But, the photo-reporting on this story had an unintentional effect.  While newspapers sensationally plastered their pages whit the most outrageous drag queens they could photograph during the riots, in the backgrounds of those photos were normal looking young men, dressed as most young men of that time dressed.  I, a teenager in a small town in the Midwest (Normal, IL – and I am not making that up) saw them and realized that I was not alone and that I did not have to grow-up to be a sissy, since that was the only stereotype of gay sexuality portrayed on television: Milton Berle in drag and lisping. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew that it wasn’t that.  And I am sure I wasn’t the only young man dealing with sexual identity at the time to look past the flamboyants in the center of the photographs at the people behind them.

My credo became: I’m a guy.  I like being a guy. I just happen to like guys.”  Because of those images, I lived my life as I wanted: a 20 year career in the Navy SeaBees (albeit, closeted) and I am now a Teamster, planning my retirement from a company that accepts me and my husband in a state where we are married.  Now I get to drag my husband to the VFW and defy them to say anything – at least, I did until I realized a lot of old guys were buying him drinks.

I have never worn a dress or make-up.  I don’t understand drag ( I just learned the word “transphobia”!) , and I am definitely missing that “savoir-faire” gay gene that accounts for things like decorating (although I do know more show-tunes than a Teamster should), but I am grateful to those girlie-men who spent three days leading the NYPD on a merry chase around those three blocks of Greenwich Village in boas and size-11 Spring-o-lators.  I recognize what they did and acknowledge the impact they had on the success of gay rights. They had no choice but to be on the front lines of the war because they stuck-out.  Camouflage doesn’t come in chiffon.

(I came out to a friend in my high school in Chicagoland when I was 17, but I never admitted to being a Packers fan – the difference between being a gay kid in Chicago and a Packers fan was that the gay kids only got their asses kicked about once a week. I was more afraid my friends would find me in green-and-gold than pink. Ironically, my husband is one of “da Bears.”)

Still, I’d need to know more of the author’s work (and the work of his competitors) to get a better context for his evident transphobia.  I’m thinking of a Chicago columnist whose column painted bicyclists with the broadest, least savory stereotypes – while essentially arguing *in favor* of  bike-friendlier transportation infrastructure.  I learned later that being a hard-bitten crank about this or that was essentially his main pose and calling card.  Bicyclists read it and responded en masse to the ugly stereotyping, but his regular readers would have known how to separate the ‘red meat’ in the column from its pro-bike-safety main point.

Kind of like someone today who might say something like “Fags and dykes, those people should be able to get married so they can be just as miserable as the rest of us.”  I have a lot of old uncles who talk and pose this way, and they are (in their minds) about as pro-equality as they can be.  You’re supposed to have a thick skin about all of their racial/sexual jokes and slurs, and understand that they will give the biggest cash gifts at your interracial, homosexual wedding, with tears in their eyes.

rednecks and teabaggers.

If you’re joking, you forgot your sarcasm tag.  If not, you forgot your hypocrisy tag.

When i read his obit and saw the cause of death listed as “brain cancer” in 1993 I couldn’t help but think of how common it was then for ashamed families of AIDS victims to reveal only some portion of the person’s illness (cancer, pneumonia) and not the primary cause.

“… a private little place where they could congregate, drink, dance and do whatever little girls do when they get together.”

And while generally things have improved, even though, as you say, we’re far from equality, it’s still possible to find LGBT people talked about this way in the media. You may not find it so much in newspapers, but certain “conservative” radio talk show hosts engage in such mockery and outright misinformation all the time.

The timing of that particular raid, and the involvement of members of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission seemed extremely suspicious at the time.

An analog today would be about Cannabis law reform/repeal: here is a policy that is locking millions in cages, destroying lives and economic prospects particularly of young black men, sparking war in mexico and other countries, setting back industry, setting back medicine, many other bad effects; yet whenever talking heads mention it, it is always a lot of joking about ‘cheech and chong’ type stuff.

If you want to deny basic human rights to any group, it’s useful to choose language to make fun of them and make them an object of ridicule so people won’t consider them as human beings.

The flashback is not a pleasant one.

You’re also right about youth, and you’re right about the context of the last 20 years – but I’m deliberately trying to do that. The message I’m trying to put across is “it could’ve been much worse, and today it often is”.

He never uses the words “illegal” (except in recounting the police’s statements) or “criminal”. He never implies that anything worse than a lack of licenses happened in the club to provoke sympathy for the police – no drugs, no violence, no prostitution.

He quotes a local saying that “there was never any trouble there” and that they “never bothered a soul” and “just wanted to be left alone” and that “it was just awful when the police came”. He mentions that the club was host to wedding receptions rather than drug- and drink-fueled excess.

This is not the writing of someone who is trying purely to provoke scorn at the expense of all else. I agree that it’s shameful to write offensively to encourage violence, but it’s also laudible to give everyone a fair account of events.

There are plenty of modern examples, from say the Byron Sonne debacle, of reporters trying to create a particular narrative, and relying on police press conferences and nothing else to learn the supposed facts. Lisker didn’t do that.

I’ll assume that you’re young and reading this within a context of the last 20 years. But that’s not applicable to this piece. Despite the way that we read it today, The Merchant of Venice was not written to be sympathetic to Jews.

Some reporters are happy to exclude elements from their account of events to give a certain impression. They will deliberately select people to interview who are more likely to support their argument, and refrain from reporting anything that would contradict what they’re trying to say. This is bad reportage.

Lisker isn’t guilty of this. If he was a worse reporter he might’ve described the Stonewall patrons as criminals, might’ve found the only resident of the street who thought badly of them and published their views, might’ve made Bruce and Nan out to be horrible people. He did none of those things.

I thought the phrase “the language is pejorative but the reporting is fair” was a good summary of that. Perhaps “account of events” would’ve been a better phrase than “reporting”, I don’t know. But I stand by my impression that Jerry did a decent job hearing out the Stonewall patrons and a poor job at not being offensive towards them.

The language is pejorative, but the reporting is actually quite fair.

Not sure how anyone with an IQ over 30 could write something like that.

Oh, shit – I used pejorative language, but it’s okay because I was being fair about it.

The language is pejorative, but the reporting is actually quite fair. It gives accounts from people who were involved, and not people who were chosen purely to give a certain impression and to try to ridicule the Stonewall’s patrons. It reported a sympathetic eyewitness account and supports that account with other evidence, like Bruce and Nan’s story, that the patrons weren’t really up to much of anything. It didn’t overtly characterise anyone as criminals or in any way dastardly for fighting the police, and it actually gives the police’s report much less time than the Stonewall side.

In comparison with the dregs of modern, supposedly enlightened reporting, I think they did a pretty good job.

Which doesn’t mean I disagree with you. At all.

And I think being gay or lesbian does not make one immune from practicing other forms of bigotry, sadly.