New York Mattachine Newsletter

Contrary to popular belief, LGBTQ political movements did not start with Stonewall. In fact, there had been LGBT political organizing in the U.S. from at least the 1950s, and a vibrant LGBT press with a range of political and cultural magazines. In the mid-1960s, the New York chapter of the Mattachine Society was part of the emergence of direct demonstrations by LGBT groups, spurred by a series of riots and conflicts with the police by LGBT communities across the country. In this newsletter, Dick Leitsch (1925–2018), the head of the Mattachine Society of New York, writes under the pseudonym Price Dickinson to report on the June 1969 rioting—later known as the Stonewall Uprising—at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Here he describes this conflict as “the first gay rioting in history,” although, as a member of the LGBT press, he knew that to be false. Nevertheless, this framing of Stonewall helped propel the massive expansion of LGBT activism that followed in the 1970s.