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The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous protests by members of the gay community in response to a police raid that began in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Patrons of the Stonewall, other Village lesbian and gay bars, and neighborhood street people fought back when the police became violent. The riots are widely considered the watershed event that transformed the gay liberation movement and the twentieth-century fight for LGBT rights in the United States.
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The homophile movement is a collective term for the main organisations and publications supporting and representing sexual minorities in the 1950s to 1960s around the world. The name comes from the term homophile, which was commonly used by these organisations. At least some of these organisations are considered to have been more cautious than both earlier and later LGBT organisations; in the US, the nationwide coalition of homophile groups disbanded after older members clashed with younger members who had become more radical after the Stonewall riots of 1969.
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Craig L. Rodwell was an American gay rights activist known for founding the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on November 24, 1967, the first bookstore devoted to gay and lesbian authors, and as the prime mover for the creation of the New York City pride demonstration. Rodwell is considered by some to be the leading gay rights activist in the early homophile movement of the 1960s.
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Clark Philip Polak was an American businessman, publisher, journalist, and LGBT activist.
The Janus Society was an early homophile organization founded in 1962 and based in Philadelphia. It is notable as the publisher of Drum magazine, one of the earliest gay publications in the United States and the one most widely circulated in the 1960s, and for its role in organizing many of the nation's earliest LGBT rights demonstrations. The Janus Society takes its name from the Roman two-faced God Janus of beginnings, endings, and doorways. The organization focused on a policy of militant respectability, a strategy demanding respect by showing the public gay individuals conforming to hetero-normative standards of dress at protests.
A zap is a form of political direct action that came into use in the 1970s in the United States. Popularized by the early gay liberation group Gay Activists Alliance, a zap was a raucous public demonstration designed to embarrass a public figure or celebrity while calling the attention of both gays and straights to issues of gay rights.
New York City has been described as the gay capital of the world, and is home to one of the world’s largest LGBTQ populations and the most prominent. Brian Silverman, the author of Frommer's New York City from $90 a Day, wrote the city has "one of the world's largest, loudest, and most powerful LGBT communities", and "Gay and lesbian culture is as much a part of New York's basic identity as yellow cabs, high-rise buildings, and Broadway theatre". LGBT travel guide Queer in the World states, "The fabulosity of Gay New York is unrivaled on Earth, and queer culture seeps into every corner of its five boroughs". LGBT advocate and entertainer Madonna stated metaphorically, “Anyways, not only is New York City the best place in the world because of the queer people here. Let me tell you something, if you can make it here, then you must be queer.”
Frédéric André Sargeant is a French-American gay rights activist and former lieutenant with the Stamford CT Police Department. He participated in each of the nights of the 1969 Stonewall riots and was one of the four co-founders of the first Gay Pride march in New York City in 1970. He was vice-chairman of the Homophile Youth Movement at the time.
Ellen Broidy is an American gay rights activist. She was one of the proposers and a co-organizer the first gay pride march.
The Homophile Action League (HAL) was established in 1968 in Philadelphia as part of the Homophile movement in the United States. The organization advocated for the rights of the LGBT community and served as a predecessor to the Gay Liberation Front.
References
- ↑ ECHO Monthly, 26 Jan.-1 Sept., 1963
- ↑ Ken Travis, “Confidential Reporter Attends First Homosexual Convention in U.S History,” Confidential, Jan. 1964, 26-27
- ↑ Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
- ↑ Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves
- ↑ Sargeant, Fred. "1970: A First-Person Account of the First Gay Pride March." The Village Voice. June 22, 2010. retrieved January 3, 2011.
- ↑ Dudley Clendinen; Adam Nagourney (30 July 2013). Out For Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in Ame. Simon and Schuster. pp. 46–47. ISBN 978-1-4767-4071-3.