“We don’t like these management people running around the street shouting ‘gay power’ to further their own ends. “These raids shouldn’t be conducted at all,” Marty Robinson, GAA (Gay Activists Alliance) Political Affairs Committee chairman, declared. The Police left shortly thereafter and most of the patrons re-entered the club. Management mafiosi reportedly took to the streets also shouting “gay power” and urging the patrons to return apparently hoping to provoke a confrontation a-la-Stonewall. in his column in GAY, the nation’s first weekly gay newspaper:īarn Baloney Bared: New York Police raided the Barn Sunday, July 18th, issued summonses to nine employees and sent dozens of patrons scrambling out of the back rooms and into the streets. Gay activist Randy Wicker described what happened at The Barn, an after-hours club in the early morning hours of July 18, 1970. From getting caught in the crossfire between organized crime and corrupt police officials.Against direct harassment by the police.At this time in history the community actually found itself fighting on two fronts:
Yes, the gay community was bit more organized but the police continued to raid gay bars and clubs, nearly all of which continued to be mob-owned. Despite the fact that the Stonewall Riots happened a year earlier change did not happen overnight for the lesbian and gay community in NYC especially when it came to the NYPD.
