stonewall

[OrphanPip]

hey i've always been curious what was so significant about this stonewall. there is a gay club in my town named that- care to tell me what it is? i often see it pop up in conversations on gay literature.

The Stonewall Riots were the first time gay people in the US stood up against police brutality and discrimination in large numbers, and it is generally seen as the beginning of the modern gay rights movement in the US.

In literature, pre and post stonewall are usually used to distinguish between the major cultural shifts that occurred around then, when homosexuality was suddenly more in the open and celebrated. Pre-Stonewall literature tends to be characterized by a sort of confusion and sadness. Look at the oeuvre of a writer like Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar was published in the 50s and its atmosphere is one of a sort of melancholy confusion, it's a sort of sad lament for the gay condition, the novel primarily deals with a gay man's life long unrequited love for a straight man, and it doesn't have a happy ending. (Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness provides an even more depressing lesbian depiction) This can be contrasted to what came in the late 60s and up until the AIDS epidemic. The literature of this period tended to be confrontational, celebratory, and more overtly political. We can see this in Vidal's later novel Myra Beckinridge, (which predates Stonewall by a year, but I would argue is of the post-stonewall zeitgeist) *SPOILER* this novel is about a rapist transsexual and is a deliberate attack on puritanical ideas of sexuality and gender. *END SPOILER*