I read this as part of the 2021 Read Harder Challenge, for task 4: read an LGBTQ+ history book. I picked it because while I had heard of Stonewall, I knew vanishingly little about it... and after reading this very interesting and well-researched book, I have to say, in all honesty, that I still don't know that much about it.

Duberman, in all fairness, has written a very readable account, and he's used a compelling narrative structure, focusing on the experiences of six people and interweaving their experiences throughout the book. I always respond better, in literature, to character over plot, if you'll excuse the phrasing, so this really made the book seem more accessible, especially as in some places I got a little lost in the welter of organisations involved. I think the real eye-opener for me here was just how fractured the LGBTQ+ activist community was during the 1960s, and how much of that scattering was due to an insufficient acknowledgement of what today would be called intersectionality. Different activist groups had different priorities that were affected by the gender and race of their members, but by having six diverse voices at the centre of the book Duberman is able to give a much more effective context to the events surrounding Stonewall.

That, essentially, is what this book is: context. We don't actually get to Stonewall until about two-thirds of the way in, and the riots themselves are dispensed with in about 25 pages. Everything else is context, and as such it seems to me (with my very limited knowledge) to be more a history of American LGBTQ+ organisations in the 1960s than it is a close focus on the riots, which is what I was expecting when I picked it up. Admittedly, after reading I'm not sure that you can do justice to one without the other...