Louder Than A Riot

the community. Thomasin lived at a time when gender existed in a rigid binary, with the two in opposition to each other. Men had their clothes and their social scripts, and women did too, But the record tells us that Thomasine existed somewhat fluidly changing their dress, performance, and pronouns to suit the moment. At the trial, Thomisine claimed to have both male and female genitalia, insisting that they were

both a man and a woman. Thomisine underwent a number of exams and different inspectors drew different conclusions, but what we now believe is that Thomasin was likely an intersex person. Determining a single gender for Hall felt essential to the community, but the court couldn't figure out a satisfying answer, so it came up with a solution. Instead of forcing Thomasine to abide by a single set of gender norms, the

court would enforce a simultaneous performance of both. The court decreed that Thomisine must wear a combination of men and women's clothing forevermore think trousers, but under an apron Doing so was meant to humiliate Thomasine and rob them of the chance to ever blend in fully with society again. Queerness was not an idea that existed in the early days of the colonies, but as the colonies developed, so too did the idea of what it meant to be

a man or a woman. In the late sixteen hundreds, English philosopher John Locke wrote about the concept of a tabula rasa or blank slate, which suggested that humans were not born with inherent traits, but instead were shaped by their environment. This idea began to take hold in colonial America, and people started to understand that gender wasn't solely determined

by biology, but rather by social and cultural factors. However, as we saw with Thomisin in that time and place, those factors resulted in a strict social code, and as the concept of gender became more rigid, so too did the expectations of sexual behavior. In the seventeen hundreds, same sex relationships were not necessarily seen as immoral, but rather

as a deviation. As medicine professionalized into the mid eighteen hundreds, the term homosexual was coined, and with it, the idea of same sex attraction was defined as a pathological condition. For the stories we're telling today, we're using the reclaimed umbrella term queer, even though it may feel a bit ahistorical to cover all people with so called non normative

sexual and gender identities. People of the past didn't have access to our current language and concepts, and we should acknowledge that it's usually impossible to know how an individual would have used these terms if they were available to them.

We know that many people throughout history experienced same gender attraction and or felt a disconnect from their gender as assigned at birth, but there's a vast gulf in language and culture that lets us only speculate most of the time about who these people were and what they felt. Queer people have always been here, but in the long arc of history, queerness has only very recently become a battleground. I'm lorn vogelbam, Welcome to American shadows. America has never

truly been the land of the free. Since the time of colonization, wealthy Anglo Saxon landholding men have been fighting to keep themselves in power for hundreds of years. The laws they created carefully upheld their positions, often making existence precarious for people who weren't like them. Love and those who were lucky enough to find it was likewise a

tightly governed experience. By the mid sixteen hundreds, the American colonies decreed that any man committing the unnatural and lascivious act of sodomy, meaning either bestiality or anal sex between

anyone regardless of gender, could be by death. By eighteen seventy three, Congress passed a federal antisodomy law that applied to the District of Columbia and US territories, which threatened any convicted party with up to ten years in prison, and all the while, a constellation of state laws have been codified around fraternizing with members of the same gender. The enforcement of these laws was often characterized by brutality, but even still, queer folks found ways to find each other,

a first privately and then more publicly. As the tides of acceptance shifted into the nineteen hundreds, many gathered at discreete watering holes, members only clubs, and cafes. Pockets of queerness existed wherever people lived, but the critical masses gathered in the big cities. There are a number venues that vie for the title of the oldest gay bar in America,

which cite their inception back to the nineteen thirties. It's likely that similar establishments existed before then, although they weren't as visible or well documented. A long running and legendary favorite was The Child's Cafeteria off Columbus Circle in New York City. The city felt hard sometimes, but there in that one chain restaurant nicknamed Mother Child's, it felt safe, safe to sit, safe to stay, safe to be over endless cups of coffee. Patrons could often find the same

familiar faces of friends, lovers, family. It had the appeal of what sociologists call a third space, which is a location that's not home but not work, where the other part of your life is lived. One nineteen thirties visitor's guide to New York even highlighted it and said it features a dash of lavender, a coded language that suggested the true character of the place for anyone who was

tuned in for those who loved a spectacle. A handful of major cities also hosted spectacular drag balls that drew thousands of attendees. These were modeled on high society debutante balls, often hosting straight folks as spectators. According to one scholar, a wild dominant American society largely disapproved of these queer communities.

People sure did like a party. As the queer community gained visibility alongside other social movements, it began to take up more space, it became louder, and in doing so, it often made itself a target for the powers that hoped to keep them quiet. In nineteen sixty four, Life magazine described the relationship between the police and the queer

community in San Francisco as a running battle. They reported that a collective effort was underway by the department to educate their force on how to readily identify a gay person, they published and distributed internal materials warning of a gay agenda. Zine went on to say that while the stance by the LAPD was unswervingly tough, they believed it reflected the

larger collective attitudes of most American police departments. The article also quotes LAPD inspector James Fisk as saying, we're barely touching the surface of the problem. The pervert is no longer as secretive as he was. He's aggressive, and his aggressiveness is getting worse because of more homosexual activity. A year after that article was published in Life magazine, a New Year's Day costume ball was held at California Hall

in San Francisco. Around six hundred people had purchased tickets to raise money for the newly formed Council on Religion and the Homosexual an organization meant to advocate against discrimination with the help of religious leaders. The party planners and at ten dees alike knew it was bound to be controversial.

Police had been known to use any kind of touching by members of the same sex as a reason to arrest and prosecute them, but those who attended the ball that day did so enthusiastically, knowing they were taking a stand, and although the queer activists warned them not to, the ministers were upfront and told San Francisco police about their upcoming event, potentially hoping for some kind of honest truce. Naturally, the police tried to make them cancel it, the organizers refused.

The night of the ball, police officers circled the hall in their cruisers. They took photographs of everyone going in and out, and were rumored to have brought large movie cameras. When the cops demanded to be allowed into the hall, lawyers who were present on behalf of the council, asked to see a search warrant. Three of the lawyers, as well as the woman selling tickets, were arrested on charges

of obstructing an officer. The police were accustomed to exerting this type of power over the queer community and expected the typical lack of consequences that came with it. But the next day the council's ministers held a press conference. There they excl created the police, accusing them of deliberate harassment,

bad faith, and obvious hostility. The Americans for Civil Liberties Union or ACLU got involved, and the case came to trial in February of nineteen sixty five, and before the defense could even present its case, the judge declared a not guilty verdict. He declared to the court that this was a waste of everyone's time. The queer community in San Francisco perceived this as a turning point. Many felt encouraged and believed that they were starting to be taken

seriously by the mainstream. The movement was gaining a visible and collective foothold, moving from the fringes into a larger, interconnected web of social movements. This would not be the last skirmish, but the police far from it. The following New Year's Eve of nineteen sixty six, the Black Cat Club was set to host another ball. There were balloons and confetti and revelry, a confidence that the community found in safety in large numbers. That is, until it was

revealed that the police weren't waiting for them outside. They had already crossed the threshold and infiltrated the party. Roughly five minutes after the New year began, the cops made themselves known. They flipped on all of the lights. One officer unplugged the jukebox, while another began tearing down the Christmas decorations, still adorning the bar. The later reports said that their only identification was their duty weapons. Poor substitute,

if there ever was one. Reports say that they blocked the exits and began to beat the patrons. The raid lasted ten minutes. Of these sixteen men arrested that night, six were convicted of lewd conduct, which meant that the state of California could require them to register as sex offenders. Two of those men, Charles Tally and Benny Baker, were in fact placed on the states first in the nation, sex offender registry. They had been caught kissing other men

at the party. They appealed the decision, even petitioning Supreme Court, which decided not to consider the case. Meanwhile, the police painted themselves as the victims, including a claim that three officers were injured, with one being hospitalized. In February of nineteen sixty seven, a queer newsletter named Pride headlined their story CoP's Start bar brawl, A word spread quickly around the country. By September of that year, the publication had

morphed into The Advocate, which still exists today. The Black cat raid was cited as an impetus for creating the first national, mass circulation gay newspaper, The Advocate became a central tool of the community. It collected and spread news of the gay rights movement faster and further than ever before, and it would end up playing a pivotal role in

informing readers and stoking passion in what came next. Tucked away behind a descript facade, the Stonewall Inn was the heart of queer New York, but by the end of June of nineteen sixty nine, the Stonewall Inn was about to become the epicenter of a movement. The two room establishment was dimly lit and cramped with a makeshift bar constructed from black painted plywood, a few stools, and a few water buckets used for rinsing dirty glasses. The liquor

was cheap, diluted, and plentiful. A single bare light bulb hung high on the wall, a flashing beacon that warned folks when a raid was eminent. It wasn't much, but to those who came, it was everything. The dance floor was small, but it was where the patrons came alive, letting loose in a world where they could be themselves

without fear of persecution. It was illegal in New York to serve gay people of let alone create a dedicated space for them, but the padding of police pockets by mafia owners helped subvert these policies, and the Stonewall Inn became a haven for those who had been forced to live in the shadows. They came to the Stonewall In to escape, to find community, and to express themselves in

a way that was impossible in the outside world. On Tuesday, June twenty fourth of nineteen sixty nine, police raided the Stonewall In for operating without a valid liquor license, arresting several employees and confiscating the boothe Because of a mafia police agreement, it was arranged that the typical raid would happen on a weeknight or well before midnight on a weekend, when fewer customers would be present. This was all standard

operating procedure, but this time something would be different. The police planned a second raid for the following weekend, which was part of a concerted campaign to shut down the village's mafia run gay bars. In the early hours of the following Saturday morning, they surprised the almost two hundred patrons inside when they came in and locked the doors behind them. They started calling for everyone to show in order to leave, targeting both employees and those dressed in

drag for arrest. A one patron who was there at the time described it almost like a hostage situation. According to the deputy police inspector in charge of the raid, a Seymour Pine, he hadn't been planning on arresting patrons until they started getting verbal pushback from the gender nonconforming portion of the crowd. A Pine, a World War Two veteran who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was a contributing author to the Army manual on Hand to Hand Combat, later said he had never been

more scared than he was that night. The police had grown increasingly aggressive in their harassment of the queer community. As the patrons were rounded up and filed out of the establishment. Instead of leaving, they stayed something ignited. They were tired of being pushed around, tired of being beaten and arrested for simply existing. Maybe it was just that the crowd inside had been bigger at most raids. Maybe

some patrons were waiting for their friends. Maybe the earlier raid on the stone Wall, combined with the recent raids and closures of several other bars in the village, was finally too much. As more and more people gathered outside. The people being released from the bar hammed it up for the assembled crowd, taking bows, throwing up their arms, and shouting one liners at the police. People began throwing pennies and beer cans, accompanied by shouts about paying off

the cops. Soon the tension had reached a breaking point. What happened next has been widely disputed and mythologized. Someone through a brick, but the number of people who claimed to have thrown the first brick at Stonewall is staggering, as is the number who claimed to have been there, far more than the two hundred or so patrons or the others who gathered to watch. Some who were there estimated that the crowd numbered anywhere from around five hundred

to in thousands. The fell into bedlam. Punches were thrown, people were dragged, tires were slashed. The police eventually barricaded themselves inside the bar and called for backup. People began throwing things through the windows, bricks, makeshift moltov cocktails, trash. The crowd turned a parking meter into a battering ramp.

People would later express the feeling that Stonewall was their home and the attempt to break down the doors represented their need to take back a space that was theirs. Reinforcements in the form of fire trucks and riot cops eventually arrived, and the cops barricaded in the Stonewall In were able to exit along with the restees trapped inside. However, the crowd was still large and had no intention of leaving. Fire Hoses were used at an attempt to disperse them.

Cops began hitting protesters with billy clubs and dragging them into squad cars. As dawn broke, the street was covered in shattered glass. Cops still stood at attention, and groups of rioters lingered in the nearby park and some with improvised bandages over bleeding cuts. The news spread rapidly through New York City. The following day, Protests continued outside the bar on and off for six days. Groups of queer people showed up outside the Stonewall Inn, facing off with

and taunting the assembled police. Demonstrators blocked off the road, shouting Christopher Street belongs to the Queen's and liberate the street. The poet Alan Ginsburg, having heard about the riots, showed up on Sunday night to a smaller and calmer crowd. He was delighted by the energy in the air and visited the Stonewall Inn for the first time, still open but reduced to giving away soda for free, where he

danced with abandon. This wasn't the first police raid or protest in a queer community, and it certainly wouldn't be the last, but the Stonewall Riot was a turning point in the fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, asexual, and otherwise queer rights, and it marked the birth of

the modern day queer liberation movement. Today, one of our primary metaphors around queerness draws from the visual of a closet, and if you're a queer person, you might be in it or coming out of it, or perhaps you're actively outside of it. But this is a newer turn of phrase, having only shown up in the nineteen sixties. Then and earlier, coming out had a larger implication, like a debutante, one

was coming out into the gay world. The closet door becomes a portal to a world poised with open arms. A month after the riots, on July twenty seventh of nineteen sixty nine, a group of about five hundred people joined a vigil and marched in Greenwich Village Demonstrator's Mind. Activists gave speeches and shouts of gay power echoed through the streets. News of what happened at the Stonewall Inn spread across the country, in part thanks to The Advocate,

which reprinted local reporting about the riots. The community was catalyzed. Even still, Stonewall Inn couldn't hold on in the aftermath of the riot because it didn't have a liquor license. The venue tried to convert itself into a juice bar, but this venture failed, and just three months later, with dust settled and activists having gone home, the space went

up for lease. Over the next few decades, it morphed into all the different things in New Yorker could want, a bagel shop, a Chinese restaurant, and a shoe store, among them, But it would be a long time before the space once again became a safe place for the queer community to gather. Many local gay rights groups were invigorated by the events at Stonewall, and newly minted groups of younger folks took up the cause from their elders.

They created spaces for queer people to take part in gay run night life in an environment free from mafia control. On June twenty eighth of nineteen seventy, the Christopher Street Liberation Day March lined up at noon in Sheridan Square near the Inn and walked fifty blocks to Central Park's Sheep Meadow. Estimates of the crowd's size vary, but what started as a few hundred people quickly ballooned into several thousand as the march continued. That same day, in Los Angeles,

a Christopher Street West Parade marched down Hollywood Boulevard. The latter was more a spectacle than a march, with the Los Angeles Times later reporting queens and drag ferries with paper wings, clowns, leather jacketed motorcyclists, a lesbian on horseback, a python, white huskies, American flags, hilarious and somber signs and chants, and a float depicting a homosexual nailed to

a cross ape. Smaller group marched in San Francisco. Over the years, more and more cities began holding parades to coincide with the anniversary of the Stonewall Riot, first Boston, then London, then Washington, d c. Those nights at the Inn became a beacon for people the world over, a source of inspiration and courage that's still drawn from a. Germany, for example, calls their annual Pride celebration Christopher Street Day, an homage to the New York City street where American

queer history changed forever. Eventually, in the early nineteen nineties, part of the space that had been the Stonewall Inn became a bar again and was once again re christened. In nineteen ninety nine, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in two thousand became a National Historic Landmark, where you too can go enjoy a cold drink and a slice of history to this very day, safely, legally and with whomever you so choose. There's more to

this story. Stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. Activism doesn't always take place in the streets. It also takes place in the home. In the nineteen seventies, Mary Jane Rathbun was a fifty somethingter iye hop waitress with a side hustle. She was a grandmotherly type, but perhaps only as far as the gray hair and glasses went. She was known to swear like a sailor, hang out in radical left wing circles, and

sell pot brownies. She would carry a big basket of her wares and sell direct consumers in San Francisco's cast Her district for two bucks a pop or a dozen for twenty. She also did brisk business with Dennis Perone's legendary Big Top cannabis supermarket and the legal dispensary run out of a Castro apartment. She drummed up business by posting ads on bulletin boards describing her brownies as magically delicios.

As she had noticed that, in addition to getting people high, those with chronic illness symptoms seemed to receive relief from her brownies, she began giving them away for free to her sick neighbors. Amary inspired a loyal following her only daughter had been killed by a drunk driver, and soon her neighbors became her adopted kids, and many of them were young gay men who had come to San Francisco

to find their chosen family. Soon growers began donating to help keep her brownie business in the game as she left ihop after a fall and began working in her kitchen full time. She was fifty seven when she was

first arrested. According to the San Francisco Examiner, after her first arrest in January of nineteen eighty one, a police seized and i quote, twenty pounds of high grade marijuana, the quantities of psilocybin, mushrooms, cocaine, and second all of thirty five pounds of margarine, twenty five pounds of sugar, twenty five pounds of flour, twenty two dozen eggs, and twenty one thousand square feet of plastic wrap, in addition

to fifty four dozen freshly baked brownies. It was the same year that AIDS began to be widely reported in the United States. After completing her mandatory community service, she began devoting much of her time to volunteer work and baking, committing herself to a life of service. She was furious at the government's in action in the AIDS crisis, which had already killed many of her adopted kids from the castro.

Mary became a fixture of the Shanty Project a hospice program for folks with terminal illness, including HIV and AIDS. She took care of the patients there in any way she could, picking up medication, shopping, and bringing food, and she continued to bake those brownies. Soon she was baking dozens a month and distributing them to everyone in need.

She started volunteering at San Francisco General Hospital's Ward eighty six, the country's first to outpatient clinic for people living with AIDS, In nineteen eighty six, she won her first of four Volunteer of the Year awards. In nineteen ninety two, she was once again arrested while baking, but her time wasn't up. She was sixty eight years old, and her attitude catapulted

her to fame. The Sonoma County District Attorney was determined to convict Mary like any other marijuana dealer, a sentence of about five years in prison, but Mary refused to take the deal and insisted on going to trial. Meanwhile, San Francisco declared an official Brownie Mary Day and referred

to her as the city's Mother Teresa. She was insistent that giving away pop brownies to those suffering from illness was the right thing to do and pleaded not guilty while wearing a gold pot leaf necklace and a pot patterned sweater. The judge was not amused. Mary got out on bail and continued to be vocal expletives and all about the medicinal use of the plan. People from San Francisco and beyond rallied behind her. The DA ended up dropping all of his charges, fearing an attempted challenge to

cannabis's legal status. In the end, Mary helped countless scores of people in her immediate orbit and beyond in the state of California would go on to legalize the plant for medicinal uses in nineteen ninety six. As for Mary, she passed away in nineteen ninety nine, and when she did, her brownie recipe went with.