Remembering Stonewall

Participants Look Back At The Greenwich Village Protests That Sparked The Modern Gay Rights Movement

- Jeff Truesdell

Ask any veteran of Stonewall—the 1969 uprising that gave birth to the modern gay rights movement—about the events of that fateful night in New York City, and odds are he’ll talk about the pain of life back then first. “It was against the law to be homosexual,” recalls Joel Snyder, who was 23 and fresh from three closeted years in the Army. “The police would harass you to no end.” Joe Caldiero, then 16 and a Brooklyn native, notes that “the streets weren’t very safe. If you looked gay you might get hit.” Job and housing discrimination was legal, and homosexuals were banned from dancing, wearing clothes not specific to gender or drinking in a bar. “Christopher Street was the only place you could be public, and even that held peril,” says Mark Segal, then 18, who’d moved from Philadelphia six weeks earlier. But there was refuge in a few bars run by the Mob, and the Stonewall Inn drew a crowd. “You could go in that bar and hold hands, be kissed,” Segal recalls. “Most importantly for an 18-year-old, you could dance your ass offwith anyone you wanted to.”