What's Judy go to do with it? [re-posted]

A relatively widespread belief is that the death of Judy Garland, in the week preceding the July 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn, inspired that famous rebellion, which has almost from its inception been heralded as the starting point for the "modern" gay and lesbian movement. In fact, celebrations of the riots' anniversary have gradually morphed into a whole "pride season" each summer that even presidential candidates celebrate (some of them, anyway).

Since Judy Garland was beloved among gay men, who claimed many of her songs as parables of their condition, this narrative about her relationship to Stonewall has seemed like proof that gay camp and diva worship can generate political resistance, even revolution. Thus, the journalist Daniel Harris writes, "Garland was simply the hostess, a performer who good-naturedly rented out her immense reputation as an occasion for a huge gay party, a dry run for Stonewall, a dress rehearsal for the birthday bash of the burgeoning gay rights movement, which her last and most important concert, her funeral, was to inspire only a few years later."

Trouble is, the story's not true. So says another journalist, David Carter, in a new book called Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, just published in time for the 35th anniversary next month. Having interviewed everyone he could find who was anywhere near the place (including the police captain who led the bar raid that night), and dredged up every scrap of paper he could find that was written in the riots' aftermath, Carter concludes, "No eyewitness account of the riots written at the time by an identifiably gay person mentions Judy Garland. The only account written in 1969 that suggests that Judy Garland's death contributed to the riots is by a heterosexual who sarcastically proposes the idea to ridicule gay people and the riots....in the only piece of indisputably gay writing at the time of the riots where Garland's death and the riots are both mentioned, the two events are not related....[moreover], consider that the main fighters in the riots were street youths. These young men were not of the generation that listened to Garland, their music being rock, soul, and funk."

Carter's book has a kind of Kennedy-assassination, obsessional quality. He tries to reconstruct exactly what happened at every stage (e.g., "who was the man in the red shirt?"). The result, though, is actually quite a page-turner, because the stakes associated with so many of his questions are so high. (What role did drag queens and lesbians play? What was the Stonewall's clientele like? Who threw the first bottle?) Scholars of queer history have long questioned whether Stonewall suddenly transformed gay and lesbian life, as so many popular accounts would have it---and rightly so. And yet the riots do carry tremendous emotional and political significance, and their aftermath do seem to have led to significant shifts in how gay people in New York related to the police. I recommend it.