So why is Stonewall seen as the catalyst for the modern LGBTQIA+ social movement? First, the Stonewall Uprising is thought of as the first time LGBTQIA+ people united behind a common cause. Some historians place the start of the movement even earlier-some 30 years prior. That’s only a handful of dissents from across the United States at the end of the 1960s.
The following day, hundreds of demonstrators showed up outside the Black Cat to protest police raids on gay bars. On New Year’s Day 1967, officers beat and arrested fourteen gay men for “lewd conduct” at the Black Cat Tavern near Los Angeles. That same year, New York City activists staged a “sip-in” in New York City protesting the State Liquor Authority’s ban on serving homosexuals. Notably three years prior in 1966, a group of drag queens and transgender women in San Francisco stood up to police violence at Compton’s Cafeteria. The Stonewall Uprising certainly wasn’t the first public demonstration in America’s LGBTQIA+ social movement. The Stonewall Uprising is credited as the incendiary point for the modern-day LGBTQIA+ liberation movement across the United States. The demonstration lasted four days and occupied the Stonewall Inn, neighboring Christopher Park, and the surrounding streets-all of which were designated as a National Monument in 2016. On June 28, 1969, a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, escalated to riots involving over 2,000 protestors and 400 policemen.