But who made all of this possible? According to PBS:
In the early 1960s, while homosexuality was legal in the state of New York, establishments openly serving alcohol to gay customers were considered by the State Liquor Authority (SLA) to be "disorderly houses," or places where "unlawful practices are habitually carried on by the public." The SLA refused to issue liquor licenses to many gay bars, and several popular establishments had licenses suspended or revoked for "indecent conduct." Businesses that remained open were frequently raided by the police.
Already a strong presence in New York, members of the Mafia saw a business opportunity in catering to the otherwise shunned gay population. By the mid-1960s, the Genovese crime family controlled the majority of gay bars in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood in southern Manhattan that was quickly becoming a hub for the city's burgeoning gay community. In 1966, young Genovese family member Tony Lauria purchased the Stonewall Inn, then a low-earning 'straight' bar and restaurant. "Fat Tony," as he was known, renovated at low cost and reopened the Christopher Street club as a gay bar, controlling everything from the jukebox to the cigarettes.
And who was the head of this crime family when this transformation took place? None other than Vito Genovese himself.
Genovese may seem an unlikely hero of the gay rights movement. His life reads like a history of the Mob in the twentieth century. At various times he teamed with Lucky Luciano, Albert Anastasia, Bugsy Siegel, and Carlo Gambino. He helped organize the famous Apalachin conference. At the 1958 US Senate McClellan Hearings, he invoked the 5th Amendment 150 separate times. He participated in and ordered numerous murders, including that of a man whose wife he wanted for himself.
Eventually, in 1959, Genovese was convicted of conspiring to import and sell narcotics. He spent the rest of his life behind bars, though he continued to run his crime family from there, and ordered several hits from prison.
It is unknown how Vito himself felt about homosexuals. His personal resume does not bear much similarity to that of, say, Harvey Fierstein (author of Torch Song Trilogy).
Genovese died in February 1969, four months before the uprising, so he didn't live quite long enough to see the pivotal, historic role his Stonewall Inn would play.
So far the gay rights movement doesn't seem to have taken any great pride in its association with Genovese.
One can't help but wonder what he, in turn, would think of the movement he helped spark.
(Don't ask me why I wrote this silly post; I just thought it was sort of funny that Genovese was so closely connected to this symbol of gay liberation.)
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4 comments:
They could make this into a movie. Kind of surreal.
& that guy looks kind of like De Niro. Finally a good role for him again.
Steven --
You're right, he does look a little like De Niro, and that would be a good role for him.
I may be able to shed a little light on the connection--you may recall that the fall of Rome was prompted by a gradually increasing influx of Semitic/Asiatic migrants and invaders, until the Empire ceased being an empire of people with blond/light brown/red hair and blue/green eyes.
Underground criminal cartels have only ever existed in conjunction with the banks and secret police that launder and protect them, using the criminal arm to take care of financial and security tasks that even the secret police can't handle. The cooperation between the Sicilian mafia, the Vatican cultural front, and the international banking financial front, has been largely duplicated across America, as certain nameless financial interests controlled New York, then spread out to Vegas and LA, utilizing non-state Euro-Semitic criminal organizations to control the corresponding other halves of their industries.
Hollywood and softcore are managed by the front men, while the "criminals" manage bootlegs and hardcore. The Fed brutally enforces currency controls on the law-abiding nation, while the mafia brutally enforces currency controls on the underworld. Thereby both halves of the economy, the public and private, are controlled. Cooperation between the two halves allows the police to tap the cartels to murder public figures and eliminate dissident members of the police, while the cartels can use the police to arrest, imprison, or execute dissident members of the underworld.
Even half a century later, the pattern holds. Certain financial elements in politics massage border enforcement regulations and criminalize certain drugs in order to provide de-facto patents on drug sales and mule movements to the cartels they partner with. Public cartels like the Fed and the BIS continue to manage currency flows, ensuring that their underworld partners can easily launder trillions, while violently enforcing payroll-tax policy on people making $44K a year.
As impossible as it will seem to people nowadays, in the face of so much current Jewish homophilia, anti-homosexuality laws were heavily promoted by Jewish elements. During the Weimar Republic, for example, Hitler was said to have been greatly offended by the ways that Jewish newspapers blamed Germany's financial problems on degenerate homosexuals. In America after the war, that translated to local governments funding morals squads (with plenty of support from Christian dupes) that took on homosexuals, even while different elements of the same governments cooperated with the financiers who paid for and violently controlled the homosexual subculture of bathhouses, bars, etc. The late 20th and early 21st centuries' "gay pride" stuff couldn't have happened without the fostering of the highly commercialized gay culture that the "Italian" (1000 years of Afro/Semitic invasions into Rome) mafia set up in the U.S. after WW2.
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