“I mean, I was rowdy, I always fought back, but after I read about Stonewall, then my attitude was, ‘You can’t be doing that shit. “I was like, ‘Those sons of bitches.’ I would have taken out as many as I could before they took me out,” he says.

Valley resident John La Noue, who owned and managed various local LGBTQ bars in the ’70s and ’80s, remembers being just as furious. “It’s one thing for them to close the place, and it’s another to be dragged out of a bar.” We were infuriated,” Kim Moody, currently the co-owner of downtown Phoenix art space the Alwun House. Shockwaves from the Stonewall riots were felt around the U.S., including here in Arizona, where members of the Valley’s LGBTQ community of that era were outraged for many reasons, not the least of which because they’d endured persecution by the police for their sexual orientation. The turmoil came after years of police harassment of LGBTQ bars and an anti-gay legal system rife with homophobia. It sparked a spontaneous counterprotest and rioting by drag queens, neighborhood residents, and bystanders which lasted three days.

on June 28, 1969, officers and detectives from the New York Police Department raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village.