In the early hours of 28th June 1969 police unremarkably raided a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York City. But those in the bar did something unusual, something which changed history. They fought back, and so began a six-day uprising, now widely referred to as the Stonewall riots. We should use this month to commemorate those who fought back and particularly those who were criminalised for fighting for their right to exist.
Nine pages of police records were published for the first time in 2009. Seven pages were released after a Freedom of Information request. They were obtained by Jonathan Katz (Director of OutHistory.org), with help from David Carter (author of ‘Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution’). Two pages had already been obtained by Michael Scherker in 1988 who sued the city to obtain some police records of the uprisings. In June 2019, Tim Fitzsimmons, a reporter for NBC News, published one completely new and differently redacted documents based on a Freedom of Information request for Stonewall police reports. You can read the police records in full here.
It will come as little surprise to anyone with experience of dealing with the police that many historians and commentators have criticised these records for poorly and incompletely documenting the events; however, they do help us put some names to the six-day uprising of those who were criminalised for taking a stand:
Raymond Castro, Vincent DePaul, Marilyn Fowler, Wolfgang Podolski, Thomas Staton and David Van Ronk.
Many eyewitnesses from the Stonewall riots recalled that the arrest of a Queer woman, thought to be Marilyn Fowler, intensified people’s resistance to the police.
Read more: Rachel Harger, Bindmans Solicitors, https://is.gd/A6AF1Q
