GLR May-June 2025

Correspondence

sembled protest, and several archival ac counts at the USC-ONE LGBTQ Archives. Four demonstrations—on the Sunset Strip, and in the Valley, South L.A., and Sil verlake—were called to protest LAPD vio lence against young counterculture hippies on the Sunset Strip and, secondarily, Black and Latino communities. Only the Sunset Strip and Silverlake events materialized. In the Silverlake protest, organizers forbade the use of the words “homosexual,” “ho mophile,” or “gay.” Look at the photo of demonstrators’ protest signs with the article. None use those forbidden words or refer to the Black Cat violence. In Kepner’s speech that day, whenever he wanted to use one of the forbidden words, he said instead “the word I am forbidden to speak” in defiance. About the actual Black Cat protest, Kep ner shared the following narrative: “A hand ful of demonstrators (whom I respect and honor) very briefly protested outside the Black Cat and then moved across Sunset to very briefly protest at the second gay bar that was secondarily raided. When a police car parked nearby on Sunset, the Black Cat protesters rapidly disappeared into people

Alliance. It was a multi-pronged move ment early on. Felice Picano, Los Angeles How the Black Cat Protests Went Down To the Editor, Eve Goldberg’s article in the Origins issue [March-April 2025] was correct about the brutality of the Black Cat raid but woe fully distorted about the protest later. Her description of the cruel and unprovoked LAPD attacks on the Black Cat and a sec ond gay bar across the street at midnight of a New Year’s celebration is factually correct. The approximately 200 demonstrators on February 11, 1967, were not there to protest the Black Cat raids, however. A handful of Black Cat protesters correctly and adroitly latched onto the larger demonstration as protective cover. My sources are printed ac counts of the raids in LA-based homophile publications, detailed conversations with Jim Kepner who was a speaker at the as

Another Take on Stonewall’s A ft ermath To the Editor: A small gloss on the final paragraph of David Carter’s “What Made Stonewall Dif ferent” [March-April 2025]: Carter gives much of the credit to Craig Rodwell’s idea of an annual parade to give it “staying power.” A good idea, but those of us who were there remember twice as many ob servers as marchers. More to the point was the four days of protests right after the riot at the six Greenwich Village subway stations. Gay or straight, you could not come or go from 4 pm to 8 pm without encountering gay and lesbian marchers with signs, chanting, and being egged on by people like Vito Russo with megaphones. Those, in turn, had sign-up lists, and people did show up a half a block away, upstairs, for the first meeting (and subsequent meetings) of the Gay Liberation Front. That group became the larger, more effective Gay Activists

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