Stonewall: Movement, Monument, Myth

“Stonewall” means many things. It is a series of physical locations, all related, including the Stonewall National Monument and the places within it: the Stonewall Inn, Christopher Park, the Stonewall National Monument Visitors Center, and the surrounding public rights of way. It is also these places independent of the monument. There is also Stonewall as a civil disturbance, an uprising, a direct action, or riot—terms for a series of events that occurred between June 28 and July 3, 1969, that have both changed over time and differ greatly based on a person’s identity and interpretation. Subsequently, Stonewall has become a concept that fuses both the physical landmarks and the events together, culminating in a historical phenomenon within the narrative of the LGBTQ civil rights movement that has become queer pop culture—and myth—as it has ascended into an important event in US history.

“Stonewall” as an event in time has come to be recognized broadly as a galvanizing moment in the fight for LGBTQ civil rights in the United States. The phrase “pride was a riot,” emblazoned on t-shirts and hashtagged during Pride Month, calls back to the events at Stonewall, serving as a reminder that the parades and celebrations of Pride Month that the LGBTQ community and their allies enjoy have their origins in revolutionary actions. Yet, the galvanization of Stonewall in the United States occurred through distinct shifts in how it was understood over time, and through the codification of Stonewall through the federal government. Stonewall was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service in 2000, and in 2016 Stonewall became a US National Monument.

Within the phenomenon of Stonewall are physical places—commercial, civic, and nonprofit—but also concepts around them that expand further than the built environment, beyond the internet and social media.

The Stonewall Inn itself is a simple, somewhat vernacular dive bar—the fourth bar on the site to carry the name “Stonewall”. Its atmosphere not unlike other dive bars; its long wood bar top and painted tin ceiling give off an intimate, but unpretentious impression, as does a bright red neon sign over the front window. It’s daytime, and Cher is crooning softly from the jukebox while customers sip mixed drinks and Miller Lites. The Stonewall Inn is both a local watering hole and an international, cross-generational pilgrimage site, an observation made clear through both the casual conversations with the bartender and the many languages heard within. Historic sites often attract a broad diversity of people. Here at the Stonewall Inn is an array of queer identities, playing pool, talking shit, swirling their cocktails with plastic swords, and dancing—all activities that, in 1969, could have fallen under laws in New York that allowed law enforcement to harass or jail LGBTQ people.

The Stonewall Inn was constructed as two separate, two-story horse stables built in 1843 and 1846 that were fused together in 1930 and capped with a contemporary façade with a brick first floor and stucco cladding its second floor. The adaptively reused building housed a teahouse, called Bonnie’s Stone Wall, and was later turned into a restaurant, the Stonewall Inn. In 1966, men with organized crime affiliations converted the restaurant into a bar, which opened in February 1967 as a private “bottle club” catering to a customer base that, at the time, was predominately, but not exclusively, referred to as “gay,” but inclusive of many non-cisgender, non-heteronormative identities.¹

In the 1960s, factions of organized crime like the Italian American Mafia owned and managed real estate in Greenwich Village and profited from illegal enterprises, including running queer bars as private clubs as a source of income.

In 1969, it was both illegal and dangerous to perform the public functions of a non-cisgender, non-heteronormative life. Federal and local laws, enacted in the United States since the country’s founding, prohibited queer people from publicly gathering, dancing, or being served alcohol. Dressing in a manner that did not correspond with a person’s gender assigned at birth was subject to punishment. Spatially, this played out through a necessity to gather in places where it would be more difficult for the police to enforce those laws when queer people gathered outside of the home. Mafia capital provided the means to open private clubs, to staff them, to stock alcohol—and to pay off law enforcement. Money could be made from queer people by people who had more power—even if it was outside of the law. Yet, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn had little protection.

Over the course of the mid-twentieth century, a sociopolitical movement was growing among queer people with the resources to organize around causes related to queer rights or to practice mutual aid. These causes and the organizations that supported them found inspiration through the civil rights movement including acts of civil disobedience and organizing sit-ins, in a fashion of those performed by primarily African American activists at restaurants across the United States. While people of color and non-cisgender people were present within these organizations, they were not intentionally intersectional or inclusive of queer people of color or transgender people. While LGBTQ activists were present in spaces like the Stonewall Inn, there were also LGBTQ people who were not.

Queer bars and clubs were frequently subject to police raids where the patrons themselves were subject to harassment, jail, or fines. The Stonewall Inn was regularly raided by police. Yet, during a pivotal raid the night of June 28, 1969, the second one in a week, the results were different. Shortly after midnight, undercover New York City police officers entered the Stonewall Inn to gather evidence. The police returned at approximately 1:20 a.m., announcing their presence and demanding to see identification. The police detained bar employees, patrons without identification, those who appeared to be gender non-conforming, and anyone who talked or fought back.² As patrons were forced to leave the Stonewall Inn, spilling out onto the streets and into Christopher Park, they turned back towards it in agitation, particularly as the New York City Police began taking patrons into custody and bringing them out of the bar. As this crowd grew in numbers, people began throwing objects at the bar, including bricks, coins, stones, and bottles. The police were forced into the bar as windows were shattered. The building’s exterior was damaged, and the interior was destroyed. The civil disobedience continued for the next three days.

Details regarding what specifically motivated that crowd at the Stonewall Inn to resist have become more indeterminate as the Stonewall Uprising reached iconic status and then became enshrined as a National Monument. Who were bystanders and observers, and who were the agitators and instigators that mounted an offensive against the New York Police Department with their bodies or projectiles? Like many historical events that center the lives of marginalized people or revolutionary acts, the exact details of the events are subject to interpretation. Who was there and what they were responsible for is the subject of debate, as is who is entitled to speak for those that played a role. Yet, in the present moment, the impact is clear. The LGBTQ Americans at the Stonewall Inn were not willing to allow the status quo of harassment to continue without a response.

It took the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union soldiers, three years after the conclusion of the Civil War to organize around commemorating the war’s end, resulting in the creation of Decoration Day, a precursor to Memorial Day. Yet, it took LGBTQ Americans only a year to organize Christopher Street Liberation Day celebrations in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—effectively the first Pride parades, organized in 1970.

An early understanding of the significance of the uprisings at the Stonewall Inn and the commemoration of that significance undoubtedly set it on a path towards canonization. Yet, other acts of civil disobedience and resistance at bars, taverns, and cafeterias across the country predated what occurred at Stonewall and never reached the iconic status that Stonewall would eventually gain.

A partial explanation for how Stonewall was able to acquire mythical status may be found in the way in which the built environment around it has been the subject of preservation efforts since the late 1960s. The Greenwich Village Historic District was established as a local historic district in April 1969—just two months before the events at Stonewall. The designation of this district codified the preservation of over two thousand buildings in Greenwich Village, including 51–53 Christopher Street, limiting teardowns and contemporary development in the area. A second designation at the federal level followed in 1979. While these efforts were absent from discussions of LGBTQ history, the built environment where LGBTQ history happened was preserved because it was coincidentally located within this district. Modern visitors to Christopher Street will find both the buildings and public infrastructure to be strikingly similar to what one would have seen in 1969—absent a horizontal neon blade sign that once hung on the façade of the Stonewall Inn.

By October 1969 the original Stonewall Inn had closed. Like the calls to commemorate the event, appeals to recognize the building as an individual landmark also began early in 1973.³ As a contributing building within a local district, the New York Landmarks Preservation reviewed plans for updates to the building over time, and with updates came new businesses. By 1975, the single storefront 51–53 Christopher Street was divided into two, housing two restaurants: the Bagel Place at 51 Christopher Street and Bowl & Board at 53 Christopher Street. In 1987, a new bar opened at 51 Christopher Street. In recognition of the site’s historic significance, it was named Stonewall.⁴ This Stonewall closed in 1989, and 51 Christopher Street became a men’s clothing store and later, a nail salon. In 1993, a third bar named Stonewall opened at 53 Christopher Street, next door to the previous Stonewall, closing in 2006. In 2007, the current Stonewall Inn opened at 53 Christopher Street. In June 2015, the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission individually designated 51–53 Christopher—the Stonewall Inn—as a local landmark. The evolution of preservation from a movement to a set of local and national ordinances and laws was happening concurrently with forms of activism that sought to secure social, political, and economic rights for both LGBTQ Americans and African Americans. The preservationists of this era focused on preserving architectural significance and Colonial history and weren’t considering that the sites where acts of protest, civil unrest, organizing, and mutual aid were occurring would one day be a priority for local governments, federal agencies, and nonprofits. While efforts were taking place to record the social and cultural history of marginalized people within communities, the will and the means to preserve where they happened so soon after they happened, unlike the efforts at the Stonewall Inn, was rare.

The Stonewall National Monument was established by presidential proclamation in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama, setting aside the Stonewall Inn as a historic landscape for permanent protection by the National Park Service. The monument includes Christopher Park, the streets and sidewalks surrounding it, and the Stonewall Inn, located at 51–53 Christopher Street. The proclamation linked the uprising at the Stonewall Inn to both the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 and the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, that endeavored to gain voting rights for African Americans.

Immediately after Donald Trump was sworn in on January 20, 2025, the administration issued a proclamation titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Within this executive order was a directive that “Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology.” The executive order stated that “‘Gender ideology’ replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as, and thus become, women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.” Like other buzzwords in the conservative United States political lexicon, “Gender ideology” attempts to use an empty signifier, in this case to imply that transgender and non-binary identities are not a normal variation in human experience, but a contemporary concept based on pathology—a falsehood that has already been debunked through the historical existence of trans and non-binary people that mirrors the historical existence of cisgender people.

In February 2025, that executive order came for the Stonewall National Monument—or at least its digital footprint. All references to transgender people were removed from the National Park Service-run website. The word “queer” was also removed, turning the well-known acronym “LGBTQ” to “LGB” within the National Park Service’s websites. The National Park Service was complying with a specific directive in the January 20 executive order, that “each agency shall assess grant conditions and grantee preferences and ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology.”

Outrage over the removal of the “T” and “Q” flooded the internet, but the administration wouldn’t stop there regarding sweeping directives pointed at the National Park Service. Subsequent executive orders would scale back funding to National Parks, reduce the workforce, and encourage the reversal of contemporary efforts toward telling inclusive narratives of history and culture. A subsequent executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” would direct the Secretary of the Interior to review public monuments, memorials, and statues on federal property for “Images, descriptions, depictions, messages, narratives or other information that inappropriately disparages Americans past or living.” Interpreted broadly, this executive order provides the Department of the Interior with the ability to build on the rewriting of the history that has occurred at the Stonewall National Monument.

Created in 1916, the National Park Service is an agency of the United States government under the Department of the Interior that oversees the management and interpretation of historic places, including national parks and national monuments. In its more administrative role, the National Park Service (NPS) is also responsible for administering historic preservation at a federal level, including managing the National Historic Landmark (NHL) and National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) programs, issuing financial incentives for preservation, and providing funding, guidance, and technical assistance to preservation at the state level through State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPO). While NPS is best known as the stewards of national parks, monuments, and landmarks like New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns, Missouri’s Gateway Arch, and the Stonewall Inn, the agency’s administrative duties regarding how the stories of significant places are told allows for a broader cultural understanding of those places—the first step in determining how the public will experience them. NPS is responsible for both codifying research and narrative and then applying it to an interpretation of a place.

Also removed by NPS were agency-published booklets and educational guides on queer life in the United States, most notably a 2016 document initiated by the National Park Service in celebration of its centennial, LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer History. The first ever federal government account of the LGBTQ community, the LGBTQ Theme Study brought historians and authors together within a larger initiative to address a lack of LGBTQ representation within NPS parks and programs. When the initiative began in 2014, out of the over ninety-thousand individual places on the National Register of Historic Places, only ten were included for their association with LGBTQ history, and only one—the Stonewall Inn—was a National Historic Landmark.

In June 2014, a group of scholars met in Washington, DC to kick off the LGBTQ Heritage Initiative, whose primary work was to produce a theme study providing historic context. The goals of the theme study were to increase the number of LGBTQ-associated properties in the National Register of Historic Places and to amend existing listings if they had a narrative of LGBTQ history that was not included, to engage scholars and community members who work to tell the stories of LGBTQ associated properties for recognition, and to encourage national park units to interpret LGBTQ stories.

Each chapter of the resulting twelve hundred and sixty-two-page study explores a different aspect of LGBTQ heritage and history through multiple voices, with examples tied to specific places that convey that history. It tackles challenging histories, including those that relate to violence, sex, sexuality, and race, and those that, like United States history broadly, center the roles that white cisgender men played. It also digs deep into the multiplicity of the LGBTQ experience in the US and brings to the forefront the work of early scholarship around recording the history of LGBTQ Americans when living life openly was dangerous or illegal. The theme study represents a moment in time when the federal government, and the National Park Service, was willing to make an investment toward telling a comprehensive and inclusive story through preservation.

Like the Stonewall Monument, the LGBTQ Theme Study stood in defiance of the ideology of the Trump administration. As the Stonewall Monument’s website was being stripped of the word “transgender,” those who contributed to the theme study anticipated that it too would be affected.

“We were expecting it would be removed,” shares Tracy Baim, cofounder and majority owner of Windy City Times, an LGBTQ newspaper founded in Chicago in 1985. Baim’s essay included in the study, “Sex, Love and Relationships,” explores the places, both hidden and not, where LGBTQ Americans have found each other.⁵ Baim sees common threads in the ways in which the stories of marginalized people have been banned from libraries in defense of the claim that gender and equity ideologies are discriminating against the white, heterosexual life as the norm in the US. “People see Black books being banned and gay books being banned and Black gay books being banned. People are not stupid. They are seeing that these are very similar attempts to disappear communities and their stories.”

LGBTQ Public Historian Gerard Koskovich’s essay for the study, “The History of Queer History: One Hundred Years of the Search for Shared Heritage,”⁶ speaks on what he refers to as “autodidactic practices,” which Koskovich describes via interview as knowledge you “can’t learn in any of the normal places you’re taught history; you have to figure out how to learn it yourself.” Unlike the histories of family ancestry or cultural knowledge that are handed down via a person’s presence in a given community, learning LGBTQ history is initiated through self-education or through LGBTQ peer groups. Koskovich was originally asked to write an essay about LGBTQ preservation but responded that a bigger question was missing from the study, and from research in the field and cultural practice. “When do people start thinking, ‘do I have a history’ and how do they then constitute it into a sharable form? How is it then used?” It is in Koskovich’s essay where the theme study investigates a search for shared heritage through the collection of books and periodicals about LGBTQ history and the gathering of knowledge by early-twentieth century LGBTQ historians.

Marc Stein, the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of History at San Francisco State University, is the author of the study’s essay “Historical Landmarks and Landscapes of LGBTQ Law.”⁷ Stein’s essay tracks national, state, and local laws in the United States and connects legislative efforts with associated historical landscapes, including Stonewall. Stein is also the editor of the book The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. Like the theme study, The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History, compiles information in a way that urges historians to use the contents as a foundation for their own inquiries.

In an interview, Stein identifies a challenge that befalls historic sites as they rise within the public consciousness—that there are often concurrent efforts that occur independently of each other. In 2019, Google, partnering with the LGBT Community Center of New York City, launched the $1.5 million dollar Stonewall Forever initiative. Stonewall Forever would gather digitized artifacts, oral histories, and interviews in glossy Google style, along with an augmented reality component. Stein asserts that this effort was “history without historians” and occurred without efforts to incorporate or contextualize the work done over time by previous scholars and historians. While not a federal agency, Google had its own response to Trump’s executive orders, removing Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Indigenous Peoples Day, and LGBTQ holidays including Pride Month from its online and mobile calendars.

Stonewall’s digital and online landscape remains contentious, while the physical landscape of the monument, the bar, Christopher Park, and an interpretive center are also set at odds with each other as physical spaces. National monuments must include a component owned by the federal government. In the case of the Stonewall National Monument, that ownership requirement is fulfilled through Christopher Park.

Established in 1837, and a contributing element to the Greenwich Village Historic District, Christopher Park is surrounded by a 130-year-old wrought iron fence and includes a life-size bronze statue of Civil War cavalry leader General Philip H. Sheridan, installed in 1936. The park also includes the 1992 Gay Liberation Monument—the work of sculptor George Segal—that depicts two sets of similarly gendered life-size figures in modern dress, posed casually. The park’s fence is festooned with the six color pride flags, absent the more progressive New Progress Pride flag that includes stripes to represent people of color and those that are transgender or gender non-conforming. Signs indicate that the park is a National Monument but also warn that this is property of the United States Government.

Like the bar, the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center at 51 Christopher Street also lies outside of the jurisdiction of the United States government but is within the national monument as an original section of the Stonewall Inn. Opened in 2024, the visitor center is the result of nonprofit partnerships between the National Park Foundation and Pride Live. Here too are corporate partners, including Google and Target, who scaled back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts since the second Trump administration began.

The experience at the glossy visitor center begins with the Wall of Solidarity, an interactive exhibit installed by Google that thankfully does not obfuscate the roles that transgender and gender non-conforming individuals played in the Stonewall uprising. A 1967 Rowe AMI jukebox—similar to the one that was once inside the bar and that was destroyed during the 1969 uprising—is supported by Amazon and features a playlist of music inspired by Stonewall. This playlist is available exclusively on Amazon Music. Toward the rear of the visitor center is the Booking.com Theater, flanked by the names of founding supporters. Unlike the Stonewall National Monument, the visitor center has the “T” and “Q” within LGBTQ, but it also has corporate capital, vulnerable to shifts in political tide.

While the physical changes to the Stonewall Inn and all its iterations—as a bar, a bagel shop, and a nail salon—are easily mapped via municipal department documentation, asserting which account, or accounts, of Stonewall are the most accurate or authentic, or which expression of Stonewall online or within the lexicon of United States history has the most authenticity is as complicated as determining how to describe LGBTQ identities of the past using the inclusive contemporary language of today. Since the uprisings at Stonewall occurred, LGBTQ people have reclaimed “queer” as an umbrella term for a number of ways of being that include both identity and desire, a shift in the use of the word as a pejorative term to indicate that LGBQT people were different. What occurred at Stonewall in 1969 was also a reclamation; LGBTQ people had enough of being harassed by police in the moment, a reaction against an inability for society to allow them to live their lives openly in the same way that cisgender, heteronormative people were allowed to do by default.

When under the care or jurisdiction of the United States government, LGBTQ Americans are subject to political will—or political terror. The removal of transgender references from the Stonewall Inn National Monument is emblematic of a larger effort by the Trump administration to dehumanize transgender and gender non-binary people through the operations of other federal agencies. The same executive order that gave NPS the directive at Stonewall would require the United States Department of State to no longer issue passports with an “X” marker, returning to a system where passports were only offered with a male or female sex marker. The executive order would lead the Department of Health and Human Services towards terminating gender-affirming care for trans youth and restricting access to gender-affirming care for trans adults. The removal of “Transgender” and “Queer” is the beginning of the Trump administration’s aim to erase every letter within “LGBTQ” until none remain; you cannot come for one letter without coming for all of them. Perhaps the greatest lesson that Stonewall has for the United States in this current moment is one that articulates how resilient LGBTQ people have always been against oppression and erasure—even if it is government sponsored.

Yet, recent developments relating to national monuments might render the alteration of history on the Stonewall National Monument irrelevant. On May 27, 2025, a United States Justice Department legal opinion concluded that if the president has the power to declare national monuments, then the president has the power to revoke them. While this legal opinion is absent of any mention of the Stonewall National Monument, it opens the door for the removal of monuments across the country.

The ways in which LGBTQ history is recorded (and debated)—whether at Stonewall the National Monument or Stonewall the idea or through the National Park Service’s LGBTQ Theme Study—will allow it to endure. While the National Park Service has removed the study from its websites, it was widely distributed in 2016 and can still be viewed and downloaded elsewhere. It is a bell that cannot be unrung.

Back at the Stonewall National Monument, under the sign emblazoned with the National Park Service seal, is a pile of three bricks, placed like a cairn—a human made mound of stones built as a landmark, or a memorial—or a monument. Beside this cairn of bricks is a bouquet of carnations. An unknown visitor to the Stonewall National Monument has made their own tiny monument. A moment of tension exists in the history of the Stonewall uprising that wishes to declare identity as a way in which to stake a claim to its history. Who threw the first brick? Or was it a rock? Were they a cisgender white gay man? Were they a Black trans woman? Should we even speak on their identities using contemporary signifiers? How much does this matter when the United States feels so threatening for all of us? Yet, the physical presence of the bricks endures, just like the name common across the monument, the bar, the tactic, the uprising, the idea: Stonewall.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Tracy Baim, Gerard Koskovich, and Marc Stein for their time and interviews. Research for this article was sourced primarily from LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer History, published in 2016 by the National Park Service.