Every Pride Month, we celebrate the visibility, contributions and history of the LGBTQ community. It takes place in June to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, an event that began with a police raid of a gay bar in Greenwich Village that resulted in five days of demonstrations by LGBTQ people and others and helped spark a new phase in the LGBTQ movement.
Yet, while Stonewall had major historic ramifications, change came slowly. In fact, police raids persisted throughout the country. For instance, in 1982, police raided the Blues Bar, a working-class African American LGBTQ bar in Times Square.
The Blues Bar raid, the protest it triggered and the failure of New York’s government to offer justice to the victims teach us a different multiracial history than the one we learn from Stonewall. The historical amnesia of the Blues Bar raid reveals something fundamentally flawed in the way that LGBTQ history has been told and provides lessons for the push for equality moving forward.
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