politics

Stonewall as a riot isn't as notable as an outburst as it was a starting point. What would become the LGBTQIA+ of the time were underground. There were frequent police raids of establishments and there was violence all the time but none made the news. It was swept under the rug. Stonewall was noisy and it got a lot of the cis hetro folk actually talking about things that had previously been relegated to innuendo or silence.

In the aftermath of the riots the Queer community noticed and organized. There had been nice quiet liberation marches in the past where people dressed in their Sunday best and tried to look respectable or ride the line so people could be confused about who might actually be breaking some laws in bed. But they devised something noisier than a riot. Taking all the stuff reserved for the clubs and spilling them onto the street. Pride was conceived as an Independence day style celebration with "the Battle of Stonewall" as it's memorial date. It was conceived at the time as a type of violence, not against people but against the silence. To keep people talking by being unabashed and even they were surprised how many queer people actually existed. The community due to external threat had been anonymized, atomized and carefully concealed so nobody had any clue how many queer people were actually out there. It was always just assumed to be a very few. Prides were hardcore shows of force where people courted arrest and police violence. One could see the continued Pride societies as being a safety measure. They are an organized entity, yes they are largely organizing parades and municipal events... But they are also highly socially connected and technically mobilizable. It's a measure of keeping in touch and having an internal structure of people who know how to organize.

It's also important to remember that the community has a continuity problem. There's not as many queer elders as there should be because AIDS survivorship selected for those who were closeted, lived an exclusive heteronormative life style except for partner or just weren't out having a good time in public. Those who remained to steer the ship were the quiet and mild mannered who were tangential to the violence. Everyone was slow to move on AIDS because it was thought to be a scourge on the obcene and it mowed down the community in the thousands. The crisis created a stunning loss of experienced liberation fighters at the same time it forged the survivors into a harder core of seige style organization with lesbians at the fore who used primarily beaurcratic means to fight. That beaurcratic framework is what survived and currently endures. It is quieter and fairly peaceable now but technically speaking you need a certain level of hardship and something that makes enough people angry to do violence to cause people to be primed to fight. The LGBTQIA are generally just invested in being happy and living their lives and their strongholds are cities. It's harder to be queer in a smaller town when people like you are scattered over a distance because those connections are harder to maintain.