WNYC-FM (NEW YORK CITY) -- Marc Stein, professor of History at San Francisco State University and editor of The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History, discusses the legacy of Stonewall through documents that include mainstream, alternative, and LGBTQ media, gay-bar guide listings, state court decisions, political fliers, first-person accounts, song lyrics and photographs.
He also discussed the connection between gay bars and organized crime.
“Some of that had to do with the patterns of police harassment and police violence with respect to gay bars,” Stein says. “And in some respects, we could say that there was a need for something that was strong enough to stand up to the police. And organized crime had that character. What developed in New York and in a number of other cities was a payoff system, whereby the bars would pay off the police in order to reduce the scope and the frequency of raids on the gay bars.”