Introduction

The year 2009 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York and the subsequent birth of the Gay Liberation Front. It is difficult to underestimate the significance of the Stonewall Rebellion of 27 June 1969 which was initiated by the lesbians and gays, drag queens, transvestites and transsexual people in the Stonewall bar in New York who had grown sick of police harassment and who therefore said, ‘Enough is enough’. The resistance at a seedy New York club ended up with a group of brutal, racist, homophobic cops being penned up inside the Stonewall bar. It was a moment of celebration and inspiration which ignited a movement.

For many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people at the time it was a crowning moment, a decisive and defiant shift away from guilt about oneself to pride in who you are, explicitly modelled on the civil rights and Black power movements in the US. That pride, protest and defiance carried over into the early Pride marches. The mood of the times is summed up by the recollections of one of the participants in the rebellion, Sylvia Rivera, who went on in 1970 to co-found Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR) with the black drag queen Marsha P. Johnson. A few years before her death in 2002 Sylvia gave an interview to Leslie Feinberg (1998) recalling the atmosphere of those days:

LGBT oppression is an issue with which social workers and social work educators need to concern themselves.