What Stonewall Got Right, and Occupy Got Wrong

[xchrom]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/06/differences-stonewall-occupy-movement.html



This Sunday, as every fourth Sunday in June, the streets of New York will fill with prideful marchers celebrating Pride Month. There will be similar marches, too, in cities around the country. Sunday marks the forty-third year since the uprising in a Greenwich Village bar called Stonewall that supposedly started the modern gay revolution. The myth is that a few hundred angry people acted out in lower Manhattan, and the world changed. Maybe that’s where Occupy Wall Street got the idea that this is how it’s done.

It’s the wrong lesson. Stonewall was the product of a handful of brilliant community organizers applying basic principles of social organizing. Without them, Stonewall would have been nothing more than one of several gay-bar pushbacks in the late sixties, or another one of the non-gay street demonstrations that characterized New York in that tumultuous time. It was the dedicated strategizing of the men and women of the nascent gay movement that turned something unremarkable into the Bastille. Their achievement is a field guide to how to make a social movement, and also offers insight into why Occupy is failing.

Stonewall did not come from nowhere. The first night, when the bar erupted, a bunch of experienced activists from the unfashionable old nineteen-fifties gay organization, the Mattachine Society, and from the hot new antiwar movement, were in the crowd. Jim Fouratt, a young and charismatic member of Students for a Democratic Society, who had already been trying to
radicalize the Mattachine Society, stopped in his tracks when he saw the crowd gathering outside the bar. Another veteran S.D.S.’er, John O’Brien, from the board of the counterculture free school Alternate U., was there. Bob Kohler, from the old Congress of Racial Equality, walked by and stayed. Gay bookstore owner Craig Rodwell shouted “gay power,” and although no one took up the chant, a big crowd gathered and fought the police again the next night. (I describe the scene in a new book, “Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution.”)

If not for Rodwell, and the Mattachine’s President, Dick Leitsch, two nights of rioting might have been the end. In the previous five years, two similar uprisings in California had come to naught. But the day after Stonewall, a Sunday, teams of activists spread out around the neighborhood, distributing manifestos (“The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World”). Unlike Occupy Wall Street, the gay activists had a clear list of demands. “Get the Mafia out of the bars,” the leaflets proclaimed. “No more police raids.”


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[pinto]

1. Well written piece.

Thanks for passing this on.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Presumptuous to think OWS is doing it wrong.

I see OWS as a grand experiment in social change. I would no more fault a failed OWS tactic than I would fault Edison's 698th failure on his way to creating the lightbulb.

[sabrina 1]

3. Good article, but where did the author get the idea that OWS came out of nowhere?

OWS was organizing and studying other movements, including Stonewall, for months before they hit the streets on Sept 17th. The organizers included many seasoned activists and there was much literature about the history of previous movements, tactics, strategies for dealing with the police, etc. That is why when they did end up on the streets, they were prepared for arrests, had lawyers and legal observers on the scene, were instructed to film everything from every angle, anticipating, as we have now seen, police making false arrests, lying under oath etc.

They also studied the Indignados in Spain, who in turn based their movement on previous movements.

The notion that OWS came out of the blue and did not connect with other movements, other organizations such as Community Service orgs and Unions and Student movements, Gay Rights organizations, mostly came from the MSM.

But I had been reading their website before the first day. In fact they had a dry run weeks before to practice for the real thing and to test their organization.

Stonewall was certainly discussed among other successful Social Movements.

This movement is in its infancy right now, so it's a bit premature to say 'it got it wrong'. Seems to me to be the most successful beginning of a movement over the past several years. But no one expected it to achieve all of its goals in a matter of months. It will most likely, like all other social justice movements, take decades to undo the harm done by decades of wrong policies.

[Vincardog]

4. I for one am glad to hear that the Gay movement achieved all it wanted, I think

OWS should learn the lesson.
OTOH Occupy's function is to change the national conversation. Which it has.
I hope OWS can make the politicians start to think of ways to address the issues OWS is bringing up (That is their job).