NY DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE VIA GETTY IMAGES
— a local speciality. Newton ate a
pickle and drank something blue,
before reflecting on the lawsuit.
“I just go back to thinking about
Stonewall,” she said.
The modern gay rights movement began at a bar. In the early
morning hours of June 28, 1969,
police raided the Stonewall Inn, a
Mafia-owned gay bar in New York
City. The raid set off three days of
rioting in the streets around the
bar, with queer patrons hurling
bottles and bricks at the the police.
Within weeks, activists in New
York had formed some of the country’s first gay rights organizations.
At the time, homosexuality
was a crime in every state but Illinois, and bars were among the
only places where gays and lesbians could gather. Gay bars were to
the gay rights movement as black
churches were to civil rights, as
one commentator observes in
Stonewall Uprising, a 2010 documentary about the riots.
The lawsuit against Shannon
draws on that history, arguing
that O’Hara’s is more than a bar:
Like the Stonewall Inn and Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church before it, Newton’s bar
would be a sanctuary for politically marginalized individuals
and a symbol of freedom and
equality. It not only would make
The 1969
Stonewall
Inn nightclub
riot in NYC’s
Greenwich
Village is
considered by
many to be
the beginning
of the LGBT
rights
movement.