Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots/uprising, Jason Baumann, coordinator for the New York Public Library's LGBTQ Initiative, has created a spellbinding anthology that collects firsthand accounts from participants in the fight for LGBTQ civil rights. This battle did not begin with the three days of rioting outside the Stonewall Inn gay bar in 1969. But it did represent "an oceanic change in thinking," according to Edmund White's foreword. "People saw homosexuals no longer as criminals or sinners or mentally ill, but as something like members of a minority group."
Divided into three sections (before, during and after Stonewall), the book's selections pulsate with vitality, wisdom and bravery. Setting the stage, John Rechy remembers cruising Greenwich Village in an excerpt from his 1963 autobiographical novel City of Night. Transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen recalls her headline-making 1952 sex-change surgery. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon recount forming the lesbian organization the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955. And Hugo Award winner Samuel R. Delany writes of coming out to other patients at a mental hospital.
Actress Holly Woodlawn recalls the trans Latinx community at the Stonewall Inn, and activist Marsha P. Johnson relives her part in the actual uprising. Furthermore, activist/journalist Mark Segal and gay historian Jonathan Katz (Gay American History) discuss the activism that bloomed in the wake of the riots.
The Stonewall Reader is a vivid and articulate collection of first-person narratives. This oral history of the early fight for gay civil rights is empowering and unforgettable. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant