Book Review: Stonewall: the Definitive Story of the LGBTQ Rights Uprising that Changed America by Martin Duberman

By Al Preston

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When I first learned about the 1969 Stonewall riots, I heard the story I’m sure many have learned. Yet another police raid on a beloved New York gay bar, yet another abuse by the mob running the bar and the police raiding it. However, instead of dispersing the moment they could, the patrons who weren’t arrested lingered in the park across the street. The discontent began to increase as they watched those less lucky be loaded into the paddy wagon by harsh officers.

Someone started yelling first, hurling insults at the police and soon the others in the crowd followed. In some stories, the police snagged a butch lesbian from the crowd for their shouts and man-handled her. In others, the police abusing one of the drag queens they arrested enraged the crowd. Regardless of which act of police brutality set them over the edge, that Friday night at the Stonewall bar was the last straw. One of the queens in the crowd, often said to be Marsha P. Johnson, picked up a brick and threw it into one of Stonewall’s windows—and the riot broke out.

What follows the riot often gets muddied in these retellings. Many times, the riot is depicted as a single night of violent unrest when it was actually multiple nights with a little break in-between because of bad weather. However, the way the story is told does not tend to matter, the important lesson is that the riot was the inciting event for new LGBT+ organizations to emerge; the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) among them. It was also the event that inspired the first Pride Parade, at the time known as the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. Often, Stonewall is considered the beginning of LGBT+ activism in the United States.

As any historian will tell you, it’s very rare for a story like this to be so simple, or for there to be smoke without fire. History is a long continuous story about how one event leads into another, not how remembered historical events just suddenly happen. Even Stonewall was not a moment of sudden aggression from LGBT+ people. It was, however, the boiling point for a hundred-year-old pot of water.

Stonewall was most certainly a powerful moment in queer history and the pursuit for queer rights, but it was proceeded by a struggle and a building tension, anger, and activism dating far before 1969 New York. In fact, the activism began at least by 1895.

The years leading up to 1969 were the most muddied and turbulent. Martin Duberman’s Stonewall: the Definitive Story of the LGBTQ Rights Uprising that Changed America, is an excellent comprehensive history the Stonewall riot, what came before it, and what came immediately after. While the title is a little misleading—no history can ever by truly ‘definitive’—it does encompass much of the story, the good and the bad, of queer activism through an interesting lens.

Duberman tells the story of Stonewall almost exclusively through the stories of six people who either witnessed it first hand (Sylvia (Ray) Rivera, Jim Fourutt, and Craig Rodwell) or who were directly effected by the aftermath (Karla Jay, Foster Gunnson, and Yvonne Flowers).

I greatly enjoyed this way of presenting the story of Stonewall! Queer historians of recent years (1990s to today 2024) have taken a more identity-based approach to queer history. Being LGBTQIA+ of any kind is an incredibly individual experience. Love, gender, and sexuality are all extremely personal pieces of a person’s identity. Queer identities are so often affected by the many other pieces of a person’s identity that every story is so vastly different from each other. This element of the queer community makes its history and activism so complicated and difficult to piece together into a full picture. Building the story of Stonewall through the eyes of six very different people creates a historical narrative that can be as close to all encompassing as Duberman could get.

This book was first published in 1993—I read the 2019 edition which had a new introduction from the author and an update on the six figures in 2019. He did not update any of the information in the rest of the book, including the preface. Duberman is rather critical of historians in 1993 for viewing queer history through an ‘ivory tower’ way. The ivory tower would be academic history, the history done by universities and professors that can be rather inaccessible to the general public. Duberman wrote this book in order for queer history to be accessible to the people who needed to know their history the most, queer folks.

The six people Duberman focuses on are not all encompassing of the queer people of the 1950s and 1960s, which is something Duberman acknowledges. However, all six came from vastly different backgrounds and had a variety of beliefs. While it would be impossible to cover the whole of the queer community, these six do cover a wide range of the kinds of people who were involved in the queer movement. Duberman chose these folks probably for that reason.

He tracks their lives from youth, young adulthood, and adulthood. He makes sure that the reader knows who these people are, queer identity and all, before Stonewall was even imagined. He describes their experiences and how those shaped their views and opinions as adults.

Craig Rodwell was from Chicago and was a radical member of the homophile (an early name for the LGBT+ movements) before Stonewall. He eventually opened and ran the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, one of the first queer bookstores in New York that was not strictly a porn store. The first Pride (the Christopher Street Liberation Day March) was his brainchild and his to organize in New York. He was at Stonewall in 1969, not as a patron, but as a passerby (he actually hated Stonewall and other gay bars). When the riot began, he called the press and took pictures of the riot. He also documented their clever countermoves to the riot police’s efforts to disperse them. He was frequently fed up with the attitudes of the Mattachine Society (the first long standing gay organization in the United States) and its unwillingness to fight or demand rights for queer people.

Yvonne Flowers was a young black girl with an activist and outspoken mother. She spent much of her youth partying and disliking lesbian bars and their adherence to a butch/femme dichotomy (the presentation of one ‘masculine’ and one ‘feminine’ person in a lesbian relationship, mirroring heterosexual relationships). The sexism and racism of the very white male homophile movements kept her away from them. Sexism kept her away from many Civil Rights groups as well. She was not at Stonewall, but upon hearing about it and the organizations that arose out of it, she finally found her calling in activism. She helped found Salsa Sisters, a queer organization specifically for lesbians of Mexican and Black heritage.

Karla Jay was apart of many smaller, more militant, feminist groups. Her early years were spent trying to find where she belonged as a radical feminist, Jewish lesbian; and rarely succeeded. She found a home in the GLF after Stonewall. She struggled with the same pieces of lesbianism that Karla did, unable to fit herself into the butch/femme systems. The queer organizations were also far too focused on the issues of white men while the Daughter’s of Bilitis, the lesbian organization of the time, was not radical enough.

Sylvia (Ray) Rivera is probably the most well-known name in this book. She and Martha P. Johnson were often the faces of the post-Stonewall queer movements. Many of the pictures of the early Pride Parades feature images of either of these queens. From the beginning, Sylvia’s life was a wild ride, from her parents separating to being kidnapped by her grandmother and mother. Then her mother left her with her grandmother to marry a rich man. Her grandmother never approved of Syliva and, at the age of eleven, she found herself a Street Queen. An all too common path drag queens, transgender women, and others who played with their gender presentation, were forced to take was to become homeless and taking up sex work in order to live. Sex work is work, make no mistake, but there is a lot of danger for transgender women and Street Queens to be sex workers. They, Sylvia included, face danger with every job and many end up killed. She was one of the rioters at Stonewall, incredibly upset with yet another raid, and was one of the first to start the shouting. She was the face for transgender people in the post-Stonewall movements. She also created Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) which was designed to protect young Street Queens like she had once been.

Jim Fourutt had a strange entrance into the queer movement. He went from attempting priesthood to the Yippie (militant hippies) movement, to the queer movement at a distance. For a time, he suspected that the FBI had started the rumors that he was a spy for them, ruining a lot of trust many activist organizations had in him. He brought his knowledge of protests to the GLF. He also witnessed the Stonewall riot much like Craig had. He also hated gay bars like Stonewall which were run by the mob and was actually quite dirty and dangerous. During the riots, he attempted to get his straight friends in other activist groups to come join and aid the patrons, but no one answered the call. After Stonewall, he was an important member of the GLF.

Foster Gunnson grew up wealthy and goalless. His father had him take over the family business and he had a long academic career. He was active in the pre-Stonewall homophile movements. He was the only one of the six who agreed with the ideas and methods of promoting queer rights that the homophile organizations were trying to enact. He believed that queer folks would have an easier time becoming accepted into society if they looked and acted like average Americans. However, he was heavily attached to these ideas and therefore very picky when it came to organizing conferences between organizations. He was not at Stonewall, but he did join the GLF afterwards. He helped Craig plan the Christopher Street Liberation Day March and archived the homophile movements.

These six stories represent the different aspects of queer life before and after Stonewall. They show how Stonewall changed how Americans and queer organizations functioned. They tell a story of dissatisfaction, militancy, struggle, violence, and activism; but also of disinterest, alienation, progress, good and bad intentions, different walks of life, and identity. Each of these people show how vast the queer community is and the variety of ideologies and methodologies. Unlike other histories that gloss over the violent details, Duberman presents the realities these people faced every day. Therefore, I do issue a warning about some brief descriptions of violence for those who want to pick this book up.

While Duberman challenges many preconceived notions about Stonewall and the first Pride Parade (I won’t ruin the fun of reading about the reality of both) creating an excellent history for the general public, the organization of the book left me confused and lost at times. He chose to tell the six stories in chronological order and all at once. Starting with their childhoods and moving through to 2019, Duberman goes through each person’s life one at a time in each life stage. He titles each section with the person’s name, occasionally multiple names if they happened to be interacting at that time. With six people with very different lives, that became confusing rapidly. I went from reading about Sylvia’s turbulent childhood to having to remember who Karla even was as I entered the early adulthood section. If he had organized the six people in the same order every section, it may have helped with my ability to look back or recall who each person was.

Later on in the book, he provides brief context sections at the beginning of each chapter to give the reader some context for the other events occurring around the people’s lives. These are very helpful to a general audience who may need some help placing these stories in time and place. He also does an excellent job of connecting the context sections to each person’s story where it applies to them.

While I do believe every person’s story was important to the goal of this book, telling the story of Stonewall, Karla and Yvonne felt left out for a large section of the book when it came to actually talking about the riot and its immediate lead up and aftermath. As they were not directly involved until after Stonewall, it makes sense that they were not brought up very often in that section of the book. It was also rather thematic, given how often lesbians were left out of the larger conversation about gay rights at this time. Lesbians rarely even went to Stonewall and there were only two or so involved in the actual riot. I do wish we had heard from them more often.

Overall, Stonewall: the Definitive Story of the LGBTQ Rights Uprising that Changed America, is an excellent history book for general audiences. It covers the history leading up to Stonewall, the actual riot, and its aftermath concisely and in an engaging way. Duberman takes great strides to acknowledge the issues of early gay movements but also their good deeds. He also often points out the gaps in the literature about the early movements, trying to highlight those who were often left out. His choice of representative people also highlighted stories that most would not and may never have heard. I highly recommend this book as a starter to learning more about American queer history.