“Snatching Our Humanity out of the Fire of Human Cruelty” – A History of the Black LGBT Movement

It began organically—in the wee hours of a June morning in 1969, in the Greenwich Village section of New York City—with several brave men and women who’d grown tired of the government-sponsored persecution of them because of who they were.

It was a revolution. At the Stonewall Inn, our brothers and sisters fought for their lives and their dignity while igniting a movement for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights. Today we are humbled by our roots, and honored to be part of this movement that has evolved over the past 40 years.

Police raids were common for gay bars in the 1960s, but this one was different.  The Black drag queens that join the fray alongside white gay men and lesbians at New York’s Stonewall Inn didn’t realize that they were the flash point for a movement.  They were too busy fighting back marauding police, undeniably fighting for their lives and for their dignity, to realize what they had started.

It was a Revolution. The very idea—the audacity—that gay men, lesbians, transgender and bisexual people could assert their humanity in the public arena and demand equal rights and justice under the law was unheard of in an America that said we were a diseased class of less-than-humans.  They argued we were hell-bound and so psychiatrically impaired that we needed shock treatment, castration, or quite possibly annihilation…

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