Back in 1969, when same-sex behavior was illegal, the Stonewall Inn was run by the Mafia. They had a deal with the NYPD. The police raided the bar and harassed the clientele frequently, but usually the Genovese crime family would just pay them off. “It might’ve been dirty. It might’ve been a dive bar. It might’ve had watered down drinks,” Mark Segal, 73, who was there the night of the raid, told me recently. At the time, he was new in New York. “I was a typical 18-year-old, and as an 18-year-old, what do you want to do? You want to dance.” The Stonewall Inn had the only dance floor in the neighborhood.
It was the late sixties, and uprisings, marches, and revolts of all kinds were breaking out all over. Radical change was being demanded. Segal — “It was until that night that I was a typical 18-year-old” — helped found the Gay Liberation Front, which organized the first Pride march a year later.
“We’re the only movement where the movement was born in a bar. But it’s way more than a bar,” says Stacy Lentz, who, together with Kurt Kelly, Bill Morgan, and Tony DeCicco raised the money to take the bar over in 2006. “People come in and cry as soon as they walk through the doors,” she says. “I think a lot of people sense the freedom.”
In 2006, “the history was not that well known. It was certainly not a place where people in the community gathered,” she says. “A lot of people just didn’t care. You have to think of where we were: still five years away from getting gay marriage in New York.” Soft-spoken and curly haired, Lentz, 54, is drinking a co-branded Stonewall Inn IPA from Brooklyn Brewery. She grew up, she says, in the “cornfields” of Kansas, just 40 miles from where the trans man Brandon Teena was murdered in 1993. She remembers when that happened; it helped lead her to activism, which now includes making sure Stonewall doesn’t end up another Starbucks or a Chase Bank (She also runs an associated nonprofit, the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative).