Still another theory presents evidence that police knew about the blackmail scam being run against the wealthier patrons of the bar and were mad that the cops weren’t getting a cut. Another claims that the Stonewall’s Mafioso owners stopped making protection payments to the police. One claims it was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that ordered the raid, rather than the city police, after rejecting the notion that the bar was a “private bottle club” and didn’t need a liquor license. As for why the unexpected raid happened, there are are several theories. Just after 1am on Saturday morning, the police showed up for a raid without previously tipping off the bar’s management and at a time when the bar was likely to be packed. On June 28, 1969, however, something was different. The few women who frequented the bar were arrested if they weren’t wearing at least three pieces of “feminine clothing.” If a man was in drag, he would be arrested. It was illegal to serve alcohol to homosexuals, or for gay people to dance with one another. For those who didn’t get out in time, the police would arrest those without proper identification. The bar was usually tipped off before the raids, and when they came it was early in the evening or the afternoon when there were few customers. Police would raid it on a regular schedule, usually just to collect their monthly pay-off. As dismal as the Stonewall might have been, it provided a sense of community, a place to be with others like you. They came because the Stonewall, while eschewed by the more respectable members of the city’s gay and lesbian community, served as a de facto home for freaks, hustlers, homeless gay youth sleeping in Christopher Park across the street, transvestites, cross-dressers, and queens. Men mostly but occasionally some women as well. And yet, even at a time when men and women could still be arrested in the city for homosexuality, people came. There were no fire exits, the bathrooms were almost constantly backed up, and oh yeah - they never bothered with a liquor license. Dark, dank, with no running water behind the bar.
They were not motivated by any wish to serve the gay community they simply wanted to make money, and perhaps more valuably, blackmail some of the more prominent men who showed up.Īt the time, the Stonewall was a dump. Built during the 1840s as a stable and converted to a restaurant in 1930, the building was gutted by a fire in the early 1960s before three enterprising members of the city’s leading Mafia family, the Genovese, invested in the space and, in 1967, reopened the Stonewall Inn as a gay bar. The Stonewall Inn in New York’s West Village seems an unlikely rallying point for a movement.