ABSTRACT
In the early morning of June 28, 1969, Martha Shelley was showing two women from Boston the bars of New York City’s Greenwich Village. Shelley was president of the city’s chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian rights organization founded in San Francisco in the 1950s. During their tour the three women walked into a riot. “What’s going on here?” asked one of the women. Shelley, adopting the voice of a jaded New York activist, responded, “Oh, it’s a riot. These things happen in New York all the time. Let’s toddle away and do something else” (Marcus 180). Wrapping up her tour, Shelley dropped her guests off at a friends’ and headed over to New Jersey to see her lover.
