Stonewall National Visitor Center Will Bring LGBTQ History to Life

But what happened next would change history: Instead of dispersing as usual, patrons clashed with police, and the confrontation swelled to include hundreds of people. Thirteen arrests were made that first night, and riots would continue into the following week. The Stonewall uprising, as it came to be known, galvanized a new wave of LGBTQ activism across the country.​

Now, more than 50 years after that fateful night, the uprising’s impact lives on — and, advocates say, is more important than ever.​

"Before Stonewall, you had a handful of activists in the United States who were doing very pioneering demonstrations,” said Jason Baumann, coordinator of the New York Public Library’s LGBTQ Initiative and editor of The Stonewall Reader, a collection of first-person accounts of LGBTQ activism in the years around the uprising. “After Stonewall,” he said, “you had the emergence of this group, the Gay Liberation Front, that had a totally different perspective.”​

Pre-Stonewall organizations such as the Mattachine Society, founded in Los Angeles in 1950, and the Daughters of Bilitis, founded in San Francisco in 1955, were part of what was then known as the “homophile” movement. They were at the helm of planned demonstrations around the country, such as the Mattachine Society’s 1966 “sip-in” to protest frequent police raids of gay bars, which were, as at Stonewall, carried out for so-called “disorderly conduct.”​

This early activism, according to Baumann, was in many ways assimilationist, concerned with integrating LGBTQ people into broader society. In contrast, the Gay Liberation Front, which sprung up in response to Stonewall and would ultimately spread across the United States and abroad, took a more radical approach. “Gay liberation does not just mean reforms,” reads the group’s 1971 manifesto. “It means a revolutionary change in our whole society."​

The start of a movement

Another thing that set Stonewall apart was timing, says Mason Funk, founder of Outwords, an archive of interviews with LGBTQ pioneers and elders from across the country. “By 1969, everything was either a little or a lot more combustible.” Post-Stonewall LGBTQ activism, he notes, took inspiration from the feminist, black liberation and anti-war movements of the era to advocate for societal change on a grander — and sometimes radical — scale.​

One year after Stonewall, marches were held to commemorate the uprising in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. By one estimate, the number of LGBTQ organizations in the United States had soared from approximately 50 to at least 1,500. In 1971, the movement went worldwide, with parades and demonstrations taking place in West Berlin, London, Paris and Stockholm. And in the decades that followed, victories that were once unthinkable — from the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973 to the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states in 2015 — became reality.​​​

And as members of the Stonewall generation — those who came of age around the time of the uprising — reach their 70s and beyond, they’re more likely than their heterosexual peers to struggle when it comes to finding housing and health care that meets their needs.​

Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center groundbreaking ceremony on June 24, 2022.

TIMOTHY A. CLARY/Getty Images

For Karyn Skultety, the former executive director of the LGBTQ housing and services organization Openhouse, which has served older LGBTQ adults since 1998, Stonewall is not only a reminder of the progress that has yet to be made, but also an opportunity for younger generations of LGBTQ people to learn from those who came before them.​

"We have a tendency to separate our history from our history-makers,” she said. “But we have an opportunity that other civil rights movements don’t have — to meet the founders of the movement.” And, she emphasizes, it’s not just activists and organizers who should be celebrated, but the people she calls “one-person riots,” the older LGBTQ adults whose everyday bravery helped them survive — and thrive — in the pre-Stonewall era.​

As for Stonewall itself? After years of changeover — including stints as a bagel shop, shoe store, restaurant and nightclub — the premises reopened in 2007 as the Stonewall Inn once more.

​Michelle R. Davis, AARP Home & Family editor, contributed to this story. 

Sarah Elizabeth Adler is a former writer for AARP, who covers science, art and culture. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, where she was previously an editorial fellow, California magazine and elsewhere.  

Editor's note: This article was originally published on June 26, 2019. It has been updated to reflect new information.​​