American Experience; Interview with Dick Leitsch, 1 of 3 : Stonewall Uprising
Description:
In this interview, Dick Leitsch, former president of the Mattachine Society, talks about his work with the Society in the 1960s and early LGBT activism both before and after the Stonewall uprising. Other topics include police raids and entrapment laws, local politics and political figures, the mafia gay bars, life in the Village and on the Upper West Side, and his personal experience during the Stonewall uprising. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969 police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. Such raids were not unusual in the late 1960s, an era when homosexual sex was illegal in every state but Illinois. That night, however, the street erupted into violent protests and street demonstrations that lasted for the next six days. The Stonewall riots, as they came to be known, marked a major turning point in the modern gay civil rights movement in the United States and around the world.
