Democratic presidential hopeful and former Vice President Joe Biden visited last week, for example. The Stonewall has also become a sometime political campaign stop. People gathered there to cheer when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide in 2015 to mourn the next year when a gunman killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Florida and to protest in 2017 when President Donald Trump rescinded guidance that encouraged letting transgender students use the bathrooms of their choice in school. The Stonewall Inn itself remains a place to measure key points in the arc of LGTBQ life in America. “We really feel like the fire that started at Stonewall in 1969 is not done,” Lentz says. They founded the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative in 2017 to raise money to aid LGBTQ organizations in Kansas, Tennessee and elsewhere outside U.S.
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Lentz and co-owner Kurt Kelly acquired the business in 2006, with investors’ help, and have sought to keep its legacy current. Two other figures from Pisano’s tenure, friend and business partner Bob Gurecki and renovation contractor Dominick DeSimone, oversaw the bar’s next chapter, grappling with noise complaints and other issues. “People walk past that place today and assume it’s always been there,” Garguilo says. Long gone from the Stonewall, he recently launched a website to highlight Pisano’s role in maintaining what would later become a National Historic Landmark and part of the first national monument to LGBT rights.
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“It just felt like such a relief, a blessing,” recalls Garguilo. When it came, the Stonewall was indeed open, drawing so many people that a line formed just to take photos in front. His boyfriend, Thomas Garguilo - a marketing executive who had never planned on managing the bar - recalls a struggle to keep the business afloat for the milestone.
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One co-owner, Jimmy Pisano, died three months before the Stonewall rebellion’s 25th anniversary in 1994. The current Stonewall Inn, at 53 Christopher, dates to the early 1990s.įor years, its path was pitted with financial strains, business vagaries and loss. Over the ensuing years, the space was divided and used by a bagel shop, a Chinese restaurant and other establishments, including a gay bar called Stonewall that briefly operated at 51 Christopher in the late 1980s. The bar itself didn’t last long after the raid. Protests followed over several more days and led to new, more extensive and militant LGBTQ activist groups than the U.S. The police raid in the wee hours of June 28, 1969, stirred a sudden resistance, as patrons and others outside the bar hurled objects at officers. But it also had a popular, pulsating dance floor that attracted a diverse, largely young crowd. Some gay nightspots simply operated illegally.Ī onetime horse stable in adjoining buildings at 51 and 53 Christopher Street, the Stonewall was a divey, unlicensed spot with darkened windows, black-painted walls and a doorman who scrutinized would-be patrons through a peephole. At the time, showing same-sex affection or dressing in a way deemed gender-inappropriate could get people arrested, and bars had lost liquor licenses for serving such people.
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In 1969, the Stonewall was part of a Greenwich Village gay scene that was known, yet not open. “We understand we’re the innkeepers of history,” says co-owner Stacy Lentz.