KNOWLES: The Dirty Truth About ‘Stonewall’ That LGBTQ Activists Want Ignored

Pride Month is the Ramadan of sexual revolutionaries, and the Stonewall Inn is its Mecca.

On June 28, 1970, a group of LGBT activists staged the first “Pride Parade” in New York to mark the anniversary of the “Stonewall Riots” the previous year. The riots began, the story goes, after homophobic police raided the Stonewall Inn, one of the few “safe spaces” in which homosexuals could meet before the social movements of the 1960s and ‘70s liberated them from the oppression of traditional American society. The put-upon club-goers responded to the raid by rioting. Some threw rocks and bottles at the cops. Others lit garbage cans on fire. At least one person uprooted a parking meter and used it as a battering ram. According to the popular narrative, the proprietors and patrons of Stonewall had committed no crime but the love that dare not speak its name.