How Gay Pride and Black Power Shaped Me
Fifty years after the riots, the Stonewall effect remains strong.
I remember the first time I ever walked into Stonewall.
It was 1991, and I was 22 years old. I had just moved to New York City. As I sipped the first of several gin and tonics at the Greenwich Village watering hole, I had no idea that my perch by the bar was located at ground zero of a protest the same age as me: a 1969 riot that launched Gay Pride as we know it.
Although memorabilia on the walls commemorated the landmark uprising, I was more interested in the handsome 33-year-old bartender flirting with me.
I’ll always connect Stonewall to the beautiful stranger who made my first drinks there. However, today it’s significant to me for reasons that have less to do with that night’s crowd than the one gathered at its precursor, The Stonewall Inn, 22 years earlier, on the night that would change the lives of the gay and lesbian community in the next decade and for decades to come.
A different era
Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong era. I wonder what it would have been like to have struggled and fought alongside the brave blacks and brave gays in the ’60s, to be able to pinpoint where I was when I knew that as a black man…
