Summer of ’69, Part I: The Stonewall Riots
The summer of 1969 was long, hot and volatile, still reverberating with the cosmic gong that was the Uranus/Pluto conjunction of four years previously. In this fiftieth anniversary summer, AAA will be taking a look back at some of the blockbuster events from that period, some of which were obviously momentous at the time, like the Moon Landing, and others which initially seemed to be predominantly personal tragedies, like the drowning death of Mary Jo Kopechne or the Manson Family murders, but which have reverberated for decades.
The summer had barely begun when one of its most consequential events occurred, involving some of what society viewed as its least consequential members. In the wee hours of June 28th, 1969, a group of fed-to-the-teeth drag queens challenged a police raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village neighborhood, essentially inaugurating what became the Gay Rights movement.
