “The Stonewall Generation.” In one video, he reminisces about being a bar patron in his youth, and in another, he interviews young LGBTQ artists and influencers.
Of course, it's a smart idea to include young people in the mix, and this is clearly the audience the center is trying to attract. To that end, Pride Live has begun a collaboration with Parsons School of Design, through which students will create art projects for the center each year within the context of their LGBTQ history classes.
The first of these is a fabric sculpture woven collectively against a collage of vintage LGBTQ ephemera, adding real color and texture to an otherwise monotonous gallery design that devotes far too much space to two walls and a projection screen—advertising the names of the center’s corporate donors (banks, sports teams) and celebrity sponsors, giving the unmistakable impression that rainbow-washing and fairy-tale politics are in fact in play.
But what is most disappointing is the softness of the center's presentation of information, the suggestion that the Stonewall rebellion and what it symbolized is old history and that everything is fine now. There is Christopher Park, who is attending the party, and the AIDS memorial up the street.
But we can't afford that kind of meekness in this moment of viciously transphobic “don't say gay” because right-wing politics is dragging us back to the 1950s, before Stonewall, with every bill. Yes, young people, everyone, need to know that pushback and pushback, as Stonewall showed, work. And they need to know how fragile gay rights are, and can always be. Pride alone is not enough to protect, preserve, and advance gay rights, and it can even be counterproductive.
So how can we commemorate that history in a useful way?
There are only a few recent examples that come to mind. Perhaps one is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, created by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2018. Also known as the Lynching Victims Memorial, it is very simple in terms of information. Direct statements of hard facts like names and numbers and abstract designs that are implicitly interrupted, equate the murderous reality of racial hatred, past and present.
Closer to home, there were moving tributes to a public sculpture called “Craig's Closet,” which until recently was installed by American artist Jim Hodges in a park next to New York City's AIDS Memorial. Named after Hodges' partner, musician Craig Ducote, who died in 2016, the work is a cast black-painted bronze image of an ordinary bedroom closet, which is left wide open and filled with books, hooded sweatshirts, suitcases, shoes and more. It is full of things needed for daily life. Thanks to its placement near the memorial, the work subtly synchronizes personal and political content, expressing images of the lives we had and are, the lives we have lost and are still losing, and the lives we must fight not to forget. (This work was exhibited from June 2023 to May 2024.)
The new Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center also features a personal memorial, which is part of the first exhibit. The exhibit will undoubtedly change over time. It is designed to be dynamic. It feels full of historical life. Conceived by Diana Rodriguez, co-founder of the center and Pride Live, the piece consists of a few objects: a folded American flag, a few military medals, and a photo of a young Puerto Rican American in military uniform (Rodriguez’s uncle). — And text:
Martin Antonio 'Tony' Torres served in Vietnam. He returned from serving his country extremely ill, requiring dialysis several times a week. Although very frail, he still decided to serve and took a job as an administrator at the Department of Veterans Affairs office on East 23rd Street in New York City. He was a deacon at his church, a pillar of the community, and a friend to all. He passed away on May 9, 1989. When his troops and colleagues found out he had died from HIV/AIDS, no one attended his funeral. Not one.
In 1989, Stonewall turned 20. For LGBTQ people, a lot has changed, but a lot hasn’t. And that’s still the case 55 years later. Which way is our story going? Backwards? Forwards? Neither? We don’t know. It’s not time to party yet.
Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center
Greenwich Village, 51 Christopher Street, between Waverly Place and South 7th Avenue, Manhattan; 212-355-6295.