Stonewall

Martin Duberman's Stonewall should be required reading for everyone in the US. Perhaps I exaggerate a tad, but he zeros in on a singular event in US civil rights history and creates a classic piece of historical reading. Yes, LGBT struggles for acceptance and justice is part of our civil rights movement in the United States, along with the United Farm workers, Martin Luther King, Paul Robeson and the Equal Rights Amendment. I grew up across the Bay from San Francisco/Castro so the LGBT was never an alien concept to me, yet even in the Bay Area homophobia existed and still does. This book explains why LGBT people are still fighting for rights that many straight people either disregard as essential or simply don't think "those people" deserve. The book also explains why LGBT people can't 'hide' their minority sttaus and uniqueness the way many people think they can or expect them to. Best of all though, Duberman is a gay historian who does NOT want 'to be straight.' Just as his most famous biographical subject, the African America radical entertainer, Paul Robeson, did not want to be white. It sounds simple but it's a very important factor in why he's perhaps this countries' greatest historian. The photos are amazing, the book is exciting, as a straight woman, I cried tears of sadness and joy--don't miss out!

"Suddenly they were not submissive anymore" - Deputy Inspector Pine, who commanded the Stonewall raid. Not a definite account, but a novel one, filled with 'great men and women of history,' sometimes participating, sometimes observing. Author Duberman traces the consciousness leading up to Stonewall-era Gay Power and Liberation through a carefully-selected (and politically correct) lens: the old gay guard, the new gay guard, the lesbian take, the TG take and the black take. It rather adds up to the ostentatiously diverse format of the X-Men, and reads as entertainingly. Jim Fouratt is the 'Wolverine' of the group, and the dramatic center of the narrative, representing "the new kind of gay man beginning to emerge: the hippie, long-haired, bell-bottomed, laid-back, and likely to have 'weird,' radical views" - which, by association, places Stonewall securely into the mythology of the Sixties. The bar itself is colorfully described as sleazy and small, much like William Burroughs' Interzone. No doubt, the acute history of the June 27-29 actions, recounted 'journalistically' here, are, and will be, forever debated, amended and venerated for many a decade to come. Not a conclusive take, but one with a compelling pace. Great stuff.

Yes, this is nonfiction. No, it is not in the least boring. By taking the history of a truly legendary event and splitting it up into 6 different personal histories, it becomes one big story made up of littler stories (obviously). Like an intricate quilt...each of the stories or patches is interesting and exciting enough but when added to others it becomes a really great story (quilt). Okay...that was probably a really corny analogy and not deserving of this awesome book. Obviously Stonewall was the defining moment of the early gay rights movement so at times it can probably take on mythic proportions but when told through the eyes and mouths of these six altogether different and unique people it never becomes anything more than the human struggle and triumph that it was. Comparing the events that happened in this book, and today, you have to be a fool to think that nothing has been accomplished. So much has. But so much more remains to be done. Pick up this book and discover the experience that is Stonewall.

I loved this book...I read it once in my free time for myself and then we used it for my Social Movements class, which was amazing. We had gay and straight, male and female, reading this book and understanding why Stonewall occurred and why the gay and lesbian movement must continue. It was truly monumental...

As a veteran of the opression of the Gay rights movement, I am gladdened to see the story of my brothers told in such a respectful way. I was there in 1969, alone and afraid, unable to communicate my true self to my friends and family. Well, Stonewall changed all that. Today because of the doors kicked open, I can be who I am, a gay, father of three with a great job and a responsible position in municipal government. Read this book if you don't know your roots, it'll change your life.