LGBT History Month: 'From the 1969 Stonewall Riots to Lesbian & Gays Support the Miners Group'

This event has now passed but you can view a recording below.

The Stonewall Riots, also called the Stonewall Uprising, began in the early hours of 28 June 1969 when New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay club located in Greenwich Village in New York City. The raid sparked a riot among customers and residents as police hauled employees and customers out of the bar, leading to six days of protests and violent clashes with law enforcement outside the bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. The Stonewall Riots served as a catalyst for the gay rights movement in the United States and around the world.

The London Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) group was formed in July 1984, four months into the year-long miners’ strike of 1984-5. Founding members Mike Jackson and Mark Ashton had organised a bucket collection to support the striking miners on the June 1984 London Pride march and decided that more needed to be done to raise awareness of the miners’ cause in the London lesbian and gay community. Eleven people attended that first meeting and over sixty people were involved in LGSM by the end of the strike in March 1985. LGSM groups were also formed in ten other towns and cities across the UK, among them Manchester, Brighton, Southampton and Lothian. A Dublin LGSM group was also formed. The LGSM story is told in the 2014 film Pride, and the group reformed in October 2014 to respond to the new wave of interest in this story.

The speakers

Marc Stein is the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of History at San Francisco State University, where he teaches courses on U.S. constitutional law, social movements, and the history of sexuality. In the 1980s and 1990s he was the coordinating editor of "Gay Community News" in Boston and an active member of MASS ACT Out in Boston, ACT UP Philadelphia, and Philadelphia Queer Action. From 1998 to 2014 he taught at York University in Toronto, where he helped found the university’s Sexuality Studies Program. Stein is the author of "City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972" (University of Chicago Press, 2000); Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Rethinking the Gay and "Lesbian Movement" (Routledge, 2012); and "The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History" (NYU Press, 2019). He also served as editor-in-chief of the "Encyclopedia of LGBT History in America" (Scribners, 2003) and guest editor of “U.S. Homophile Internationalism,” a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality (2017). His next book, "Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism", will be published by the University of California Press in 2022.

Nicola Field was a member of LGSM. A writer and artist based in south London, she has remained a socialist activist ever since, taking part in campaigns over anti-racism and against austerity, climate change, housing, defending the NHS and education against privatisation and cuts, Covid justice, and the continuing fight for LGBTQ+ rights and liberation.  Her 1995 book "Over the Rainbow, a Marxist account of the links between class struggle and LGBTQ+ liberation" was republished in 2015, and she has written articles and arts reviews for academic journals and left-wing and LGBTQ+ magazines and newspapers.  She is currently researching 'Family, Fiction and Life-Writing, a queer materialist English/creative writing PhD at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University.

The respondent/discussant is Tristan Craig, 3rd year Ancient and Medieval History student, Digital Editor of Retrospect Journal and EDI Committee Undergraduate Student Representative.