Obama Designates Gay Bar As National Monument. Here Are 7 Things You Need To Know About Stonewall.

President Barack Obama has designated the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, as a national monument. Here are seven things you need to know about it.

1. The 1969 Stonewall Uprising was the “catalyst” for the gay rights movement.

“The Stonewall Uprising is considered by many to be the catalyst that launched the modern L.G.B.T. civil rights movement,” Obama wrote in a proclamation. “From this place and time, building on the work of many before, the nation started the march — not yet finished — toward securing equality and respect for L.G.B.T. people.”

The White House also said in a news release that the uprising was the result of the police “trying to enforce a prohibition against selling alcoholic drinks to ‘homosexuals.'”

But that’s not exactly the full story.

2. Stonewall began as a heterosexual restaurant and nightclub in the 1950s. This is according to gay rights activist Martin Duberman, who wrote in his book Stonewall that the restaurant had several iterations in the Fifties as a “straight restaurant” until…

3. Stonewall was run by the Mafia. Three Mafia members – identified by Duberman as “Mario,” “Fat Tony” Lauria and “Zucchi” – turned Stonewall into a gay bar in the late Sixties with the support of the Genovese crime family. At the time, gay bars were illegal under New York state law, giving the Mafia the opportunity to provide underground gay bars as a means for the crime syndicates to turn a profit.

Under the Mafia’s reign, Stonewall “had no fire exits, no running water to wash glasses, and the toilets routinely overflowed” and “the drinks were atrocious,” according to C. Alexander Hortis’s book The Mob and the City: The Hidden History of How the Mafia Captured New York. Since the bar was operating illegally, Stonewall did not have a liquor license and the Mafia bought-off policemen to look the other way. The bar’s employees and a number of guests were frequent drug users as well.

4. Stonewall was the target of a raid by the police because the Mafia was using the bar to run a “blackmail ring” against “gay patrons who worked on Wall Street.” This and the fact that they didn’t have a liquor license is what Police Department Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine told author Lucian Truscott IV in a New York Times column was why the police decided to launch a raid against Stonewall. Truscott wrote that the possibility of the Mafia running a “blackmail ring” out of Stonewall was “likely,” which is given more credence by this piece in Slate.

5. The raid is what sparked the Stonewall Uprising. Pine reportedly said, “We weren’t concerned about the gays. We were concerned about the Mafia,” and Hortis argues that “the gay patrons bloodied that night by billy clubs were mostly just in the wrong place.”

The gay community’s strained relationship with the police reached its breaking point when the police put a lesbian and three drag queens into a paddy wagon. The gay community felt the Stonewall raid was part of a wide targeting of gay clubs, even though the raid was conducted without the local police’s knowledge, since Pine suspected they were paid off. But once those four people were put in the paddy wagon, the result was a riot that left two injured police officers, followed by numerous days of protests and the formation of the Gay Liberation Front and other gay rights organizations.

6. Older gays found the behavior of the younger gay activists in the riots to be off-putting. That’s what they reportedly told Truscott, as they were not amused by the activists “taunting” the cops with chants like: “We are the Stonewall girls, we wear our hair in curls!”:

Many of the older gay men lived largely closeted lives, had careers to protect and years of experience with discrimination. They believed the younger generation’s behavior would lead to even more oppression.

In part, at least, they were correct. It would take several more years before major New York political figures came out in favor of employment anti-discrimination laws, and much longer before other gay rights would be realized.

7. Stonewall has already been designated as a landmark by New York City.