While Stonewall has come to represent a revolution, in which queer and transgender people fought back against the state and a society that participated in or had become complacent to the violence against them, it did not happen in a vacuum. However, while those events helped strengthen and consolidate the more radical impulses of previous movements for gender and sexual non-conformists, the description above was not written with Stonewall in mind. The “Stonewall riots” have been at the center of the queer imagination in the United States and abroad for decades. While lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) history is still only rarely taught outside of specialized courses in colleges and universities (although that is beginning to change), many Americans might think they know when and where this raid happened: June 1969, at New York City’s Stonewall Inn. The club became a site of resistance against the city’s conservative forces. It ultimately helped build community among those whom law enforcement could harass and arrest for wearing clothes not associated with their sex, for vagrancy, for lewd and lascivious behavior, or for any other of the broad charges they used to criminalize queer people during the era. In the long run, however, the raid had unintended consequences.
