(no subject)
Gays owe drag queens a great deal. The gay pride movement suddenly became visible during the sixties, when a group of drag queens at New York's Stonewall Inn decided to fight back against police raids and police brutality. Across the country, police officers would beat up and arrest people just for going to a bar with a largely gay clientele, and newspapers would then print the list of "perverts," causing those people to lose their jobs and/or contemplate suicide. That trend had occurred off and on throughout the twentieth century. The Stonewall uprising led to change. Those "wimpy" drag queens turned over some police cars, stopped the police raids, and added to the anti-discrimination movement that had already started brewing in San Francisco.