This is how we tell the story: On a warm summer night, 50 years ago, almost to the day, a Greenwich Village bar rowdy with hustlers and queens and queer people of all sorts got rowdier still when police came to raid the place. A crowd gathered outside. There were 100 people, and then 200, and then 500 or 600, each new person adding to the tension. A woman in handcuffs shouted at them all.Why don’t you guys do something?And so they did. Bricks went flying, or maybe it was shot glasses, and riots raged at the Stonewall Inn for two nights.

This, we say, is how the modern gay-rights movement began. And now this year, we celebrate the riot’s 50th anniversary as we celebrate Pride.

But that’s not really how history works, all nice and neat with clear-cut beginnings and endings. Stonewall was not the first riot like it, and neither were the organizations that grew from it the first of their kind. Stonewall was more like “the crest of the wave, rather than the beginning of a wave,” as historianSusan Strykerput it. The movement had been gathering itself up for decades before that.

A couple of weeks ago, queer historians made their way to San Francisco for a queer history conference. HistorianMarc Steinspoke at the event. He’s written much about Stonewall, and for this occasion, he hoped to tie that event to California, in part, by contextualizing what came before it. The Berkeley Barb, an underground newspaper, wrote about Stonewall not long after it happened, he said. They congratulated New York City on “joining the revolution.”

“You know every year at Pride, we hear the narrative that everything began with Stonewall,” Stein said later over the phone. So it’s been an annual ritual for historians, at least as far back as the ’70s, he said, to push back on that. To talk about a movement that began in the ’50s, and one that could also trace its roots to Europe decades before that.

“Social movements are complicated, right?” he said. “And understanding the longer history of LGBT resistance and activism, I think helps us appreciate that the struggle is a long one, and it’s one that takes many shapes and forms over a long period of time.”

Before Stonewall, there were protests at the Black Cat Tavern on Sunset Boulevard (’67); and before them ariot at Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night diner in San Francisco’s Tenderloin (’66), and before that a protest outside a restaurant called Dewey’s in Philadelphia (’65); and before that a riot at Cooper Do-nuts in downtown Los Angeles (’59).

Each of theseis a piece of a “bigger more complicated story. We can’t sew things up neatly,” says Stryker, the historian who is credited with rediscovering the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. “I’m also weary of ‘Stonewall wasn’t the first, it was actually Compton’s. Oh no, it wasn’t Compton’s it was Dewey’s. Oh no it was Cooper Do-Nut, oh it wasn’t Cooper Do-Nut, it was this thing we never heard of.’

“So firsts are not significant for me. For me what we’re seeing in the post-World War II years is this really different way relating identity to bodies politic to rights and citizenship, there’s new ways of thinking about the kind of person you can be.”

Much of that thinking began in San Francisco.

“Queer California,” an exhibitionat the Oakland Museum of California, takes a long view of the movement. A big timeline in the back of the exhibit, tracing the gay-rights movement, puts Stonewall somewhere closer to the middle, and pulls lesser known bits of activism to the front.

The Mattachine Society began building a “homophile movement” from Los Angeles in 1950. The Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian rights organization, formed five years later in San Francisco. In the mid-’60s, queer youth formed a group called Vanguard. They staged protests in the Tenderloin and along Market Street.“Vice Versa” was the earliest known gay periodical. It began in Los Angeles in 1947. “It seems such a courageous venture, though perhaps not a very wise one,” a reader wrote to the magazine.

There were other organizations and periodicals in those early years. Their work was not invisible.In the summer 1969, The San Francisco Chronicle ran a three-part series about lesbians. The first in the series appeared June 30, just days after Stonewall. In one image, people picket outside the State Line steamship company. “Gay is good,” says one of the signs.

“I think, broadly speaking, it’s not unfair to characterize San Francisco, and California in general, as a place where things have been a bit more open,” says Christina Linden, the Oakland Museum show’s curator. “It’s not a surprise to me that Stonewall actually happened later than a lot of this organizing.”

研究这些历史揭示了阶级和race struggles, disagreements over whether to assimilate or be bolder. These lessons meet us in the here and now and seem as fresh as ever. In recent years the radical queer organization Gay Shame has been pushing San Francisco Pride to ban police and corporations from participating. “It’s incredibly important to let these histories be more complex, as broad and rich and diverse as they actually are,” Linden says.

David Evans Frantzhas spent hours upon hours sifting through archives. He worked in Los Angeles as the curator at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, the largest and oldest of its kind. Stonewall, he says, was absolutely a galvanizing force.

But, all alone, the memory and myth of the riot grows heavy and bloated. We try to see things in it that just weren’t there. (We’ll likely never knowwho threw the first brick… or shot glass, or stone.) No event, no moment can hold all of that weight; but a broader, considered history — one with nuance and rough edges — can offer a sincere and true home.

“我认为我们认为太多的方法about Stonewall is about the construction of grand narratives,” he says. “Even as it can expand (to include figures likeMarsha P. Johnson),it still can’t expand to encompass all of the permutations of people who continue to be left out, or the different types of communities or the different conceptions of queerness.”

These grand narratives are born of many things, of histories poorly recorded and histories actively erased. The point, then, in opening history up isn’t to diminish a moment, so much as reveal others.

“It’s more important than ever to remember that resistance has happened, resistance has made changes and that a different world is possible,” Stryker says. “Continuing to activate what Stonewall can stand for, the idea of a mass uprising that can change our history, that’s important to remember. So even if we complicate the story — it wasn’t the first, it wasn’t the biggest — we can contest its legacy, but the take away point of all of that … should not be to undermine the significance of political resistance.

“That is to be celebrated.”