By Terri Schlichenmeyer, July 2019 Issue.
To
anybody else, that tchotchke would be worthless.
To you, though, it oozes with
memories, and that’s why you keep it: because it represents special people,
remarkable times, or things you hold in your heart. One glance, and you
instantly recall something you want to remember, so in Stonewall
Riots by Gayle E. Pitman, take a
look at 50 objects that represent LGBT history.
Ancient statues and classic
paintings can tell you a lot about what people did long ago, and what they
thought or liked. The same goes with items that are modern, although some
accounts get “complicated — especially if that story differs depending on who
tells it,” says Pitman. That’s what happened in at least part of the tale of
gay liberation: few records were kept, newspapers were mostly silent, and key
players have died. Even so, she says, there are enough objects to tell a story.
She begins with a basic
history of Greenwich Village in New York City, and the Jefferson Livery Stable,
which housed horses long before it became Bonnie’s Stonewall Inn, and then just
the Stonewall Inn. There’s a possibility, says Pitman, that the word
“Stonewall” might have been “a coded welcome message to lesbians.”
Back then, being gay or
lesbian meant almost certain persecution but a gay man named Harry Hay and
three of his friends knew that the best way to work against discrimination was
to organize. They started the Mattachine Society in 1950, and Pitman includes a
photo of one of their early meetings. Five years later, Del Martin and Phyllis
Lyon started the Daughters of Bilitis, an organization for lesbians.
And yet,
the discrimination continued and “in 1966, resistance was in the air.” African
Americans had been fighting for civil rights for “quite some time,” and antiwar
protests were just starting to organize. Small uprisings had been staged on
behalf of LGBT people in California, while in New York, LGBT individuals were
getting pretty tired of police harassment, Mafia shake-downs, and raids on
their hangouts.
And on June 28, 1969, their
simmering anger boiled over.
by Gayle E. Pitman c.2019, Abrams Books for Young Readers $17.99 / $22.99 Canada | 208 pages
Do 10-year-olds have
difficulty grasping happenings in their great-grandparents’ day? It may seem
so, which is why parents will be glad that The Stonewall Riots is written in the way that it
is.
Using photographs, matchbook
covers, clothing, and other ephemera, author Gayle E. Pitman makes LGBT history
into something relatable for its intended audience because, as you know, kids
are big on keeping mementos and special objects.
Through the stories of
selected items, Pitman explains the events surrounding the night of the riot
and she draws a few threads between then and now, but she’s careful not to be
too hasty in filling in historical blanks. Those unknowns serve to leave kids
hanging a bit, and they heighten the excitement and outrage of what happened.
While this is a book for children ages 10 and up, this
book is also for anyone under the age of 55. You wouldn’t remember the Riots
first-hand, so reading The Stonewall Riots is absolutely worthwhile.
