40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans

[Shana A]

40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans

By FRANK RICH
Published: June 27, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opinion/28rich.html

LIKE all students caught up in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, I was riveted by the violent confrontations between the police and protestors in Selma, 1965, and Chicago, 1968. But I never heard about the several days of riots that rocked Greenwich Village after the police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of June 28, 1969 — 40 years ago today.

Then again, I didn't know a single person, student or teacher, male or female, in my entire Ivy League university who was openly identified as gay. And though my friends and I were obsessed with every iteration of the era's political tumult, we somehow missed the Stonewall story. Not hard to do, really. The Times — which would not even permit the use of the word gay until 1987 — covered the riots in tiny, bowdlerized articles, one of them but three paragraphs long, buried successively on pages 33, 22 and 19.

[Genevieve Swann]

I was aware of the Stonewall story. It did result in some progress. At least awareness. There has been progress in the last forty years. For example the hate crimes law. It doesn't stop the crime, merely makes it prosecutable. That is better than we had forty years ago. However, The law cannot bring back Mathew Shepard, Gwen Araujo or Angie Zapata. There are probably others we do not know about because many years ago the law somehow justified it. Newspapers would not print it because the public may find it offensive.