The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World

Teleology as a concept is a useful one for most students to learn. It can help explain quite a lot not only about how the world works, but also about how academic study, influenced by the Enlightenment, can determine our thinking patterns. In short, teleology (pronounced “tee-lee-ah-loh-gee”) can be defined succinctly as “the supposition that there is purpose or directive principle in the works and processes of nature.” A good example of teleological thinking or argument is the onwards and upwards understanding of human social and economic development contained in American optimism, or life will always get better. The sad fact that this is not always true, that backsliding in the development of human cultures is an important aspect of human history and experience (what, after all, were the Dark Ages, or for that matter, 20th century fascism?), has to a certain extent been banished by technological progress— science, medicine, and machines will enable human societies to continue to advance in sophistication and expectation. This is such a widespread idea(l) that is almost a truism. However, close readers of diverse works ranging from Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On to Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague will be familiar with the tendency of expectations to exceed what is possible, or rather, the role and function of hubris.

All of this is to say that, on some level, Stonewall is a teleological event. Duberman’s narrative exposition on the riots that occurred in New York City’s Greenwich Village over the last weekend in June 1969 have become, through force of argument, the ne plus ultra expression of contemporary LGBT identity and self-expression: the birth of the now. And, to a certain extent, Duberman participates in this teleological determinism: his narrative is leading to the burst of the dam, to an event, that we know now, through hindsight, was the shift from the "bad old days when we all hated ourselves" to the "new, sunny prideful" days we live in now, purportedly.

If only history and human experience were like a novel, we would all be living much more aesthetically pleasing existences (NB: I, for one, would like to model my life on Meg Schlegel). Yet, this is not the way it is. Stonewall is regarded, even within the structure of the course, as the pivot point. Yet, there are events both before and after that complicate the picture. For instance, the activities of SIR in San Francisco and the Compton Cafeteria riot, which occurred several years before Stonewall. Similarly, the rise and assassination of Harvey Milk, not to mention the emergence of HIV, are post-Stonewall moments whose impact has, in some ways, been greater than the street disturbances around Sheridan Square over a series of muggy New York nights.

So why then does Stonewall become the pivot it has become? Partially, it is good press: there were witnesses and journalistic coverage of the event that differed from pre-Stonewall moments of resistance. Second, it was sustained: out of Stonewall comes LGBT activism (“Gay Lib”) that is connected and modeled on the refusenik politics of the 1960s, including a critical relationship to dominant society and a resurrection of culturalist ideas about LGBT identity that were so important to Harry Hay and the early Mattachine founders. Obviously, another aspect is the ideological progression of authorization and deauthorization. Stonewall becomes important because it disengages with the past: it is not only different, but works to become dominant.

Yet, Stonewall is just one of many potentials that could have determined LGBT experience, in the same way that the question “What if HIV never happened?” presents us with several indeterminate pasts and futures. All of which only serves to reiterate that the appropriate critical relationship to something like Duberman’s Stonewall is as fiction: a compelling legend we tell ourselves specifically to make sense of ourselves. Fiction, of course, is not always untrue, as non-fiction is not always fact. Rather, arguably the legend is more important than the actual events, and how exactly the legend then circulates and become “true.”