Photograph: Gioncarlo Valentine/The Guardianįear of assault had a profound impact on people’s social and emotional lives. Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, an artist, in his apartment in Manhattan, New York. New York police recovered a body from the Hudson River in April 1969, concluding that the young man had been strangled before being dumped in the water, a victim of the “dock scene” – probably the most dangerous gay meeting place in the city. There were always corpses being fished out of the Hudson River.” “Once in a while someone would end up in the ER or dead. “If someone showed up with a black eye or lumpy face we’d joke about it and say ‘You got your gay-knocks,’” said Lanigan-Schmidt. The threat of violence was always around the corner. People flocked here in search of companionship, love and security, though even in the Village safety was not guaranteed. By then Greenwich Village, a New York neighborhood with a rich history of tolerating sexual diversity, had become America’s pre-eminent LGBT destination, home to probably the largest population of gay and lesbian people in the world.
It is against this backdrop of legal, professional and social ostracism that the extraordinary events of 1969 unfolded. “Liberals would say you should be given electroshock treatments which they thought was being nice conservatives would simply throw you in jail.” “Just being gay then was to be a criminal,” said Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, an artist who lived then as now in Manhattan. So concerned was he to hide his identity that he spoke through a voice-altering microphone and wore a mask like Leatherface in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (it was in fact a Richard Nixon mask turned inside-out).ĭr Barbara Gittings, Dr Frank Kameny, and Dr H Anonymous. It shows three experts sitting on a panel discussion titled Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to Homosexuals? One of the panelists was a gay psychiatrist who referred to himself as Dr H Anonymous. Such malevolence masquerading as science and the fear it instilled were hauntingly captured in a photograph taken in 1972. It would take another four years before the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off its official list of mental illnesses. In California and Pennsylvania, they could be put in mental institutions for life. Conversely, in seven other states, gay men who made love in their own homes faced legal castration. Illinois was the only state in the union where sexual acts between consenting same-sex partners were legal. But such gains were still elusive for gay and lesbian people who by contrast were largely quiescent, atomized and supine – metaphorically and literally forced to hide behind trees. On 28 June 1969, in Greenwich Village, in a bar called the Stonewall Inn, gay men and their trans and lesbian peers would strike a blow for equality that would change the face of America and the world.īy that summer, tectonic plates had already begun to move for other marginalized groups of Americans.Īfrican Americans had already secured major civil rights victories, the Black Panthers were parading, women’s lib was finding its stride.
Gay men had had enough of the vigilante threats, enough of the slurs, enough of the random violence in the street and the endless police harassment. They’d had enough of hiding in the shadows of trees and living a lie. A week after the trees were felled in Queens, about 10 miles away in Manhattan a thread snapped in the social fabric of the city. The strange incident was one of the more surreal manifestations of a country that in June 1969 remained trapped in homophobia’s grip. They went home, grabbed saws and axes, and on that sticky summer evening, under the approving eye of local police, they chopped down all the trees. When that failed, the self-appointed defenders of morality took things to the next level. Run and never come back, they said, or we will beat you to a pulp. When they found a gay man hiding behind a tree they beamed powerful lights into his face. Growing at times to 40 strong, they prowled the park like packs of hunting dogs in search of prey. But that didn’t stop the locals forming vigilante groups.