To honor LGBT History Month and remember the Stonewall riots, Syracuse University’s LGBT Resource Center is hosting an exhibition in Bird Library through the end of October.  

“(The riots) set off a chain reaction of community building and political organizing and sparked a liberation movement,” said Margaret Himley, director of LGBT studies. 

The Stonewall riots began on June 28, 1969, when New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in Greenwich Village of Manhattan. This raid started a riot that lead to six days of protests in New York that helped spark the gay rights movement in the United States and around the world. 

Kimberley McCoy, the community engagement organizer at The Community Outreach and Resources for the Arts Foundation, and her team helped create four panels outlining LGBTQ history for the Stonewall exhibition. She said organizations during the Gay Rights Movement purposely wanted to be more political and their goals were to change laws and making it illegal to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals.  

McCoy said that Stonewall was a turning point for LGBTQ history, but the last 50 years were when the movement started to grow. 

“I don’t think we’re at the end point yet but things have drastically changed,” McCoy said.   

At the time of Stonewall, McCoy said, there was no legal protection — you could get fired from a job for identifying as LGBTQ.  

Kevin Camelo | Co-Digital Editor

Bea Fry, a senior at SU, helped curate the Bird Library exhibition as a student employee for the LGBT Resource Center. They said that because of the exhibition’s prominent location, it is really visible as it’s in one of the most trafficked spaces on campus.  

Fry said that even though Stonewall was an extremely important event within LGBTQ history, it wasn’t the first time that queer people rose up and fought back. They added, queer history goes far back in United States history and they tried to show that in the exhibit.  

The LGBTQ community has made immense progress for itself over the years, Fry said. They said that at the time of the riots, the narrative of the movement centered around white cis-gender voices even though the people who threw the first bricks were queer and trans people of color. 

In recent years, voices of people of color and trans experiences are finally beginning to be listened to and understood, said Fry.  

Although the LGBT Resource Center has unveiled the Stonewall exhibition, Fry said the Syracuse community is not looking at Stonewall as a way to really commemorate queer identities, queer narratives and the violence that queer people experience. 

They noted the lack of attendance at LGBT Resource Center events and at other partnering organizations.  

Fry said that education on this vast and complex community can be furthered “if we take the time to be able to hear one another and learn.” 

Published on October 23, 2019 at 12:58 am