Impact Of Stonewall Riots [Draft]

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Assess the impact of the Stonewall Riots On Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Liberation as well as its effects the LGBT community as a whole. The Stonewall Riots were a series of violent protests against police harassment by the Gay community of New York City in 1969. While not planned; a spur of the moment uprising, the riots managed to explain to the world that the gay community are oppressed, and that we were not going to take it anymore. While not the beginning of the fight for homosexual rights, with demonstrations and other violent protests happening within America during the decades up until the ’69 riots. They affected great change in the mentality and approach of the then gay liberation movement. Today the Stonewall Riots are now ingrained in the vocabulary of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people everywhere, and is commonly referred to as the ‘spark’ that started the Gay Liberation Movement. Just as the actions of Rosa Parks during the Montgomery Bus Boycott [1] have become a symbol for the modern civil rights movement for African Americans, so too the Stonewall Riots have had a profound effect on the LGBT liberation movement and its fight for equality. David Carter, author of the popular book, Stonewall Riots: the Riots that Sparked a Gay Revolution explains that the riots could have only have happened in New York. Taking place at a time of great civil unrest in America, as well as a place where the Gay community were particularly despised [2] . For decades the homosexual community of America had been abused, institutionalised, arrested and treated as mentally insane. So to truly understand the lasting impact of the Stonewell Riots on the gay liberation movement one must first understand the oppression and abuse felt by the LGBT community in those years before Stonewall. Since the words ‘homosexual’

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