Stonewall journalist who covered uprising recalls shock moments from riot that became ‘Rosa Parks moment for gay people’
ONE of the only journalists present when the Stonewall Riots first erupted has recounted what he witnessed during the historic skirmish that would go on to become a "Rosa Parks moment" for the LGBTQ community.
In the early hours of June 28, 1969, the NYPD conducted one of their frequent raids on the Stonewall Inn - a gay club located in the heart of Greenwich Village - and arrested more than a dozen revelers.
Rather than running in fear or submitting to the officers' show of brute force, swarms of angry patrons and activists gathered outside the bar and faced off against the police, chanting "gay power" and "gay pride."
The unruly protest lasted long into the night and sparked several more days of unrest outside the bar in the days that followed.
Those protests are often credited as a flashpoint for LGBTQ rights in the United States and beyond.
The first-ever Pride parade was also held in the Big Apple the following year to mark the one-year anniversary of the riots.
So much of what is known about the Stonewall Riots today is thanks to Lucian Truscott IV, who back in the summer of 1969 was a 22-year-old aspiring writer that was freelancing for The Village Voice.
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Speaking in an exclusive interview with The US Sun, Truscott, now 75, said he happened upon the chaos unfolding outside of Stonewall by chance.
A recent graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, Truscott had been spending two months of leave living in New York and renting an apartment from a friend a short distance away from Stonewall.
Late in the evening of June 27, 1969, he was walking toward The Lion's Head bar when he noticed a stream of police officers, flashing red lights and a large crowd gathered on Christopher Street.
"They were all along the sidewalk and spilling out into the street," Truscott remembered of the gathering crowd.
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"The cops were bringing patrons out of the club in handcuffs, and they got a couple of them into a patrol car as people on the street kept cat-calling them, telling them to lay off and calling them 'pigs'.
"At that point, a paddy wagon from the Sixth Precinct rolled up and it became clear to everybody, I guess, that they were going to arrest everybody who was still in Stonewall so the crowd really started to get angry."
With temperatures already simmering, Truscott said the crowd's anger finally boiled over when a beloved then-drag queen by the name of Sylvia Rivera was hauled out of the bar and manhandled by police.
"They brought Sylvia out and she was kind of vamping and posing, putting on a show for the crowd and everybody was cheering," remembered Truscott.
"And then a cop shoved her in the back with a nightstick. She turned around and cussed at him, told him to knock it off, but the cop really grabbed her and started manhandling her into the paddy wagon and the crowd really didn’t like that.
"They started jeering and throwing things."
At first, the crowd started throwing pennies and whatever else they could find in their pockets at the police.
But before long, rocks and even slabs from a nearby construction yard were hurled through the air - with one such slab crashing through Stonewall's front window.
The paddy wagon summoned by the NYPD drove away with Rivera still inside and the officers who remained at the scene ran into Stonewall seeking shelter from the projectiles now raining down on them from all directions.
"When the cops retreated into the bar, the riot was on," Truscott said. "Then all hell broke loose."
'SHAME PUT IN THE CLOSET'
Truscott watched the chaos unfold from across the street, standing on a trash can to peer over the heads of the frenzied crowd.
Stone and rocks continued to crash against Stonewall's exterior.
At one stage, rioters set fire to a clump of newspapers and threw them through the bar's shattered window, starting a small blaze.
Others ripped up parking meters out of the ground, fashioning them into make-shift battering rams to smash against the bar's locked doors.
Though the significance of the moment wouldn't dawn on him for some time yet, Truscott knew what he was witnessing was "extraordinary" and certainly nothing of the kind he'd seen before.
"It wasn't uncommon for the cops to bust a gay bar at that time," Truscott said, "but when they did, usually you would see people come out of the bars with jackets over their heads, trying to hide their faces.
"I guess part of it was shame or whatever, but really they didn't want to be identified as gay.
"But in Stonewall that night a lot of the crowd was very young and more flamboyant than some of the older patrons ... and they just didn't give a damn.
"And I think that sort of atmosphere and attitude just caught on."
Truscott called the first night of the Stonewall Riots a turning point for the gay rights movement, a time at which "gay people who were in the closet came out and shame was put in the closet in their place."
"They were saying 'I'm not ashamed to be out here, or of who I am,' while protesting against the cops and the way they traditionally treated gay people," he said.
PRELUDE TO STONEWALL
Back in 1969, New York was notorious for its strict enforcement of anti-gay laws that made it risky for gay people to congregate or be seen together in public.
Such laws also made it illegal to sell gay patrons alcohol, to display homosexuality in public, or for two gay people even to dance together.
Under the guise of New York State’s liquor laws that barred “disorderly” premises, the State Liquor Authority and the New York Police Department often raided bars that catered to gay patrons, the majority of which were owned by one of New York's five main mob families.
Stonewall Inn was purchased by Tony "Fat Tony" Lauria, a member of the Genovese family, in 1966, and transformed from a restaurant into a gay bar and nightclub.
To ensure the police turned a blind eye to the ongoings inside Stonewall, the mafia paid off the NYPD in bribes, with Lauria reportedly paying New York's Sixth Precinct an estimated $1,200 per week.
Still, raids would take place, but typically police would let the bars know ahead of time and do them in the early afternoon when few customers were present, and so that the bar had enough time to resume operations by night.
However, no such heads-up was apparently issued for the NYPD's raid on the night of the Stonewall Riots.
The chaos finally came to an end at around 4am ET when riot police were finally able to disperse the crowd and a fire crew moved in to extinguish a small blaze inside Stonewall.
Incredibly, no one died or was critically injured on the first night of rioting, though a handful of police officers reported suffering minor injuries.
ESCALATING CHAOS
After the dust settled from the first night of unrest in the heart of Greenwich Village, word of the police raid at Stonewall quickly spread around New York City's five boroughs and beyond.
The Stonewall Inn also made the remarkable decision to reopen its doors the following night, just hours after the bar had been pelted with pebbles, parking meters, and just about everything in between.
In the absence of a window, a plywood panel was installed in its place with the words "gay pride" and "gay power" emblazoned across it.
The bar resumed business as usual and by nightfall a crowd of thousands had gathered outside the bar, far eclipsing the size of the congregation that had clashed with police less than 24 hours earlier.
"Everbody seemed to know that something was going to happen when the Stonewall reopened," Truscott said.
"And the cops responded to that by rolling up about six buses of tactical patrol cars and riot cops wearing helmets and wielding clubs."
Protests would continue for a second night and police struggled to contain the crowd despite firing tear gas at demonstrators and ordering them to disperse.
As the evening went on, according to Truscott, the police grew angrier and angrier, beating any demonstrators they could get a hold of with their batons and immediately taking them into custody.
Apparently compounding law enforcement's frustrations was the fact the crowd kept flanking the police, using the Village's many side streets to get behind their line of defense and attack from a different angle.
"It was such a f**king madhouse on that second night," Truscott laughed.
"It was just a whole bunch of cops with nightsticks chasing gay people all over that part of the village, and whenever they would catch them, which wasn't terribly often because the kids were faster than they were and smarter, they would try to beat them senselessly.
"It was the biggest clusterf**k of a riot that you've ever seen," he continued, adding that he later used to NYPD's response during night two of Stonewall to teach a seminar in the army about "how not to do riot control."
BECOMING THE STORY
Over the next few nights, gay rights activists and disgruntled allies continued to gather near Stonewall, seizing upon the moment to spread information and build the community that would provide the foundations of what we know today as the LGBTQ rights movement.
Though police also returned to control the crowd, the mood was significantly less confrontational, with only isolated skirmishes reported as opposed to all-out rioting.
However, by July 2 the ire of gay rights advocates would be struck once more when Truscott published his now-infamous story about the riots in The Village Voice, .
Angered by a series of homophobic slurs, including a line in which Truscott referred to "the forces of f***otry," protestors swarmed outside The Village Voice's offices, with some calling for the building to be burned down.
When the police pushed back, rioting broke out again - but this time the unrest last only a short amount of time, concluding by midnight.
"I was out of town at the time, I think I was visiting my grandmother in Washington," Truscott said.
"The ironic thing is a friend of mine now Jim Fouratt [founder of the Gay Activist Alliance] said they were looking for something to do as a gay power movement, so the first protest they held was outside the Village Voice against my article.
"So not only did I cover the first gay power riot, but I was the subject of the first gay power movement action.
"Jim and I still laugh about it to this day, that the first protest he ever held was against me.
"But Stonewall really impacted my life too. After that, I became a force in the movement for the rights of gay soldiers to be involved in the military."
'A ROSA PARKS MOMENT'
Though the Stonewall Riot, or Stonewall Uprising as it's otherwise known, was not the first demonstration of its kind, it's regarded as the galvanizing force for LGBTQ activism.
Numerous gay rights organizations were formed in the wake of Stonewall, including the Gay Activist Alliance, the Gay Liberation Front, and the Human Rights Campaign.
On the one-year anniversary of the riots on June 28, 1970, thousands of people marched in the streets of Manhattan from the Stonewall Inn to Central Park in what was then America's first-ever gay pride parade.
Then called the "Christopher Street Liberation Day" parade, the slogan of the event was ";say it loud, gay is proud."
Looking back on the enduring legacy of the riots 53 years on, Truscott believes Stonewall was for the gay rights movement what the Montgomery Bus Boycott was for the civil rights movement.
"It's the Rosa Parks moment for gay people," he said.
"It's the night that gay people said I'm not going to sit in the back of the bus anymore, I'm not going to take this lying down, I’m not going to cover my face and I’m not going to be ashamed anymore.
"It was people standing up and saying, 'Well, we can be proud of who we are and proud to be who we are; we don't have to be ashamed of ourselves.'
"And the rest, as they say, is history."
STONEWALL: A CORNERSTONE
While Truscott says he never could've predicted the impact the riots would have on future generations, he said he did - partly, at least - recognize the significance of the movement, at the moment.
"I had an inkling of what was going on," he said. "I didn't see it with the kind of eyes that I have now, of course, but I did see it and when I saw it, I described it.
"In my story, at the end, I sort of half-jokingly wrote that [famed poet and activist] Alan Ginsberg is probably writing a manifesto right now and that the 'liberation is already underway.'
"But it really was ... that was the day everything changed."
Something that Truscott left out of his famed article was that on the third day of the protests, he and Alan Ginsberg went into Stonewall and danced together.
Afterward, the pair walked through the village and saw same-sex couples holding hands and showing affection to one another in the street - something seldom seen at the time.
"We were walking and talking and he said something like he couldn't get over how beautiful all the gay people looked.
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"He said they've lost that wounded look that [they've] always had.
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"He was acknowledging that something had changed: that gay people were out on the street and no longer in hiding."
