ABSTRACT
In 1969, the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street in New York City, was raided by the New York City Police Department. A mass of gay men and drag queens openly fought back, and this riot marked the birth of the modern gay civil rights movement. Yet, unlike the Black Power movement and the Women’s movement, there are no enduring images of the Stonewall Rebellion embedded within the collective American consciousness. The 1955 image of Rosa Parks seated on a bus, in front of a white man, speaks volumes about the direct correlation between public awareness of political movements and the indelible memory created by repeated viewing of a single, compelling image. Even if we don’t remember their names, who can forget the photograph of American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising the Black Power salute on the dais of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, or Billie Jean King beating the pants off Bobby Riggs in 1973? Visual representation is power. Outside of the usual collection of stereotypes assigned to gay men and lesbians, the first grand-scale appearance of homosexual marginalization in the popular imagination was the 1981 photograph of an emaciated AIDS patient—hardly an empowering icon. And yet the urgency of the AIDS crisis made it unseemly to point out the complete absence of lesbian representation.
