Alert: I am, once again, invoking my Howard Cosell rule to write about something not directly related to cycling. It is, however, a reflection from the vantage point of midlife, as I have defined it on this blog.
The night was hot, even for early summer. Judy Garland had just died, 47 years old. Patrons of a particular bar were mourning her passing. Or, perhaps, they simply wanted to release some tension, or simply have a good time.
Some of the bar’s regular patrons had been forewarned about one event about to take place. But at the time, they could not have known its aftermath.
On this date in 1969, New York City police officers raided a bar. That, in itself, was not unusual. Nor was the fact that its “respectable” patrons—mainly white-collar and creative men with wives and families not very far—at least geographically—from that place had been forewarned.
The remaining patrons consisted of “undesirables ” and “throwaways”: kids kicked out of their homes by families who didn’t approve of their “lifestyles;” others, young and old, who survived on the streets by catering to the most lurid fantasies of men (mainly) richer and more powerful than themselves, and those who were expressing their gender identity and sexuality in then-illegal or yet-unnamed ways.
I am talking, of course, about the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. I was a week and a day away from turning and would know nothing about what happened that night for many more years. By that time, I was close to midlife—at least as I define it on this blog—and had become an avid cyclist.
