Foreword
There’s an old joke about Woodstock that could just as easily apply to Stonewall. Basically, it says that if everyone who claims to have been there had really been there, the crowd size would be equal to the population of a not-so-small European country. Funny—and true. Why do so many of us who were alive and aware in 1969 feel like we were at Stonewall or Woodstock? Probably because both these events, which happened only two months apart, were such huge cultural milestones that they transcended a place or a date. They washed over us like a tsunami, changing the landscape of our lives forever. And although they were gatherings attended by relatively few, they changed everything for millions of people worldwide.
So it’s logical that the first question Jane asks all her interviewees in The Stonewall Generation is “Where were you on the night of June 28, 1969?” And this time everyone who’s asked tells the truth, including us:
On June 28, 1969, Kate was sitting quietly in their car, staring up at a moose who was standing in the middle of the Trans-Canada Highway. She was going to San Francisco. Kate had missed 1967’s Summer of Love and was going in search of sloppy seconds. Surely, there would still be hippies and hippie chicks lining the sidewalks of Haight Ashbury. At the time, Kate was a hippie boy who wanted to be a hippie chick: twenty-one years old, just out of college, and about to start graduate school in the fall. The only trans people Kate’s age who were out of the closet were drag queens,street fairies and butch women who passed as men. Most of them lived on the streets; that was the cost of being a gender outlaw in 1969. Trans wasn’t even a word yet—the phenomenon of transsexuality was barely noticed by the mainstream media. Kate called themself a freak, but they didn’t want the rest of the world calling them a freak too. Hippie boys could grow their hair long and wear pretty headbands, bell bottoms, and flowered shirts. Kate would have to make do with her delight in that small piece of gender freedom for a while. Kate wouldn’t hear about Stonewall for another fifteen years.
Barbara was a teenager in Newport, Rhode Island, deeply mourning the death of Judy Garland while celebrating her first professional theater job as an apprentice with a local summer stock company. She doesn’t recall hearing about Stonewall in any meaningful way until the following winter when she became friends with Paul, a twenty-something gay sound designer at her community theatre. He was ecstatic about the possibilities that the Stonewall Riots and gay liberation, as they were called at the time, would bring, and his enthusiasm was infectious. Interestingly enough, the thing Barbara and Paul were most passionate about being liberated from was marriage. They were convinced that gay people would be able to model a lifestyle that would convince straight people that marriage was outmoded and anti-liberation. (Ah well . . . win some, lose some.)
Gay Liberation, Women’s Liberation, Black Liberation, Sexual Liberation. Liberation was the heart and soul of the years following June 28, 1969 for Barbara, as it was for so many others.
Like us, not all the people who share their stories in The Stonewall Generation were “in the room where it happened”—that is, on the front lines resisting the police. Many did not pick up the activist baton until several years later, yet their contribution is just as important to the history of the Stonewall phenomenon as if they’d been loaded into the police vans on June 28. Many of the people interviewed for this book were marginalized not only by the mainstream culture but also by folks within their already marginalized culture for various reasons: for being too effeminate, too butch, too kinky, too bisexual, or for being people of color, sex workers, or drag queens. Our biggest delight and immense gratitude for this book rests in the choice of people who were included. Because the vast majority of us were not at Stonewall (or Woodstock), we have tended to interpret the event through the narrow historic lens of the dominant culture. Until relatively recently, most people thought of Stonewall as a primarily white, middle class, gay male event. The Stonewall Generation strips away this whitewashed, classist, sexist, and sex-negative veneer.
We also celebrate the author’s decision not to edit the voices of these elders. We all spoke a different language of liberation fifty years ago, particularly those of us in hyper-marginalized communities, and it’s important for us to remember what our struggles and victories sounded like in the original language.
It is equally important for young people today to hear how differently things looked and sounded in 1969, while still being able to appreciate the common yearnings for love, identity, and human rights that they are still fighting for today. As the saying goes, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Social change is never a straight line. What goes down comes around in a spiral—not circling back to the same spot, but with each revolution, reaching a point a bit further away from the center as we expand our awareness and ability to include and connect with others.
Most importantly, The Stonewall Generation is a love story. In the midst of all the fights for our rights over the past decades, we were then and are still fighting to be loved for who we are, and to be able to love whomever we choose in the way we choose.
Perhaps you picked up this book because you remember life before and after Stonewall. Maybe you even know one of the people interviewed. Or maybe you’ve only just heard about Stonewall from a teacher at your school and you’d like to learn more about it from someone who was there. Welcome to the Time Capsule of Love that is The Stonewall Generation. The brave, youthful activists who have become our LGBTQ+ elders will inspire you—whatever your age#&8212;with the spirit and perseverance to shape your own LGBTQ+ future.
—Kate Bornstein & Barbara Carrellas
Kate Bornstein is a nonbinary author, performance artist and gender theorist. Their books include Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us and Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws.
Barbara Carrellas is the founder of Urban Tantra® an approach to sacred sexuality that adapts and blends a wide variety of conscious sexuality practices from Tantra to BDSM. Her books include Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century and Ecstasy is Necessary: A Practical Guide to Sex, Relationships and Oh, So Much More.