Section outline

    • Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community URL

      Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community (1h 27m)  is a 1984 U.S. documentary film about the LGBT community prior to the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, widely considered to be a major development in the history of gay and lesbian rights in the U.S.A., investigating national cultural perceptions of homosexuality before the event, looking back on previous decades, particularly in regard to conflicts with police and censorship. In addition to interviews with activists and scholars, the film includes the reflections of renowned writer Allen Ginsberg.


    • 1960s background to the Stonewall Rebellion File
    • “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” by James Brown (1968) URL

      James Brown (1933-2006) was and is considered “The Godfather of Soul,” the self-proclaimed “hardest working man in show business.”

      His smash hit “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” was released in August 1968, just 4 months after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968). The line “I’m Black and I’m Proud” is sung by a large chorus of children in the call and response tradition of Afro-American spirituals and gospel music. The song was n. 1 on the R&B Chart for 6 weeks and it hit n. 10 on the Billboard “Hot 100.”

      This song became an anthem for Black Pride and the Black Power Movement of the 1960s: “We won’t quit movin’/until we get what we deserve” and “we'd rather die on our feet/than be living on our knees." It put to music the ideas expressed in the 1966 “Black Power” speech by Stokely Carmichael, Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later a minister of the Black Panther Party, marking the adoption of the ideology of Black Power by the SNCC. Another slogan which became popular at the time was “Black is Beautiful.”


    • “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag – the Vietnam Song” by Country Joe McDonald and the Fish File

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft0vkKCadgk

      A song which became an anthem of the mass U.S. anti-war movement against the U.S. war on Vietnam (ca. 2 million Vietnamese & 60,000 U.S. soldiers dead), as sung by Country Joe McDonald & the Fish at the Woodstock Music Festival 15-18 August 1969 in Woodstock, N.Y.


    • Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young "(4 dead in) Ohio" URL

      4 May 1970 Kent State University, Ohio massacre by Ohio National Guard of unarmed university students protesting U.S. war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Four dead (Allison Krause, 19, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 20, Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, William Knox Schroeder, 19) and nine wounded (one permanently paralyzed).

    • The Stonewall Rebellion URL

      “The riot that changed America's gay rights movement forever: Stonewall was a rebellion and a release of fear. But it was also the celebration of personhood by queer Americans standing proud and unashamed”

      by Ed Pilkington in New York, The Guardian, 19.06.19


    • Stonewall Rebellion language exercise File