REMEMBRANCE
David Carter, Stonewall’s Key Historian, Dead at 67
Meticulously researched 2004 book set high standard for documenting LGBTQ history
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
David Carter, an historian,
author, and LGBTQ
activist whose
2004 book “Stonewall:
The Riots That Sparked the Gay
Revolution” remains, more than 15
years later, the defi nitive account
of the fateful events in Greenwich
Village in late June of 1969, died
May 1 in his West Village home.
Carter, who was 67, had a history
of heart trouble, and his older
brother William said he was told
the likely cause of death was a
heart attack.
Carter was born and raised in
Jesup, in southeastern Georgia,
which at the time his book came
out he described to Gay City News’
Duncan Osborne as “a small,
conservative town.” William, his
brother, was 11 years older than
he and on his way to becoming a
university professor and scholar of
Marcel Proust.
“He would bring in the larger,
outside world to me,” Carter said
of William’s infl uence on his young
life. “Whenever he came home,
he would bring the latest Broadway
show albums or art books. I
grew up with Marcel Proust in the
house.”
William last week recalled being
a graduate student at the University
of Georgia at Athens when a
teenaged David visited him. The
Metropolitan Opera was in Atlanta
that weekend, and the brothers attended
a performance of “Parsifal.”
“This was the beginning, I believe,
of David’s love for classical
music,” William told the newspaper.
Carter himself attended Emory
University in Atlanta, where he
majored in Religion and French,
spending his junior year at the Sorbonne
in Paris. He earned a master’s
degree in South Asian Studies
at the University of Wisconsin at
Madison.
It was during his time in Madison,
Carter recalled last year, that
he became active in the gay rights
movement, organizing a dance to
raise money for the fi ght against
David Carter, 1952-2020.
Anita Bryant’s 1977 campaign to
overturn Dade County, Florida’s
sexual orientation nondiscrimination
ordinance. The following
year, he was the co-founder of a
group formed to beat back a similar
repeal effort in Madison. That
group was the launch pad for the
successful effort to make Wisconsin
the fi rst state in the nation to
enact a ban on sexual orientation
discrimination in 1982.
Moving to New York City in 1985,
Carter worked as an editor at Chelsea
House Publishers, which produced
young adult multicultural
books. He wrote biographies of
the artist Salvador Dalí and the
philosopher and author George
Santayana for that market and
FRANCIS SMITH
also originated two series of young
adult books for Chelsea House
— “Issues in Gay and Lesbian Life”
and “Lives of Notable Gay Men and
Lesbians.”
While still in Madison, Carter
had met Allen Ginsberg when the
famed Beat poet and author did a
reading at the university. Shortly
before Ginsberg’s death in 1997,
Carter began working with him on
editing a book of interviews Ginsberg
had given between 1958 and
1996. Carter completed the book
after Ginsberg’s death, and “Spontaneous
Mind” was published in
2001.
Carter also worked with Pete
Townshend, the guitarist, singer,
and songwriter with The Who, directing
a fi lm about Meher Baba,
the late Indian spiritual master in
whom the two men shared an interest.
Carter’s most important work,
however, began in 1994 during the
25th anniversary of the Stonewall
riots.
Recalling the wide array of panel
discussions and other events
held that year in commemoration,
Carter told Gay City News, “I fi gured
people would be coming out
of the woodwork and I tried to do
everything I could to track down
information. I tried to attend every
event that I could.”
He began gathering documents
and reaching out to participants in
the several nights of civil disobedience
for interviews. One of the innovations
Carter brought to his examination
of Stonewall was the use
of a map of the Sheridan Square
area where the bar was located. In
his interviews, he asked the June
1969 participants to point out on
the map where they were, what
they saw, and when specifi c events
happened.
“Bit by bit I was building up a
database,” Carter recalled.
The result was nearly a minuteby
minute account of the riot, and
he was able to see where witnesses
agreed in their accounts.
“It was very painstaking, but
very satisfying,” Carter told Gay
City News. “I put them side by side
and studied them.”
The meticulousness of Carter’s
work is particularly important
given the competing claims about
who played key roles in the militant
response to the NYPD’s raid
on the Stonewall Inn on June 28,
1969 — white gay men, the transgender
community, people of color,
lesbians. He found evidence to support
all of these claims.
“One thing that is rather beautiful
about it is the action encompassed
everyone,” he said. “It was
the entire community. The way I
see it, there is plenty of credit to go
around.”
In an essay published in last
➤ DAVID CARTER, continued on p.7
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