“Why don’t you guys do something?”

She, the handcuffed stone butch, challenged the crowd, match dropping to gasoline.

The little bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village was pulsing with tension.
 
Though police raids on New York's gay bars were normal, before this night was over, drag queens would escape paddy wagons, use their high heels as weapons, straddle cops and beat them. Several nights of riots followed, marking the Stonewall Inn — a gay bar in the West Village — as the birthplace of the LGBT liberation movement.