Some members went into a downtown bar, identified themselves as gay, and ordered drinks. At the time, the state prohibited bars and restaurants from serving or employing gay people.

It wasn’t until 1955 that the Mattachine Society began focusing on acceptance and support for the LGBTQ community, and in 1966 used Civil Rights sit-ins as a model for their own “sip-in,” at a West Village bar. “The way the story of Stonewall is told, it’s like everything started that night,” said Chauncey, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History, who notes that the first documented gay rights organization, formed in 1924, was the Society for Human Rights. It is all meticulously documented in his groundbreaking 1994 book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, (reissued this spring with a new preface), which overturned notions that gay life only existed in the closet before the 1960s. George Chauncey appreciates that myth of moonlit grief sparking a cultural and legal shift, but as a history professor, he can also tell you all about the decades of activism, struggle and community building preceding that night, going as far back as the 19th century. Almost any gay person can tell you that in the early morning of Ja combination of grief over Judy Garland’s recent death, a waxing full moon and one-too-many police raids sparked the Stonewall riots in New York City-five nights of mayhem that ushered in the modern LGBTQ rights movement.

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