Never Just a Party A3 Print

Description

At the end of the 1960s, while many countries around the world had decriminalised being gay, it was still a crime in New York. On the 28th June 1969, the NYPD raided the Stonewall Inn.

Although police raids were a regular occurrence, this one didn’t go as planned, as the women in the room, cis, trans and drag queens, refused to submit to demeaning gender ‘checks’ by the police. When a police officer shoved a drag queen, she hit him with her purse.

As the police became increasingly violent,  Stormé DeLarverie, a ‘butch lesbian’ shouted “Why don’t you guys do something?”, and the patrons being brutalised by the police began to resist.

The ensuing riot is broadly recognised as the founding moment of the gay rights movement.

Although it’s not clear who actually threw the first brick, (or Molotov cocktail), during the riots, there is a folk myth that either Marsha P Johnson or Sylvia Riviera, who later went on to found the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), were the first to fight back.

With the current resurgence in homophobia and transphobia in both the US and UK, this piece was created to remind people how gay rights were won, and that any celebration of those rights needs to come with a commitment to defend them.

If you are based outside of the UK, or simply unable to afford a print, the ‘printable’ version of this image is available free of charge here