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Christina B. Hanhardt, Jason Baumann, editor. The Stonewall Reader., The American Historical Review, Volume 126, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 833–834, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab279
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June 28, 2019, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, the multiday rebellion in response to a police raid of a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Stonewall (as it is shorthanded) arguably is the most well-known piece of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) history and its most contested. Popular sources often describe Stonewall as a riot that marked the start of the modern LGBT movement, while historians and activists alike debate its details as well as its significance in shaping local, national, and even international politics. These debates often focus on historical accuracy, such as who was there and what actions they took; but they also place Stonewall in its broader historical contexts, including a longer legacy of lesbian and gay activism and other 1960s social movements, and ask why this uprising garnered so much attention and not similar ones in other cities during this same period. Among the most vexed issues is not properly historical: it is about how the memory of Stonewall now circulates. By its half-century anniversary, Stonewall was no longer a touchstone only for the LGBT-identified: for example, in 2013 President Barack Obama cited Stonewall in his inauguration speech, and in 2016, the National Park Service designated the area around the bar a national monument. In these cases, Stonewall carries symbolic weight as having ignited a fight for hard-won rights and, by extension, national inclusion. But some of the transformative promises of Stonewall still remain on the horizon. These arguments often focus on the status—at Stonewall, in LGBT social movements, and in the historiography—of those for whom the supposed benefits of national inclusion remain elusive, including people of color, women, and transgender people, and they emphasize that all historical events are subject to interpretation and shaped by the vantage points of its participants and observers. In these contexts, how one tells the story of Stonewall can reveal the stakes and limits of progress narratives.
