it was a long night of riots. It was actually very exciting cuz I remember howling all through the streets, "The revolution is here!" - Sylvia Rivera

When the cops did finally get there, the reinforcements, forty five minutes later, you had the chorus line of street queens kicking up their heels, singing their famous little anthem that up to today still lives on, "We are the Stonewall girls/ we wear our hair in curls/ we wear our dungarees/ above our nelly knees/ we show our pubic hairs," and so on and so forth.

Routine was, "Faggots over here, dykes over here, and freaks over there," referring to my side of the community. If you did not have three pieces of male attire on you, you were going to jail.

it used to be a wonderful thing to be avant-garde, to be different from the world. I see us reverting into a so-called liberated closet because we, not we, yous of this mainstream community, wish to be married, wish for this status. That's all fine. But you are forgetting your grassroots, you are forgetting your own individual identity. I mean, you can never be like them. Yes we can adopt children, all well and good, that's fine. I would love to have children. I would love to marry my lover over there [Julia Murray], but for political reasons, I will not do it because I don't feel that I have to fit in that closet of normal, straight society which the gay mainstream is going towards.