Stonewall

Rating:
Summary: Interesting study and fascinating people
Review: As a straight female raised in the bible belt, my level of education about the Gay Rights movement was at best minimal. We learned about Women's Rights and Civil Rights in school, but never Gay Rights. Anyway, I became very interested in Gay Literature earlier this year, and was often confused by references to Stonewall and other historical events/places/people.

Mr. Duberman's book, which, to be honest, I picked because it was the only book of its type available at the bookstore here in my small Texas town, was interesting and a fast, entertaining read. I especially liked the way Duberman followed a small group of people over a long period of time. Learning about an historical event through the eyes of people who were actually there gave me a far better understanding than a bland, general history might have.

Rating:
Summary: Not history, but interviews with dubiously relevant people.
Review: I loved this book...I read it once in my free time for myself and then we used it for my Social Movements class, which was amazing. We had gay and straight, male and female, reading this book and understanding why Stonewall occurred and why the gay and lesbian movement must continue. It was truly monumental...

Rating:
Summary: Personality in the Gay Liberation Movement's Early Years
Review: The "Stonewall" in the title of this intriguing, if narrow, study by Martin Duberman was a mobster-controlled New York City bar which was the scene of a series of "riots" in the summer of 1969, now regarded as an important milestone in the movement for gay and lesbian rights. Duberman, who teaches at the City University of New York, has written extensively in the field of gay and lesbian studies, and this is one of his best-known books. This is more a work of anthropology than a comprehensive history of the origins of the gay liberation movement because it is built around a series of sketches of gay and lesbian life in New York in the 1960s. Duberman focuses on the lives of six gay and lesbian activists, and his research is prodigious, but, whether the lives he selected were representative of the times is subject to debate. In the preface, Duberman acknowledges the book's "emphasis on personality," and the story it tells also includes an interesting mix of petty mobsters and corrupt cops, as well as walk-on appearances by the famous and later-to-be famous, including future San Francisco Mayor Harvey Milk, Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, civil rights pioneer Bayard Rustin, author Rita Mae Brown, and Jim Morrison, The Doors' front-man. But there is more to writing history than profiling the leaders even of great social movements.

Duberman is well aware of the important context surrounding the events about which he writes. According to the author: "'Stonewall' is the emblematic event in modern lesbian and gay history" because the series of riots "has become synonymous over the years with gay resistance to oppression." He asserts that his focus on individuals "will increase the ability of readers to identify...with experiences different from, but comparable to, their own." Although this is not, strictly speaking, a conventional work of academic history, Duberman makes some important, incisive observations. For instance, he briefly discusses what he refers to as "the endemic homophobia that characterized the black political movement" of the 1960s. (According to Duberman, Bayard Rustin, the principal organizer of the March on Washington in 1963, was ostracized after Rustin's sexual orientation was revealed.) In Duberman's view, the "new frankness about homosexuality" of the mid-1960s, "was part and parcel of a much larger cultural upheaval," and "the homophile movement" reflected and contributed to "the general assault on cultural values." And, according to Duberman, the direct-action tactics adopted by groups such as the East Coast Homophile Organizations were "inspired" by the efforts of militant students on college campuses and Freedom Riders in the south to achieve social justice in a different arena.

Focused as it is on the personalities of six activists, this book is, in some respects, less than the sum of its parts. I found it fascinating reading, but it is far from the whole story of the early years of the gay liberation movement. There can be little doubt about the importance of individual leaders in the emergence of gay and lesbian activism in the 1960s. However, there is much more to the history of gay resistance to oppression than the extent to which it affords readers the opportunity to identify with experiences different from, but comparable to, their own.

Rating:
Summary: Excellently Researched- A Must Read!
Review: This tells the story of the struggle of gays in America and the great Stonewall riots of the 60s that made Conservative America realize the existence of gay people and how they would no longer be treated as second-class citizens. (A story largely ignored and continued to be ignored by the mainstream press) and the boiling point. Stonewall is when gays strucks back and fought force with force. Violence with violence. No longer would they tolerate such abuses of their basic rights in supposedly "freedom-loving" America. Well-Researched, well-written, a great book and a must read for all!

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, readable, and important
Review: Yes, this is nonfiction. No, it is not in the least boring. By taking the history of a truly legendary event and splitting it up into 6 different personal histories, it becomes one big story made up of littler stories (obviously). Like an intricate quilt...each of the stories or patches is interesting and exciting enough but when added to others it becomes a really great story (quilt). Okay...that was probably a really corny analogy and not deserving of this awesome book.
Obviously Stonewall was the defining moment of the early gay rights movement so at times it can probably take on mythic proportions but when told through the eyes and mouths of these six altogether different and unique people it never becomes anything more than the human struggle and triumph that it was.
Comparing the events that happened in this book, and today, you have to be a fool to think that nothing has been accomplished. So much has. But so much more remains to be done. Pick up this book and discover the experience that is Stonewall.