The Stonewall Inn, shown here in 2005, was designated on the State and National Registers of Historic Places in 2016 to commemorate the importance of the 1969 uprising in the gay liberation movement. Although members of the gay community were divided in their opinions about the riot, hundreds of people returned to the scene for the next several nights, some to continue violent opposition to the police and others to express their sexuality in public for the first time. Rocks and bottles were thrown, a car was overturned, garbage was set on fire, and police and bystanders were injured. Several hundred people gathered to watch the police attempting to arrest patrons of the business, and as the crowd’s response escalated from mockery to anger, the mood shifted and violence and destruction erupted inside the bar and in the street. On June 28, 1969, a group of LGBTQ people resisted and then fought back after the police attempted to raid their bar, the Stonewall Inn, in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
The exact date of the Compton’s Cafeteria uprising remains unknown, but it did predate a better-known event called the Stonewall Uprising, which lasted six days. The next evening, protestors gathered in front of Compton’s Cafeteria to mark their resistance to oppression.Ī plaque marking the location of the 1966 riots at Compton’s Cafeteria. The customers fought the police, throwing coffee cups, smashing plates, and breaking windows. When the police arrived at Compton’s to arrest the people for loitering, an uprising ensued. They congregated at the Compton’s Cafeteria because gay bars often were hostile to them and prohibited them from hanging out there. In August 1966, the police raided Compton’s Cafeteria, a hangout for mostly transgender and queer people in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, after the owners of the cafeteria had complained that transgender people were loitering there. His analysis broke down rigidly held categories of sexuality and empowered many gay people to fight for social change.īy the 1960s, a new wave of social activism, fueled by the civil rights movement and other social movements, inspired them to resist oppression and discriminatory laws. Kinsey broke ground by discussing a taboo subject in frank terms. A rating of zero meant “exclusively heterosexual” and a rating of six meant “exclusively homosexual.” Kinsey rejected most people’s self-identification at either end of the spectrum because their other answers indicated that they often fell somewhere in between. To evaluate sexual activities, Kinsey used a scale that assigned a number from zero to six to rate sexual urges.
He interviewed more than 8,000 men and argued that sexuality existed on a spectrum, saying that it could not be confined to simple categories of homosexual and heterosexual. Like Magnus Hirschfield and other scholars who studied sexuality, including Havelock Ellis, a prominent British scholar who published research on transgender psychology, Kinsey believed sexuality could be studied as a science.
Gay people organized to resist oppression and demand just treatment, and they were especially galvanized after a New York City police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, sparked riots in 1969.Īround the same time, biologist Alfred Kinsey began a massive study of human sexuality in the United States. The feminist movement, the Black Power movement, the environmental movement, the Chicano movement, and the American Indian Movement sought equality, rights, and empowerment in American society.
Use this Narrative with the César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers Narrative and the American Indian Activism and the Siege of Wounded Knee Narrative while discussing the various civil rights movements occurring during the 1970s.Īfter World War II, the civil rights movement had a profound impact on other groups demanding their rights.