The Sun is pretty pissy about sharing and reprinting so I will excerpt gingerly. The story truly has merit after all, there are elements of gay pride and support for those arrested came from the most unlikeliest places.Ī lot of the information, except for a more recent article and two friends who actually frequented the place, comes from the Baltimore Sun newspaper historical archives.
Only recently did I decide to finally dig deeper. None of the people who told me the story had actually been there that night so I thought maybe some details had been lost. People spoke of it with reverence and as a victory. I attributed that to Stonewall but still, the story about the raid in Baltimore had such staying power. In fact, except for the one in the story nearly two decades earlier, I never heard of a gay bar in Baltimore ever getting raided. It didn't dawn on me until years later that I never lived in fear of a gay bar getting raided in Baltimore. I was too young, too post-Stonewall modern and optimistic to fully realize the constraints of 1955. 'And then what? Protests at the police station? Picket signs? 'A lot of people had to spend the night in jail, but the next day in court, most of the charges were dropped, except for a few people who got small fines.' 'Beer bottles thrown? A fire? Any resistance?'
