➤ DAVID CARTER, from p.6
year’s Gay City News Pride issue,
Carter wrote, “My conclusion is
that most of the crowd in the vanguard
on the Uprising’s fi rst night
were white men, though Marsha
P. Johnson and Zazu Nova, both
transgender, were Black, and
there were some Black and Latinx
youth among the homeless street
youth who were the fi rst to lead the
charge against the police.”
He added, “My research concluded
that the two most important
groups in the vanguard on
the fi rst night — beyond the butch
lesbian who resisted arrest and
probably had the greatest impact
— were homeless gay street youth
and transgender people, including
Marsha P. Johnson and Zazu
Nova, both trans women, and
Jackie Hormona, a member of
the gay street youth. Most of the
gay street youth were more or less
feminine — or, in today’s parlance,
non-gender conforming — young
men, not transgender, and the majority
were white.”
But he also mentioned a cautionary
coda to this summary, writing,
“While this vanguard played the
key role in escalating the confl ict,
it is important to not let their pride
of place throw others who fought
into the shadows. When I recently
mentioned the two groups in the
vanguard to Stonewall participant
Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt,
he said, ‘But almost immediately
— within a few moments — everyone
else was jumping in.’”
Beyond the 145 interviews Carter
did with 91 people, 70 of whom witnessed
the riots, he found roughly
15 written accounts from 1969,
including police reports, newspaper
articles, and letters. Those too
confi rmed the consensus view that
Carter’s witnesses had shaped.
“One of the things I heard over
and over was there are very few
written records from 1969 and
they really disagree with each other,”
Carter told Gay City News at
the time his book was published.
“What I found was an extraordinary
degree of agreement among
the written accounts. That gave me
faith in them. They corroborated
each other.”
“Stonewall: The Riots That
Sparked the Gay Revolution” has
been praised on many counts.
Ken Lustbader, an historic preservation
consultant in New York
who is a co-founder of the NYC
LGBT Historic Sites Project, said
that Carter was a “trailblazer” in
“understanding so early the importance
of place in history.” Lustbader
recalled Carter’s excitement at
learning that Lustbader had found
the original fl oor plans of the bar
by searching the city Buildings Department
archive. The layout of the
bar and the geography of the West
Village and the blocks immediately
surrounding Sheridan Square
and the bar were critical, he said,
in shaping the crowd response to
the police. Carter appreciated that,
and his book brings readers into
the action by effectively setting the
riot’s physical scene.
Lustbader’s colleague Andrew
S. Dolkart, a professor of Historic
Preservation at Columbia University
and the co-director of the NYC
LGBT Historic Sites Project, echoed
that assessment.
In describing the effort to have
the Stonewall recognized on the
National Park Service’s National
Register of Historic Places in 1999
— the 3oth anniversary of the riots
— Dolkart said of Carter, “He was
the person who helped us understand
that the reason why Stonewall
was such a successful demonstration,
as opposed to other bar
raid responses, was the street pattern
of Greenwich Village, which
permitted demonstrators to be
chased up one street and then double
back to the Christopher Park
area down another street. Also,
the demonstrators understood the
street layout, whereas the tactical
police group, who were brought in
from another area, did not.”
What was particularly impressive
to both Dolkart and Lustbader
was that Carter shared much of
his research with the group seeking
National Register recognition
even though he had not yet published
his book.
“He was so generous with his
research,” Lustbader noted. “That
spoke to his integrity… that he
would allow the use of his research
pre-book publication.”
Dolkart recalled of the 1999 effort,
“We really could not have done
such a complete job without him.”
The way that many people who
knew Carter describe his commitment
to LGBTQ history, it is not
really surprising that he was willing
to share his own research, before
having received public credit
for it, in the interest of preserving
the community’s collective memory.
Kevin Jennings, the CEO of
Lambda Legal, met Carter about
fi ve years ago when the two were
both working in the effort to establish
an LGBTQ history museum in
New York.
“He was always generous with
his time,” Jennings recalled last
week. “He was committed to making
sure we got LGBTQ history
right and that it was something
that got passed along to the next
generation.”
Getting it right is another key
quality that people who knew
Carter and care about LGBTQ history
praise him for.
“So many myths have grown up
about that night and I urge anyone
who cares about our community’s
history to read the book,” Jennings
said of Carter’s “Stonewall.” “It was
thoroughly and meticulously researched
and is an enduring gift to
our community. David was an old
fashioned historian, with a refusal
to deviate what could be proven…
I think he felt that if we were going
to be taken seriously as a community
that we need to hold our historians
to the same standards as we
hold mainstream historians to.”
Jonathan Ned Katz, an historian
who founded OutHistory.org, similarly
praised Carter’s painstaking
approach to writing “Stonewall.”
“I was greatly impressed with his
book on Stonewall, and his desire
to distinguish fact from rumor,”
Katz told Gay City News last week.
“David and I were both very interested
in evidence. We were both
investigators. There is investigative
journalism, and there should
be a category investigative history.
Nobody had asked under FOIA the
NYPD whether there were fi les on
Stonewall. It was very exciting.
They named four people arrested,
including a woman.”
In 2010, Carter’s book was the
basis for a PBS “American Experience”
documentary “Stonewall Uprising,”
directed by Katie Davis and
David Heilbroner.
The depth of Carter’s understanding
of the Stonewall riots
became a decisive advantage a
decade after the book’s publication
when the successful push to
have the area surrounding the bar
designated a national monument
began.
Lustbader recalled a 2015 meeting
with the Interior Department,
where advocates of the designation
needed to convince federal offi cials
that Stonewall was the right choice
to become the fi rst LGBTQ monument
in the nation. When Carter
made a fi ve-minute presentation
on the historical signifi cance of the
1969 riots, Lustbader said, “There
was not a dry eye in the room.”
Carter’s presentation was the
“linchpin of the decision” to move
ahead, according to Lustbader. “It
helped pave the way for the government
to be confi dent that, ‘We have
our ducks in order. We have great
advocates.’” He added, “David was
so engaging and thorough. His enthusiasm
bled through.”
Lustbader commented on another
of Carter’s qualities that others
also saw in his.
“David was always gentle,” he
recalled.
“He was a very caring person,”
Katz said. “He called me when a
gay artist had been thrown out of
his apartment and he was trying
to help him. David was very goodhearted.”
“He was a true gentleman,” Jennings
said, adding that Carter also
“had a great sense of humor.’
Jennings recalled organizing a
panel discussion in which Carter
was participating and telling him
he would have three minutes to introduce
himself. Carter response
was, “Kevin, I’m from the South.
We can’t clear our throat in three
minutes.”
Eric Danzer was a close friend of
Carter for more than 15 years, and
he too described him as “a true
gentleman,” but also “a passionate
fi ghter.”
“There was a kindness, a sweetness
about him,” Danzer said. “One
of the coolest things about David
was that despite the scholarly, professorial
side of him, he could tell
quirky jokes with the best of them.
It was a sweet balance.
Several years ago, Carter held
the Patrick Henry Fellowship at
Washington College, an appointment
that allowed him to continue
his research and writing on a
planned biography of gay right pioneer
Frank Kameny, who in 1957
lost his federal government job as
an astronomer because he was gay
and went on to co-found the Wash-
➤ DAVID CARTER, continued on p.26
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/OutHistory.org
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