The second night [of Stonewall] there was a meeting called by the Mattachine Society at St. John's Church on Waverly Place, in which they proposed a candlelight march and that we turn the other cheek and show what really nice gay people we were. I remember that I got up and said, "No way, there's no going back. We're not nice people."
Later that night there were about thirty five people who went to a meeting at the Alternative U. In that room the Gay Liberation Front was founded. That was made up of men and women, people of color, drag queens. and preppie boys. The similarities between ACT UP and the Gay Liberation Front in the way that it formed and what its goals were are amazing. And then the next two nights we just went roving around the streets. [...]
People blocked traffic. They took the streets. It was very exhilarating. They were going by the bars, telling people to come out of the bars. It was the first time that gay men and gay women had really felt a sense of empowerment. For people that had been politically active in the left, and there had been a lot of closeted gay people active in the left, they didn't have to put anyone else's revolution, anyone else's cause above their own. That process is very liberating and very energizing and very exhilarating and that's what was happening.
But I'm telling you, whether it happened at Stonewall or not, it would have happened someplace. We were coming to consciousness that our struggle was as important as all the other struggles we were supporting. So it would have happened someplace.
Stonewall was the lower life of the gay community, the ones that no respectable gay person would identify with: drag queens, fifteen year old hustlers, drug addicts. And it was almost classic in the sense that the lumpen among us became the heros. That really was the cutting edge. It was the drag queens who became empowered, it was the teenage hustler who maybe didn't fight back for the right reasons but who created that moment in history from which there is no going back.
Anita Bryant certainly proved that point, and AIDS has proved that poiht also. There'S no way people can go back to what it was like before, regardless of what the social conditions are. You'd have to wipe everyone out.
I have to tell you Gabriel, I go to ACT UP and I don't try to play a leadership role. But the first time I went into that room it brought tears to my eyes, to see that many young gay men and lesbians who were not going to go back into the closet. Who were going to celebrate their humanity and their sexuality in spite of the fact that people were being told that gay is death. And that, to me, goes directly back to that moment that was not thought out, that was not planned, that just happened spontaneously.
— Jim Fouratt, interviewed by Gabriel Rotello in “Present at the Creation,” OutWeek Magazine No. 1, June 26, 1989, p. 44.
