The Stonewall Inn, in 1969, from The New York Times.
By way of the fantastic Frank Rich, who writes a great piece on the progress we’ve made — and not made, the sentence for the day actually is forty years old:
Hundreds of young men went on a rampage in Greenwich Village shortly after 3 A.M. yesterday after a force of plainclothes men raided a bar that the police said was wellknown for its homosexual clientele.
Reflecting on that opening line from The New York Times‘ story covering the first night of the Stonewall riots, what will you do on the anniversary of Stonewall to advance the cause of equality?
As Rich concludes:
It’s a press cliché that “gay supporters” are disappointed with Obama, but we should all be. Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places.
As I was reminded, be sure to read this related piece in the NYT from Adam Nagourney.
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Chris Geidner is the senior political writer at D.C.'s Metro Weekly and has written for The Atlantic Online, Advocate.com, Salon and other publications, as well as at his blog, Law Dork. Prior to moving to D.C. in 2009, he served as an attorney on the senior staff at the Ohio Attorney General's Office and had earlier worked for a leading Columbus law firm. An extended biography can be found