Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights by Ann Bausum (review)

Noted author Bausum undertakes a tricky task here: to inform readers who know little or nothing of the 1969 Stonewall Riots about this landmark episode in civil rights history, while demythologizing the event for readers who regard Stonewall as the beginning of the gay rights movement. Teens unfamiliar with Stonewall get a rousing re-creation of the raid that, most improbably for the 1960s, saw bottlethrowing young rebels get the better of an undermanned police operation, hobbled by poor communication and ignorance of the turf they were sent to reclaim. For better-informed teens, Bausum sets the confrontation between police and gay bar patrons into the context of an already established movement, albeit one struggling for a broader audience and committed activists, and the general atmosphere of youth anger toward political and military authority that marked the Vietnam Era. She also reminds those readers inclined to enshrine Stonewall as a place of pilgrimage that it was, in fact, a Mafia-run dump that existed on police payoffs and unloaded watered-down, illegal liquor on gay patrons who had few alternative venues in which to meet, much less dance and socialize with some degree of freedom. After the exciting play-by-play details of the sweltering night of rioting, more subdued chapters skim topics such as the AIDS epidemic and the emergence of the marriage equality issue, though readers will want to look elsewhere for more in-depth treatment of those subjects. Nonetheless, this illustrated history lifts Stonewall from its customary footnote or chapter status into the YA book-length treatment it deserves. Source notes and a bibliography are included; the bound book will contain an index.