overview
Told by those who took part—from drag queens and street hustlers to police detectives, journalists and a former mayor of New York—and featuring a rich trove of archival footage, Stonewall Uprising revisits a time when homosexual acts were illegal throughout America. Hunted and often entrapped by undercover police in their hometowns, gays from around the U.S. began fleeing to New York in search of a sanctuary. Hounded there still by an aggressive police force, they found a semblance of normalcy in a Mafia–run gay bar in Greenwich Village, the Stonewall Inn. When police raided Stonewall on June 28, 1969, gay men and women did something they hadn’t done before: they fought back. As the streets of New York erupted into violent protests and street demonstrations, the collective anger announced that the gay rights movement had arrived.