Culture Wars/Current Controversies

What Is Stonewall in 2024?

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Only a few months after the June 28, 1969, police raid on the Stonewall Inn set off a riot that became the symbolic start date of the modern LGBTQ+ liberation movement, the dive went out of business. The current-day bar that is in (part of) the original space has, as Brock Colyar discovered when they dropped by during Pride month, become a sweet, if a little bit cheesy, haven for rainbow tourists and allies. The current owners bought it in 2006 to keep it from becoming, say, a Starbucks, as the neighborhood gentrified and people’s memories faded. Keeping that legacy alive, albeit without the bar’s potent Jell-O shots, is the impetus behind the just-about-to-open Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center next door — a museum to (somewhat contested) queer history operated by the National Parks Service, funded by various corporate sponsors, and occupying the other half of the original bar’s footprint. Brock found that the two sit uneasily next to each other, each half-wishing the other didn’t exist.

—Carl Swanson, editor-at-large, New York

What Is Stonewall in 2024? A touristy dive bar, an unfinished liberation movement, and now a visitor center for the National Park Service.

Illustration: Maurice Vellekoop
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Categories: Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Sexuality and the State

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