From Publishers Weekly
While the centerpiece here is undoubtedly his hour-by-hour relating of the explosive June 1969 riots, Carter, an editor of Allen Ginsberg's interviews (Spontaneous Mind, 20o1), also provides an extended prelude that highlights the places, activists and others who come to play key roles. Carter's beloved Greenwich Village and what he calls its "queer geography," which enabled gay culture to form, flourish and consolidate itself, emerges as an inimitable, finely detailed hero. But for Carter, the most audacious, energetic and enterprising of riot participants were the drag queens, homeless queer youths and other gender transgressors whose position on the farthest margins of society enabled their radical response to oppression. What they and others managed to do, Carter renders with fresh care and enthusiasm, getting new quotes and offering unfamiliar perspectives, such as the Mafia's role both as a patron of the gay scene in New York City (including the Stonewall Inn, which it owned and operated) and as a blackmailer of famous homosexuals. He ends appropriately with the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance, as well as the first gay pride parade, held in June 1970. While it may distract readers interested only in the story of gay liberation, Carter's logistical history of what gay author Edmund White called "our Bastille Day" will become a permanent addition to the great histories of the civil rights era. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In the late 1960s, homosexual sex was illegal in every state but Illinois; now the news routinely covers the latest on gay marriages. So the subtitle says it all--or does it? The six days of riots sparked by police action in the early morning of June 28, 1969, against a popular Greenwich Village gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, constituted a homosexual "shot heard 'round the world" that transformed an American subculture. Carter's carefully researched, well-crafted writing portrays Stonewall as part of a larger civil and human rights movement and a spur to the gay rights movement. Stonewall precipitated great change--the formation of the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance, for instance--and that leads Carter to examine the socio-politico-cultural convergence that resulted in the riots. Hundred of interviews figure into Carter's thorough exploration that dispels long-held myths and provides fresh facts about a freedom fight some liken to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
In June of 1969, a series of riots over police action at The Stonewall Inn, a small, dank, mob-run gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York changed the longtime landscape of homosexuals in society, literally overnight. These riots are widely acknowledged as the 'first shot' that ushered in a previously unimagined era of openness, political action, and massive social change. From an era when lesbians and gays were routinely closeted and in fear of losing their jobs, their apartments, their families and even their freedom, these riots - barely covered in the media at the time - were the spark that led to a new militancy and openness in the gay political movement. The name "Stonewall" has itself become almost synonymous with the struggle for gay rights and, yet, there has been relatively little hard information generally available about the riots themselves.
For the first time, David Carter provides an in-depth account of those riots as well as a complete background of the bar, the area in which the riots occurred, the social, political, and legal climate that led up to those events. He also dispels many of the accumulated myths, provides previously unknown facts, and new insight into what is the most significant rebellion against the status quo until the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Based on over a decade of research, hundreds of interviews, and an exhaustive search of public and private records, Stonewall is the definitive story of one of modern history's most singular events.
About the Author
David Carter has had a varied career as a writer, editor, and filmmaker. He is the author of biographies of Salvador Dali and George Santayana, he edited and compiled Spontaneous Mind, a collection of interviews with Allen Ginsberg, and directed the film Meher Baba in Italy for Peter Townshend. Carter has a B.A. from Emory University and an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin. He is a resident of Greenwich Village in New York City.
Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution FROM THE PUBLISHER
"In June of 1969, a series of riots over police action at The Stonewall Inn, a small, dank, mob-run gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York changed the longtime landscape of homosexuals in society, literally overnight. These riots are widely acknowledged as the 'first shot' that ushered in a previously unimagined era of openness, political action, and massive social change. Coming during a time when lesbians and gays were routinely closeted and in fear of losing their jobs, their apartments, their families and even their freedom, these riots - barely covered in the media at the time - were the spark that led to a new militancy and openness in the gay political movement. The name "Stonewall" has itself become almost synonymous with the struggle for gay rights and yet there has been relatively little hard information generally available about the riots themselves." For the first time, David Carter provides an in-depth account of those riots as well as a complete background of the bar, the area in which the riots occurred, the social, political, and legal climate that led up to those events. He also dispels many of the accumulated myths, provides previously unknown facts, and new insight into what is the most significant rebellion against the status quo until the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Based on over a decade of research, hundreds of interviews, and an exhaustive search of public and private records, Stonewall is the story of one of modern history's most singular events.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
While the centerpiece here is undoubtedly his hour-by-hour relating of the explosive June 1969 riots, Carter, an editor of Allen Ginsberg's interviews (Spontaneous Mind, 2001), also provides an extended prelude that highlights the places, activists and others who come to play key roles. Carter's beloved Greenwich Village and what he calls its "queer geography," which enabled gay culture to form, flourish and consolidate itself, emerges as an inimitable, finely detailed hero. But for Carter, the most audacious, energetic and enterprising of riot participants were the drag queens, homeless queer youths and other gender transgressors whose position on the farthest margins of society enabled their radical response to oppression. What they and others managed to do, Carter renders with fresh care and enthusiasm, getting new quotes and offering unfamiliar perspectives, such as the Mafia's role both as a patron of the gay scene in New York City (including the Stonewall Inn, which it owned and operated) and as a blackmailer of famous homosexuals. He ends appropriately with the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance, as well as the first gay pride parade, held in June 1970. While it may distract readers interested only in the story of gay liberation, Carter's logistical history of what gay author Edmund White called "our Bastille Day" will become a permanent addition to the great histories of the civil rights era. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
On the sultry summer night of June 27, 1969, what began as a routine police raid on the Mafia-owned Stonewall Inn, a seedy but popular gay club in New York's Greenwich Village, escalated into an uprising that lasted six nights and kick-started the gay liberation movement in North America. In the first comprehensive chronicle of this mythic event since Martin Duberman's Stonewall (1993), freelance journalist Carter presents not only a blow-by-blow retelling of the fateful night and its aftermath but a detailed history of the Stonewall Inn and the forces that made Greenwich Village a lodestone for gays, where despite its permissive, bohemian reputation, the price for free expression of gay sexuality was social and legal persecution and the mean-streets realities of drugs, crime, and death. The author depicts the Stonewall riots as a unique convergence of time, place, and circumstance and performs some gentle revisionism on the received version of events, emphasizing the contributions of lesbians and street youth while downplaying, but not discounting, the role of drag queens. Carter's gripping narrative supersedes Duberman's as the definitive account, and his urban history compares favorably with Charles Kaiser's The Gay Metropolis. Highly recommended.-Richard J. Violette, Special Libs. Cataloguing, Victoria, B.C. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A history of the week that forged a revolution and brought aboveground a thriving subculture. Freelancer Carter's debut focuses primarily on detailing the events of those six stormy days in 1969, but Carter first delineates homosexual life in New York during that period to explain exactly why Stonewall exploded. He discusses the evolution of Greenwich Village as a bohemian enclave and Christopher Street as a milieu for gay culture. Perhaps because New York had particularly harsh anti-homosexual laws, he surmises, the city spawned some of the first gay and lesbian activist societies. Carter considers Stonewall itself a fusion event. Certainly the riot was a product of the charged political and social scene of the late '60s, but it's also significant that the raid took place on a summer Friday, late enough at night so that lots of the many customers had downed a good few drinks by the time the cops arrived. The slowness of the raid and the inspired, furious resistance of a few patrons who would not go quietly into the paddy wagons meant that the customers' friends had plenty of time to assemble at Stonewall, the city's largest gay bar, located in what was for all purposes a gay ghetto, at the center of a nexus of transportation that made getting there easy. The gathering crowd was in a militant mood. For Morty Manfred, a gay Columbia student who was at Stonewall that night, as for many others, one question had to be answered: "Why do we have to put up with this shit?" They didn't, and six days later gays and lesbians had proven that point. Considering all that went before, the ongoing repression and corruption, and the scent of social and political liberation in the air, Carter's eloquentaccount makes it clear that something was bound to catch fire. Stonewall's unique place in the gay community made it an obvious tinderbox. A complete, full-bodied portrait, with lots of flesh on the bones of a strong narrative structure. (8 b&w photos, not seen)
Art & Photography
Book Info
