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As the writer Hugh Ryan underscores in a piece about the sheer breadth of queer activism at the time, "As American politics turned radical in the late 1960s, the queer community began to resist in more visible, vocal, and confrontational ways." More bars start to open, they're less likely to lose their licenses, they're less likely to be raided by the police because the police are stepping back." Meanwhile, for the country more broadly, the late 1960s was also a time of radical politics, including radical queer politics. As the historian John D'Emilio has said of the Sip-In, "It has a quick impact in New York in that spring of '66. The years immediately before and after the Sip-In at Julius' and the riots at the Stonewall Inn were a golden age for gay bars and their political centrality, at least in some areas.
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Fifty years on, they're still havens joyous havens, but no less necessary. In consequence, some gay bars, while perhaps less overtly radical compared to the organizing of the Stonewall era, have found themselves wrestling anew with anti-queer prejudice. Still, casual homophobia and ongoing state-sanctioned bigotry against queer people remain maddeningly common in this country, and the current administration, in particular, is chipping away at LGBTQ rights. In addition, greater queer acceptance, on the whole, has meant that gay bars don't necessarily feel the same urgent need to focus on advocacy. Its numbers, for one, are shrinking, some say thanks to developments like ballooning rents and the emergence of new, less bar-centric ways of meeting and interacting that have been opened up by technology.
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Fueled significantly by drag queens, people of color, transgender folks, and people at the junctures of these identities, what many consider to be a crucial turning point in the gay rights movement began at this bar.Įxactly five decades after the Stonewall riots, how does the American gay bar figure in queer politics? The institution has changed over the past half century-dramatically so. The Stonewall Inn has since become a sort of shorthand for queer resilience. They threw whatever was within reach-from coins to glass bottles-to protect the Mafia-run bar from the police molestation that had long stalked their community. But unflinching queer revelers fought back over multiple nights. In the early morning hours of June 28th, 1969, police officers carried out a routine raid on the Stonewall Inn, intending to shut it down. Three years later, a more transparently gay bar, just a short walk from Julius', took center stage in the politics of gay liberation. Julius' soon became a haven for gay patrons like Lee and Jack.
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The commission's public agreement with the protesters forced the New York State Liquor Authority to clarify that there was, in fact, no policy against serving homosexuals. The Mattachines' tactic worked: The bartender denied them service, and, within weeks, the ensuing publicity got the attention of the city's Commission on Human Rights. (Notably, they didn't initially choose Julius', but rather ended up there after their attempts were thwarted elsewhere.) By outing themselves before ordering a drink, the sippers hoped to bring legal scrutiny to the way that bars were refusing service to people suspected of being gay (bars claimed that the simple presence of homosexuals was " disorderly," and feared that disorderly conduct could jeopardize their licenses). On April 21st, 1966, members of the New York chapter of the Mattachine Society-one of the most prominent gay rights organizations during the mid-century " Homophile Movement"-staged a Sip-In at Julius', which was already popular among gay men. Julius' isn't just any New York City bar it has a distinct political history.