To the Editor:
The 40th anniversary of gay young people fighting back against the police at the Stonewall bar is something worth celebrating. And next year’s 60th anniversary of the gay civil rights movement will be worth celebrating, too — despite the persistent myth, often repeated in the pages of The New York Times, that it all began at Stonewall. It didn’t.
The gay civil rights movement was founded in 1950 in Los Angeles by eight men who had the crazy idea (certainly crazy in 1950) that gay people deserved to live free from vilification and discrimination. Stating that it began at Stonewall would be akin to saying the black civil rights movement began with Rosa Parks’s refusing to give up her seat.
Both of these brave and inspiring key moments in history are important, potent symbols, even pivotal — the start of something, but certainly not the birth of the movements they helped to energize.
Eric Marcus
New York, June 28, 2009
The writer is the author of “Making Gay History,” a history of the gay civil rights movement.
