This week’s Carolinian column: ‘Homo nest closing, this Queen Bee is stinging sad’

As previewed to you all last week, here is my column from this week’s issue of The Carolinian (UNCG):

Homo nest closing, this Queen Bee is stinging sad
By Matt Hill Comer, Don’t Ask (I’m Telling)
Issue date: 8/29/06 Section: Opinions

On July 6, 1969, the New York Daily News reported “Homo nest raided, Queen Bees are stinging mad.” That was the headline after the historic June 28, 1969, raid of the Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn. At that moment in time, the world was changed and the path to equality for LGBT people was begun.

Last week, however, a great bit of sad news hit the LGBT news media and its powerful blogging community. The historic Stonewall Inn at 53 Christopher Street is closing, but its history cannot be forgotten.

In the early morning hours of that hot June day, the world would be changed. For one of the first times in American history, LGBT people would stand up against institutionalized government and police oppression; they would assert their rights and their humanity.

The Stonewall Inn of the 1960s was a seedy place, run by the New York mob, but it was one of the only safe places where LGBT people could, even for just a short time, live equally and forget about the extreme daily oppression and discrimination so common in those times and completely unknown to younger LGBT people of today.

History dealt a wild card for the Stonewall’s patrons that night. Raids at gay bars and illegal entrapments of gay men were a common occurrence in the 1960s and many times gay bar patrons would be arrested for indecency charges, sometimes for something as simple as holding hands. The bar was a safe place, as long as the police were nowhere around. On June 28, the police would make a horrible mistake and their gay victims would say, “No more.”

It was the “purse-sling heard ’round the world.” The first opposition to the oppression that night was committed by none other than one of the Stonewall’s many drag queen patrons (cross-dressing could also lead to arrest). As the cop tried to arrest her, the drag queen hit him with her purse and all hell broke loose.

Click here to read the full column

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