Every Pride Month, we celebrate the visibility, contributions and history of the LGBTQ community. It takes place in June to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, an event that began with a police raid of a gay bar in Greenwich Village that resulted in five days of demonstrations by LGBTQ people and others and helped spark a new phase in the LGBTQ movement.
Yet, while Stonewall had major historic ramifications, change came slowly. In fact, police raids persisted throughout the country. For instance, in 1982, police raided the Blues Bar, a working-class African American LGBTQ bar in Times Square.
The Blues Bar raid, the protest it triggered and the failure of New York’s government to offer justice to the victims teach us a different multiracial history than the one we learn from Stonewall. The historical amnesia of the Blues Bar raid reveals something fundamentally flawed in the way that LGBTQ history has been told and provides lessons for the push for equality moving forward.
New York Police Department officers raided the Blues Bar on Sept. 29, 1982, at 10:30 p.m. The bar, which was located on 43rd street on Eighth Avenue, was just a few blocks from the Waldorf Astoria, which was then hosting the Human Rights Campaign’s first fundraising dinner. Founded in 1980, the then-nascent LGBTQ political advocacy organization had welcomed former vice president Walter Mondale as its keynote speaker that year.
Twenty NYPD officers entered the bar claiming its patrons had attacked two officers nearby. Various witnesses claimed the police had been at the Blues Bar weeks prior harassing patrons and accusing the bar of being involved in crime. There was no evidence to substantiate that, however.
The police did not accept denials by the bar patrons that they had not attacked any officers. Instead, the officers attacked 40 patrons, the majority of whom were Black men, along with some trans women.
During the nearly 30-minute attack, police referred to their bullets as “f--- suppositories” and threw homophobic slurs at the patrons. Police used one person’s crutches to beat them and knocked another one’s front teeth out so violently that their blood stained the bar’s wall. The officers particularly acted out against the trans women. Several patrons were sent to the hospital requiring immediate medical attention. The bar also suffered tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage.
Arthur Bell, one of the few reporters who covered the Stonewall rebellion, also covered the Blues Bar raid and referred to it on air as “worse than Stonewall.”
The attack sparked a protest on Oct. 15, 1982, with more than 1,500 LGBTQ people — one of the largest such demonstrations in New York before the more visible AIDS-related protests in the coming years. LGBTQ people of all races, genders and backgrounds marched. This included Black trans woman Marsha P. Johnson, who also took part in the Stonewall riots.