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Police entered the bar, and people say that is when the music stopped. "I remember being at the bar when the lights flickered and I said, ‘Why are the lights flickering?'" "No one expected anything special to happen," Segal remembered. Johnson was at the bar to celebrate her birthday. I had no idea what was going to happen."Īccounts of who was there vary, but on the night the riots started, many claim self-identified "queen" Marsha P. Stonewall exploded without any expectation. "There's a flashpoint where everything changed. "Wherever there was a gay bar that existed, the cops were paid off," said activist Jim Fouratt, who was also at the Stonewall Inn that night in June, and went on to co-found the Gay Liberation Front. I know that might sound strange, but at least we had a place." And so the mafia made money off the gay people. "The police knew it was illegal because there was an agreement that every few weeks, they'd come in and raid the place and get a payoff. "It had no license, because you couldn't serve alcohol to a known homosexual in New York because you would probably lose your license," Segal said. In 1969, the Stonewall Inn bar was owned by the mafia. There weren't a lot of places where LGBTQ people could gather. Of course, it was illegal to be who you were. "Gay and lesbian people were deeply stigmatized. "In 1969, there was really no such thing as being 'out,'" said actress and contemporary LGBTQ+ advocate Laverne Cox. Very few businesses welcomed openly gay people at the time, and overall society and laws were extremely hostile to LGBTQ-identifying people. We could be openly who we were," he said. "It was a glorious place to be because we could be open, we could be ourselves, we could dance, we could hug, we could kiss.