Starred review from March 30, 2015
Bausum (Stubby the War Dog) offers a powerful and moving account of the pivotal Stonewall riots of 1969 and the struggle for gay rights in the U.S. The riots occurred after police raided the Stonewall Inn, a grungy, mafia-run gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood. “The tension of that night and countless previous nights and hundreds of lifetimes of abuse burst the dams of person after person. The crowd became a mob, and the mob began to riot.” Bausum’s conversational storytelling whisks readers back to an era when homosexuality was criminalized; after a brief introduction to the night of the raid (“For starters, there was a full moon. And it was beastly hot”), the narrative backtracks a decade to set the context for the violent demonstrations that ensued. A fast-paced accounting reveals how the first riot unfolded, both inside and outside the bar. Final chapters bring the battle for gay civil rights up to the present, with particular attention paid to the AIDS epidemic, pride parades, and the fight for marriage equality. Archival photos, source notes, and a bibliography are included. Ages 12–up. (May)■
Starred review from March 15, 2015
Pennies, glass bottles, a parking meter, and a kick line: how a police raid became a community's symbol of freedom. June 28, 1969: the night the gay bar Stonewall was raided by the police for the second time in a week to stop a blackmail operation. What began as a supposedly routine police raid ended with over 2,000 angry, fed-up protesters fighting against the police in New York's West Village. Bausum eloquently and thoughtfully recounts it all, from the violent arrest of a young lesbian by the police to an angry, mocking, Broadway-style kick line of young men protesting against New York's Tactical Control Force. Bausum not only recounts the action of the evening in clear, blow-by-blow journalistic prose, she also is careful to point out assumptions and misunderstandings that might also have occurred during the hot summer night. Her narrative feels fueled by rage and empowerment and the urge to tell the truth. She doesn't bat an eye when recounting the ways that the LGBT fought to find freedom, love, and the physical manifestations of those feelings, whether at the Stonewall Inn or inside the back of a meat truck parked along the Hudson River. Readers coming of age at a time when state after state is beginning to celebrate gay marriage will be astonished to return to a time when it was a crime for a man to wear a dress. Enlightening, inspiring, and moving. (Nonfiction. 13-16)
Starred review from April 1, 2015
Gr 9 Up-This powerful, well-researched work examines the Stonewall riots, which took place in 1969 in New York City when members of the gay community fought back in response to a police raid on a gay bar. Bausum describes the restrictive lives that many gays and lesbians led in the 1960s and the relief-and risks-of meeting at gay bars. On June 28, 1969, when police arrived at the Stonewall Inn to make arrests, people-transvestites, drag queens, lesbians, and gay men-fought back, instead of filing quietly into police wagons. Quoting from a variety of firsthand sources (journalists, bar patrons, cops, and others), Bausum paints a vivid picture of the three nights of rioting that became the focal point for activists, some of whom had been fighting for gay and lesbian rights in a quieter way and others who found themselves suddenly drawn to the struggle. A month later, a large group of protestors rallied to speak out in Washington Square Park and marched down Christopher Street to the Stonewall Inn in what became the nation's first gay pride march. In the following chapters, Bausum describes the growth of gay and lesbian activism, setbacks, the impact of HIV/AIDS, and issues such as gays in the military and same-sex marriage, bringing readers to the present day and expertly putting these struggles into historical context. VERDICT An essential purchase.-Nancy Silverrod, San Francisco Public Library
Copyright 2015 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
April 1, 2015
Grades 9-12 It started with a thump on the door of The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village. It was in the early hours of June 28, 1969, and the thump announced a police raid, whichas Bausum dramatically demonstratesturned from raid to riot as the customers of the bar resisted the officers, fomenting an incident that helped launch the gay rights movement. Though it focuses on Stonewall, Bausum's book also offers a contextual look at the conditions of being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender in pre-Stonewall America; the Inn's Mafia ties that triggered the raid; and the sometimes uneasy progress of gay rights since that day, including the setback engendered by the AIDS epidemic of the '80s. Though comprising little more than a hundred pages of text, the book is comprehensive in its coverage, filled with important information, and compassionate in its tone. It sheds welcome light on a subject that deserves greater coverage in YA literature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)
Starred review from July 1, 2015
Bausum begins her history of the gay rights movement with a careful, detailed exposition of the June 1969 Stonewall riots, laying out the events leading up to the clash between the Greenwich Village gay community and the police and putting those events in the context of time and place. She dedicates the first half of the book to the riots themselves, drawing on reports, interviews, and other first-person accounts to put together a candid linear narrative that takes into consideration the perspectives of both sides of the conflict. And on both sides there is nuance, from different factions in the gay community advocating for peaceful or more combative protest to the militancy of the Tactical Patrol Force at the time (and the subsequent remorse of some of the officers involved). Bausum presents the riots as a galvanizing moment that gave the gay rights movement some traction, and traces its evolution in a more cursory way for the second half of the book. Her coverage includes the Christopher Street Liberation Day march, Harvey Milk, the AIDS crisis, Don't Ask, Don't Tell, DOMA, going up through United States v. Windsor, and arriving at the (preIreland vote) present, which she characterizes with hopeful momentum. Bausum writes with the precision of a journalist; there is never any doubt as to what she wonders, what she conjectures, and what she knows. The resulting narrative integrity makes her observations and her conclusions about the persecution and resilience of the LGBTQ community all the more powerful. Back matter includes an extensive bibliography, copious source notes, and a heartfelt author's note. thom barthelmess
(Copyright 2015 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)