We should've thanked him:
Seymour Pine, the deputy police inspector who led the raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, on a hot summer night in 1969âa moment that helped start the gay liberation movementâdied Thursday at an assisted-living center in Whippany, N.J. He was 91... About 200 people were inside [the Stonewall Inn]. When the officers ordered them to line up and show identification, some refused. Several cross-dressers refused to submit to anatomical inspections. Word of the raid filtered into the street, and soon hundreds of protesters gathered outside, shouting âgay powerâ and calling the police âpigs.â The turning point came when a lesbian fought with officers as she was pushed into a patrol car. The crowd rushed the officers, who retreated into the club. Several people ripped out a parking meter and used it as a battering ram; others tried to set fire to the club. It took police reinforcements an hour and a half to clear the street.It was the start of several nights of rioting, during which the police used force to disperse crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. Fewer than three dozen protesters were arrested, but hundreds were detained and released.
âThe Stonewall uprising is the signal event in American gay and lesbian civil rights history because it transformed a small movement that existed prior to that night into a mass movement,â David Carter, author of âStonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolutionâ (2004), said in an interview. âIt is to the gay movement what the fall of the Bastille is to the unleashing of the French Revolution.â
In 2004, Inspector Pine spoke during a discussion of the Stonewall uprising at the New-York Historical Society. At the time of the raid, he said, the police âcertainly were prejudicedâ against gays, âbut had no idea about what gay people were about.â
The department regularly raided gay clubs for two reasons, he said. First, he insisted, many clubs were controlled by organized crime; second, arresting gay people was a way for officers to improve their arrest numbers. âThey were easy arrests,â he said. âThey never gave you any troubleââat least until that night.
When someone in the audience said Inspector Pine should apologize for the raid, he did.