To understand the fury of that night, you have to understand what came before it. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the FBI kept lists of known homosexuals, their friends, and their favorite gathering places. The U.S. Post Office tracked addresses where material about homosexuality was mailed. Between 1947 and 1950, 1,700 federal job applications were denied, 4,380 people were discharged from the military, and 420 were fired from government jobs for being suspected homosexuals. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1952. Cities performed sweeps of parks, bars, and beaches to remove gay people. Universities expelled instructors suspected of homosexuality. In New York, Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. launched a campaign to close gay bars ahead of the 1964 World's Fair, revoking liquor licenses and deploying undercover officers to entrap gay men. The few bars that served gay patrons were almost all controlled by the Mafia, which paid off police for advance warning of raids. The Stonewall Inn was one such place.

The Stonewall Inn catered to the most marginalized members of the gay community: drag queens, transgender people, effeminate young men, hustlers, and homeless youth who slept in nearby Christopher Park. Unlike typical raids, which happened on quiet weeknights with Mafia tip-offs, this one came late on a Friday with no warning. Approximately two hundred people were inside. When police began the standard procedure of lining up patrons and checking IDs, the crowd resisted. Those released through the front door did not scatter as usual. They lingered. They watched. Within minutes, a crowd of over a hundred had gathered outside. When officers began loading people into the patrol wagon, someone shouted "Gay power!" and someone else started singing "We Shall Overcome." Pennies and bottles flew. A parking meter was uprooted and used as a battering ram against the bar's doors. Ten police officers barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall for their own safety, the hunters suddenly the hunted.

The Tactical Patrol Force arrived to extract the trapped officers and faced something no one had prepared for. The crowd, instead of fleeing, formed impromptu kick lines and sang mockingly to the tune of "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay": "We are the Stonewall girls, we wear our hair in curls, we don't wear underwear, we show our pubic hair." Police chased demonstrators through the crooked streets of the Village, only to find them reappearing behind the officers around the next corner. The rioting continued until 4:00 a.m. Thirteen people were arrested. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, a longtime Christopher Street resident, wandered into the scene the following night and declared, "Gay power! Isn't that great! It's about time we did something to assert ourselves." He visited the Stonewall Inn for the first time that evening. Thousands gathered the next night, and again after The Village Voice published reports using slurs like "forces of faggotry," nearly prompting a mob to burn down the newspaper's offices a few doors down from the Stonewall on Christopher Street.

The Mattachine Society, the cautious homophile organization that had spent the 1960s trying to prove gay people were respectable and normal, recognized the shift immediately. Their newsletter ran a story headlined "The Hairpin Drop Heard Around the World." When a Mattachine officer suggested a candlelight vigil, a man in the audience shouted, "Sweet! Bullshit! That's the role society has been forcing these queens to play." Within weeks, the Gay Liberation Front formed, the first organization to use the word "gay" in its name. Within six months, activists launched a newspaper called Gay because The Village Voice refused to print the word in advertisements. Two more publications followed. The Gay Activists Alliance developed the "zap," a tactic of confronting politicians at public events. Craig Rodwell began planning what would become Christopher Street Liberation Day.

On June 28, 1970, exactly one year after the raid, marchers assembled on Christopher Street and walked fifty-one blocks to Central Park. Simultaneous marches took place in Los Angeles and Chicago, the first Gay Pride marches in American history. The New York Times covered it on the front page, reporting that marchers filled the entire street for fifteen city blocks. The parade permit had arrived only two hours before the start. The next year, Gay Pride marches took place in Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee, London, Paris, West Berlin, and Stockholm. The Stonewall Inn itself lasted only a few weeks after the riots, closing by October 1969. But the site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2000, and in 2016 President Obama established the Stonewall National Monument, the first national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights. Christopher Park, where homeless youth once slept between nights of revolution, now holds George Segal's Gay Liberation Monument: four white figures standing and sitting in quiet, ordinary freedom.