The modern Gay Rights Movement began 50 years ago in a dive bar in New York City.

In many states it was illegal in 1969 to sell an alcoholic beverage to a Homosexual, so decent places to gather socially were non-existent. Stereotypes are based in reality, and the stereotype of Gay people being promiscuous and having sex in dirty places like alleys and shipping piers was rooted in society’s not allowing Gay people to gather anywhere else but in clandestine places, and the harassment, loss of housing, and loss of jobs that came if sexual orientation were discovered.  While society denied decent places to socialize, and while society forbade relationships to Gay people, it condemned them for living in the conditions society forced on them.

While denying the possibility of long term, committed relationships, society claimed Gay people were incapable of them.

Years ago when asked by Johnny Carson why Gay people had sex outside of marriage, something that most people found unacceptable in an attempt, apparently, to get Harvey Fierstein to see why society had a problem with Gay sex, Fierstein pointed out that you cannot deny Gay people the right to marry and then condemn them for not getting married. Gay people were having sex outside of marriage because society would not let them have sex within it.

It was a case of forcing certain conditions on a class of people and then condemning them for living within those forced conditions.

Humans are social creatures. We gather together according to our commonalities. We like to enjoy the company of people with whom we identify, and gathering in public for conversation or liquor infused partying ijust part of who we are. One section of society denying that to another section of it, does not erase that part of our humanity.

Gay people, having the same needs as straight people to socialize and seek companionship, sought it where they could find it within the constraint set by others, and those seeing a financial advantage in supplying those places, did so. Not, however, for the sake of their clientele, but for their own pockets, and they were also people who were involved in illegal enterprises, and bars for Gay people was just one more.

Go to the Stonewall Inn today, and you see a nice bar with clean, neat appointments, well arranged bottles of alcohol behind the bar, little chandeliers, and a large window that lets in the light of day during daylight hours.

Go in 1969, and you had warm bottles of beer, second and third rate alcohol served in classes washed perfunctorily in buckets of soapy water, ill-kept floors, questionable water mixed in with the booze, and a large piece of plywood covering the window so patrons could not be seen from the street. The restroom smelled of the impatience of a parking garage.

You took what you could get back then, and what you got was what the bar owners gave you, not because you were worth anything, but because you had money to spend and they wanted it.

The “Riot”, when it happened, was a protest of the dehumanizing treatment and conditions society forced on the Gay Community and which that community was expected to accept.

It was a protest against not being allowed to socialize as a community.

It may viagra buy online mean you have nerve damage from diabetes. Treatment options have varied with the following india tadalafil online possibilities. Sometimes, there is no medical reason to ED as the problem tadalafil 5mg no prescription is merely psychological. Many websites also offer free cheap sildenafil no prescription coupons which can be downloaded. It was not a party with commercial sponsorship, and it came from a leaderless people acting as a community with standout stars only being chosen years later because a spontaneous communal act seems too hard to grasp, and people need someone to have thrown the first shoe, shot glass, or brick, even though none were thrown, but later claimed to have been by those seeking stardom, or those who need that there was one, even if the star had not been present that first night.

Reality, sadly, has a way of losing out to romance.

While the Modern Gay Rights Movement initiated that night brought about progress in the ensuing 50 years, it also made it possible for those wanting to do so to open decent bars to make money without running questionable taverns under deplorable conditions, and having to slip protection money to the local police precincts.

Gay bars became legitimate businesses even if they were originally relegated to the seamiest parts of town, to now be, without having moved, in the most gentrified, toniest areas.

So it has become a little too ironic, and a little too sad, that while celebrating progress is worth a party, the bars where the celebrations happen have found ways to make money from it, and corporations entice people to buy product be appropriating the symbol of a movement, and commercialize it by slapping rainbows on their products for the month of June.

At recent Pride weekends when people from all over gathered in various cities automatically increasing the amount of money bars would be making, the owners found a way to increase profits by charging exorbitant cover charges as high as $25 to get in to spend money, and in some cases raising the amount when lines for entry began to get long.

Bar hopping has become an expensive proposition because every bar you could normally just walk into charged you to enter so you could celebrate liberation.

The celebration of a riot in a bar begun by the disenfranchised others of society who patronized one of the few establishments where they could do that and which brought about equality has morphed into bars squeezing money out of the celebrants, requiring money to celebrate an event in which homeless street kids played a large role.

Only the moneyed can celebrate and we have added the haves and have nots division to what should be a communal, united event.

We have become them.

When I was younger and a practicing Catholic the regular attendance at church swelled on Christmas and Easter as people thought attendance on those days could stave off eternal damnation for not attending church on a regular basis on Sundays. The “C and Es” filled the churches to standing room only with spill over, and capitalizing on this, there was always a second collection beyond the regular single one, supposedly for some specific purpose beyond church maintenance, and the church brought in a boat load of money.

A single collection with the increased attendance would have been more than what was usually collected, but with a captive audience, why not take advantage.

This is the Gay bars doing on Pride weekends what the churches do on Christmas and Easter.