In New York City, the movement galvanized around the Stonewall riots in 1969, but things were 'a little different' in Chicago, he said, where activist attorneys succeeded in winning a couple of key rulings. 'But the thing is that feeling of belonging when they went to bars was worth the risks of being busted in one of those raids and having their names listed in the paper.' 'People were rightfully scared and cautious,' Keehnen added. 'We'd always been harassed by police, but things really escalated that year. 'So crackdowns on bars got really intense, the illegal raids and everything,' he said. Daley called for a crackdown on gay bars in an effort to 'clean up the city' ahead of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. 'So really our bars are kind of ground zero for our feelings of self-awareness, community, activism, and through our activism basically our rights.'Īccording to Keehnen, Mayor Richard J. 'So what you had was all these people coming together, feeling they weren't the only one, and you have them getting a sense of community. 'From that sort of self-awareness that they weren't the only one, people began to see that the problem wasn't the fact that they were gay or LGBT, rather the problem was the way society viewed the LGBT community,' he added.
