Page "Stonewall riots" Paragraph 66

The riots spawned from a bar raid became a literal example of gays and lesbians fighting back, and a symbolic call to arms for many people.

Historian David Carter remarks in his book about the Stonewall riots that the bar itself was a complex business that represented a community center, an opportunity for the Mafia to blackmail its own customers, a home, and a place of " exploitation and degradation ".

The true legacy of the Stonewall riots, Carter insists, is the " ongoing struggle for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality ".

Historian Nicholas Edsall writes, Stonewall has been compared to any number of acts of radical protest and defiance in American history from the Boston Tea Party on.

But the best and certainly a more nearly contemporary analogy is with Rosa Parks ' refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955, which sparked the modern civil rights movement.

Within months after Stonewall radical gay liberation groups and newsletters sprang up in cities and on college campuses across America and then across all of northern Europe as well.