WHAT STONEWALL SPARKED

Timing makes history. If the police raid on the Stonewall Inn had happened earlier, it probably would have been instantly forgotten, like so many other attacks on surreptitious gay meeting places. The febrile feeling on that last weekend in June, 50 years ago, was possible only in the final year of the 1960s. That decade’s spiritual alchemy was essential to what is remembered as the opening shot in the gay revolution: a combination of everything from the Pill to LSD, from Bob Dylan to the Beatles, from the civil rights movement to the women’s movement to the battle to end the war in Vietnam. Conventional wisdom had become a non sequitur; that sea change allowed this last transformation.

In the year before Stonewall, Americans experienced unprecedented sensory overload. The