For all those who have been part of the post-Stonewall gay generation that has claimed the American dream of full and equal citizenship, it is important to know how that happened, and in particular how it happened here in Wisconsin. This event led directly to the founding of the city’s Gay Liberation Front and, not long afterward, like-minded activist organizations around the country, including here in Wisconsin.

In New York City, patrons of an LGBT bar, the Stonewall Inn, located in Greenwich Village, reacted to a police raid by fighting back against the oppression they had passively accepted for years.Īs David Carter wrote in Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, “These riots are widely credited with being the motivating force in the transformation of the gay political movement.”1 Drag queens, street youths, and lesbians were all part of the persecuted group that pushed back on the streets of the Village for the several nights of the riots. One hundred years later, in the Wisconsin Commission newsletter and in my speeches, I featured her statement as one that captured the unfolding dream of equality, enunciated though not realized in 1776.Īs a semi-closeted gay man in the early 1970s, I faced the same question that Anthony addressed: What kind of citizen was I? Today most LGBT historians date the beginning of American gay liberation to the Stonewall riots of June 1969. Anthony had posed the question of whether women were indeed citizens. At the revolution’s one hundredth anniversary celebration in Philadelphia in 1876, Susan B. The idea of claiming citizenship was familiar to me from my first fulltime job as director of the Wisconsin American Revolution Bicentennial Commission. More importantly, he has the character Prior Walter, the prophet, proclaim that gay folks will henceforth emerge from the shadows to be citizens of America. In Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s stirring and searing drama about the AIDS crisis that opened on Broadway in 1993, the playwright calls for no more hidden deaths.

Farm Boys by Will Fellows