This is the sixth post in the Succession IV: Queering the Environment – “Queer Joy” series. This series, edited by Jessica DeWitt, Tina Adcock, and Sarah York-Bertram, invites contributors to build off of scholarship and lived knowledge that envisions queer joy as a way of knowing and being in relation with the environment and more-than-human beings.

Two environments in New York City that hold immense importance to queer people—Stonewall and Jacob Riis Park—are under the management of the National Park Service. Looking at the two sites together reveals how this federal agency fails to respect how nature, queer joy, and resistance tangle together in both the past and the present.

Environmental Dimensions of the Stonewall Riots

Over the summer of 1969, the Stonewall Inn, Christopher Park, and the street in between was the center of an uprising that launched the movement for queer liberation and changed the course of history.

The moon was full on the rioting’s first night. As scientists struggle to quantify how human bodies and minds react to a full moon overhead, centuries of artists and witches have reveled in its glow.¹ There’s something magical and powerful about that orb, and the reporter who rushed to the scene in the early hours of June 28th hinted at its influence by choosing the subtitle: “Full Moon Over the Stonewall.”²

The weather, too, was remarkable. Veterans of the revolt remember how hot and muggy it was, without any breeze, giving what Victoria Cruz called an “eerie sense to” the night.³ Holly Woodlawn blamed the “unbearable” humidity on tears flowing from the eyes of “every queen in the city” during Judy Garland’s funeral earlier that day.⁴

And then there was Christopher Park, a small triangular piece of land with a green lawn and benches surrounding a paved area, with trees around the edges.⁵ Most knew this spot as “Sheridan Square” for its statue of the general who engineered the extermination of buffalo while waging genocidal warfare against Native peoples out west.⁶ Despite this connection with brutality and bloodshed, the park had what Woodlawn remembered as a “very non-threatening, friendly atmosphere frequented by panhandlers, bums, and drag queens.”⁷ Activists sometimes gathered there, planting a tree in 1961 to commemorate a labor and anti-war organizer and protesting the demolition of low-income housing in 1965.⁸ Most days, though, the park was a place to hang out, exercise, and watch performers like tightrope walker Philip Petit.⁹ A poet mused, “Walking with his environment/he opens his record player/in the park/ to friends he wants to make—music extolling the fine life/he seems to live” as “the evening light/which shuffles shadows/through the leaves/is alive/with darkness/and electric sounds.”¹⁰ A sense of laidback ease and openness to connecting with others infused this tiny pocket of urban greenery.

Christopher Park and the Riot’s Spark

At night, Christopher Park was home to queer kids. Many of the city’s open spaces served this purpose in the 1960s, as bands of young people abandoned by their families made new ones together while sleeping on benches and in bushes.¹¹ Jay Toole moved between the “little park across the street from Stonewall,” abandoned piers along the Hudson River, and Washington Square, remembering that “we had a sense that this was our home.”¹²

“At night, Christopher Park was home to queer kids. Many of the city’s open spaces served this purpose in the 1960s, as bands of young people abandoned by their families made new ones together while sleeping on benches and in bushes.”

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt extended the feeling of home to the Stonewall Inn. A self-described “STREET RAT” whose friends frequented the park, he would find an empty beer can so the bartender thought he’d bought a drink, and then “the night was yours…We DANCED…We were happy… Here the consciousness of knowing you ‘belonged’ nestled into the warm feeling of finally being HOME.”¹³

Stonewall held special meaning for gender non-conforming people of all ages. Despite often facing discrimination from the bouncers, Holly Woodlawn explained that “we flocked [to Stonewall] because it was a place where we were fawned over. We were treated like women.”¹⁴ But when cops arrived, as they often did, making a show of shuttering a bar that served queers in violation of local law, they arrested patrons who wore clothing that did match their sex assigned at birth.¹⁵

There was a “normal routine” to police raids, explained Sylvia Rivera. Usually, everyone who made it out of the bar would leave the area for about twenty minutes until the owners could open back up. But “instead of disappearing that evening, we went across the street to Sheridan Square.”¹⁶ “All of a sudden you just feel this…”—Rivera trailed off, trying to capture an inexpressible something that came over a crowd gathered in a beloved park under the full moon, as thick hot air met skins sweaty from joyful dancing cut short. “Everybody’s looking at each other,” Rivera remembered, all wondering “why do we have to keep on constantly putting up with this?”¹⁷

People started fighting back. They threw coins to represent payoffs that police demanded from the Stonewall’s mafia owners, they threw bottles, they threw anything they could get their hands on and set fires. Power started to shift, away from the police and towards the people. As the crowd de-arrested comrades who did not look the way authorities thought they should, some cops barricaded themselves inside the bar to wait for back-up. Those stuck outside found themselves pushed away by a moving human barricade of dancers kicking their legs up like the Rockettes while singing about their “nelly knees” and pubic hair. Marsha P. Johnson was too busy to dance. She remembered “throwing over cars and screaming in the middle of the street” and someone saw her climb a telephone pole to drop a heavy handbag onto a police cruiser, shattering its windshield.¹⁸ The night was a chaotic mix of rage, humor, campiness, and destruction.¹⁹

Morning brought what a Village Voice reporter described as a “new and open brand of exhibitionism. Steps, curbs, and the park provided props” as more and more queers expressed themselves freely, with public displays of affection in broad daylight and refusal to mask characteristics deemed deviant.²⁰ That night, and the next after that, people returned to this spot to battle the cops.

This was not the first queer uprising, but its combustible combination of magic ingredients launched a new era in the struggle for justice. There was the moon, the heat, and adrenaline coursing through a crowd collectively experiencing eviction from the joys of the dancefloor. And there was the setting: the park, the bar, and the street in between formed a multigenerational, multiracial, multigender, interclass space that queers from many walks of life made their own. Most fearless among those who shared these grounds were street kids and gender non-conforming people who, as Rivera explained, “didn’t have nothing to lose.” Their jubilant rage was infectious, spreading to bar patrons who were closeted and had good jobs that they risked by fighting back.²¹ As a diverse community coalesced into collective action, a routine police raid became a historic uprising.

Building on this momentum in the following weeks and years, activists organized protests and marches that started and stopped in Christopher Park. The following photograph taken a month after the rebellion shows tree branches encircling demonstrators, cradling their resistance. The park was home to some, and, to others, its leafy greenness offered daily invitations to linger as the streets outside the gates hustled and bustled. Did entering this oasis of pleasure and comfort within a city designed for profit and conformity unleash people from restraints, encouraging them to be themselves, act out, and fight back?

Enclosing a Rebellion

Trying to think this all through, I brought students to Christopher Park a couple springs ago. As we talked, a National Park Service ranger entered the gates, dressed in the whole outfit, hat and all. Stonewall became a national monument in 2016 as part of the agency’s attempt to reach out to LGBTQ+ people during the Obama administration.²² The National Park Service (NPS) manages the park and runs a visitor center in the original location of the Stonewall Inn, next to its current iteration that remains open as a bar.

That our history is not safe with NPS is clear, as the Trump administration demanded the removal of “transgender” from the website, even though the uprising would not have happened without gender non-conforming people. The image below shows renegade additions to signage in Christopher Park: stickers with the trans flag and the “T” that is missing from what NPS frames as “LGB” history.²³ But there’s another problem visible here that preceded Trump’s attacks.

Notice the lock. Rangers close the gates every evening at 5pm, many hours earlier than parks managed by the city. My students and I weren’t the only ones told to leave. A group of trans elders had been resting on the benches—the setting sun shimmering their glitter. This is no longer the freely accessible and unruly community space that turned the spark of a police raid into the blaze of rebellion.²⁴

“This is no longer the freely accessible and unruly community space that turned the spark of a police raid into the blaze of rebellion.”

The NPS’ methods of memorialization constrain this site’s potential for queer resistance in the present and future, aligning with waves of gentrification and racist policing that push unhoused and Black and Brown members of our community from the surrounding neighborhood.²⁵ In the process, history gets flattened and we lose the radical challenge that the uprising posed to enduring patterns of homophobia and transphobia.

Queer Magic Lives on at Riis Beach

The same agency that traps the Stonewall Riots in a celebratory but flattened history where it doesn’t threaten order is simultaneously trying to constrain an unruly queer beach. The far section of Jacob Riis Park out on the Rockaway Peninsula has been a queer space since the 1940s at least, and people who rioted at Stonewall went there too.²⁶ Queers sometimes headed out to Riis when bars in the West Village closed for the night, Jean Devente remembered, sleeping on the sand until the “queens woke you up with their little fights there and you hear screaming in the water.”²⁷ These impromptu performances were part of the tapestry of what Joan Nestle called “our piece of the beach where we could kiss and hug and enjoy looking at each other.”²⁸ There was plenty to see, because full nudity was legal then.²⁹

A few years after the Stonewall Riots, though, this beach became part of the Gateway National Recreation Area. Surveillance and arrests increased, with one ranger explaining NPS’ mission to “make the beach as pleasant for families as possible.”³⁰ Queers were not legitimate members of the beachgoing public, he seemed to say, and the families we create don’t count. As queer history blurs into the queer present on these sands, U.S. Park Police continue harassing us today. In the parking lot, these federal officers tow cars for any silly reason they can cook up.

Nor is NPS meeting the challenges of stewarding Riis Beach in this era of climate catastrophe and rising economic inequality. A large portion of the historically queer part of the beach is blocked off, as coastal resilience projects down the shoreline create massive erosion and dangerous currents here. Shifting sands are a complex issue on a barrier island made to move, but officials avoid wrestling with tough questions by just putting up fences.³¹ NPS has also leased Riis Beach’s historic public bathhouse to venture capitalists trying to create a shockingly expensive private club. Though the project seems like a scam destined to fail, many of us fear the privatization and gentrification of a place long known as “The People’s Beach.”

Yet despite NPS’ best efforts, Riis Beach today is still a lot like Stonewall/Christopher Park was back in the 1960s. This is where we see that beautifully combustible mixture of queer and trans people who share a place across our many differences, loving it together.³² “You can really be yourself at Riis,” explained Ralph Hopkins, who has been going there since the 1970s and is known as the beach’s mayor.³³ Multiple beachgoers who recorded reflections in the “oral futures booth” installation in 2022 described Riis as “home,” echoing memories of Christopher Park.³⁴

“Sometimes this wildness encourages us to believe that more change is possible, and we can make the rest of the world feel as free as this beach.”

Riis, too, is an unruly environment. Tim (Teal) Nottage’s contribution to NiCHE’s 2024 Queering the Environment series explores how people and plants misbehave together here. Maybe the sea inspires wildness in us. J Wortham describes water as a “physical and emotional symbol for queer expression self-discovery,” having interviewed queer elders about their experiences at Riis Beach and other queer coastlines. Waves crash and wind whips while we break all kinds of rules. Dolphins leap to our thunderous applause and clashing strains of music blaring from dozens of speakers. As the sun dazzles waves often speckled with condom wrappers, many of us have learned that we can be whoever we want to be and make our bodies our own. Sometimes this wildness encourages us to believe that more change is possible, and we can make the rest of the world feel as free as this beach. If another queer rebellion happens today, I think it will start at Riis.

Looking at Stonewall and Riis Beach together, I see official desires to trap queer history in amber, obscuring our continuously wayward struggle for liberation. But we don’t need a federal agency to remember our history. When it comes to celebrating Stonewall, many of us choose Riis over the annual Pride Parade that flows past Christopher Park. Beachgoers who spoke with jah elyse sayers explained that this festivity is “only for white gays” and has “become a “Rainbow Capitalist Nightmare…completely detached from the movement that sparked it.”³⁵ Queer Riis Beach is still an unruly place to remember our unruly past. We collect materials that help us tell Riis’ story while organizing to defend this wild shoreline where queer joy finds its fullest expression.

Mars Plater teaches history at UConn-Stamford. They are grateful to everyone in the links and endnotes for helping them bring ideas they are exploring in a manuscript about parks in nineteenth-century NYC to the more recent past.

Feature Image: Chris Berntsen’s collage shows queer history blurring into the queer present at Riis Beach. See more of his work here.

Notes

1. John Launer, “Light and Gravity: Can the Full Moon Really Make You Go Mad?” Postgrad Med J 97 (2021): 831-832. ↩︎
2. Howard Smith, “View from Inside: Full Moon Over the Stonewall,” Village Voice, July 3, 1969. ↩︎
3. Victoria Cruz” interviewed by Steven Palmer, The National Park Service’s Stonewall Oral History Project in partnership with The LGBT Community Center and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, August 9, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmWDjk7vR_Q&list=PL2WoZVqxJLYEj4yGAdXOj_xPXZ2NtmHXT&index=12 ↩︎
4. Holly Woodlawn with Jeffrey Copeland, A Low Life in High Heels: The Holly Woodlawn Story (Harper Perennial, 1991), 124. ↩︎
5. Woodlawn, A Low Life in High Heels, 123; “Christopher Park,” NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/christopher-park/ ↩︎
6. Tasha Hubbard, “‘Kill, Skin, and Sell’: Buffalo Genocide in Nineteenth-Century North America,” in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, eds. Alexander Laban Hinton, Andrew Woolford, and Jeff Benvenuto (Duke University Press, 2014), 296-297. ↩︎
7. Woodlawn, A Low Life in High Heels, 123. ↩︎
8. “Tree for Muste,” Village Voice, January 12, 1962, 3, 35; “No Demolition Rally in Village Saturday,” Village Voice, January 21, 1965, 3. ↩︎
9. “Alex Feingold” interviewed by Steven Palmer, The National Park Service’s Stonewall Oral History Project in partnership with The LGBT Community Center and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, May 7, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdIaXun7s0M&list=PL2WoZVqxJLYEj4yGAdXOj_xPXZ2NtmHXT&index=16; “Arthur Hurray” interviewed by Leyla Vural, The National Park Service’s Stonewall Oral History Project in partnership with The LGBT Community Center and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, July 11, 2018,
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjjfRTw_04o&list=PL2WoZVqxJLYEj4yGAdXOj_xPXZ2NtmHXT&index=23 ↩︎
10. James Peters, “Sheridan Square Music,” Generation 21, no. 1 (1969), 71. ↩︎
11. Woodlawn, A Low Life in High Heels, 54-60, 109. ↩︎
12. “Jay Toole” interviewed by Ted Kerr and AJ Lewis, New York City Trans Oral History Project, June 15, 2016, October 20, 2016, November 24, 2017, and August 8, 2018, https://nyctransoralhistory.org/interview/003-interview-of-jay-london-toole/ ↩︎
13. Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, “1969 Mother Stonewall and the Golden Rats,” The Stonewall Reader, ed. Jason Baumann (Penguin, 2019), 207-208; “Robert E Bryan” interviewed by Joey Plaster, The National Park Service’s Stonewall Oral History Project in partnership with The LGBT Community Center and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, May 8, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXECvwEinHg&list=PL2WoZVqxJLYEj4yGAdXOj_xPXZ2NtmHXT&index=3 ↩︎
14. Tourmaline, Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson (Tiny Reparations Books, 2025), 73-77; Woodlawn, A Low Life in High Heels, 123. ↩︎
15. Erin Siodmak, “Homosexuals Are Revolting: Stonewall, 1969,” in Revolting New York: How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising, and Revolution Shaped a City, eds. Neil Smith and Don Mitchell (University of Georgia Press, 2018), 200. ↩︎
16. “La notte di Stonewall: la testimonianza di Sylvia Rivera,” Istituto di Sessuologia Clinica di Roma, June 28, 2000, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr5lmKRp6CY ↩︎
17. “Sylvia Rivera” interviewed by Eric Marcus, Making Gay History, December 9, 1989, https://makinggayhistory.org/podcast/episode-1-1/  ↩︎
18. “Marsha P. Johnson & Randy Wicker” interviewed by Eric Marcus, Making Gay History, January 24, 1989,  https://makinggayhistory.org/podcast/episode-11-johnson-wicker/ ↩︎
19. Siodmak, “Homosexuals Are Revolting,” 201-204. ↩︎
20. Lucian K. Truscott IV, “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square,” Village Voice, July 3, 1969. ↩︎
21. “Sylvia Rivera” interviewed by Eric Marcus, Making Gay History. ↩︎
22. For the long, sordid history of exclusion that preceded this gesture, stay tuned for Sherri Sheu’s chapter in Outsiders: Queer Environmental Histories! ↩︎
23. In March 2025, the NPS website described Stonewall’s context by explaining that “almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was a violation of law, rule, or policy.” As of June 1, 2026, the acronym has been removed, but “transgender” is still missing from https://www.nps.gov/ston/learn/historyculture.htm ↩︎
24. We are stuck outside the gates when we end the annual Friday night Drag March by singing “(Somewhere) Over the Rainbow” to remember the deviance and unruliness of Stonewall that feels missing from the corporate-sponsored Pride Parade that passes the open park on Sunday. ↩︎
25. Rickke Mananzala, “The FIERCE Fight for Power and the Preservation of Public Space in the West Village,” The Scholar and Feminist Online 10.1-10.2 (Fall 2011/Spring 2012), https://sfonline.barnard.edu/the-fierce-fight-for-power-and-the-preservation-of-public-space-in-the-west-village/  ↩︎
26. “Perry Brass” interviewed by Steven Palmer, The National Park Service’s Stonewall Oral History Project in partnership with The LGBT Community Center and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, May 18, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzIrsF0R1ns&list=PL2WoZVqxJLYEj4yGAdXOj_xPXZ2NtmHXT&index=5 ↩︎
27. “Recalling the 1950s: Conversation with Jean Devente, Rudy Grillo, and Tracy Childers,” WBAI, December 25, 1977, Rudy Grillo Papers, Box 11, Audio Tape 71, LGBT Community Center National History Archive. ↩︎
28. Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country (Cleis Press, 1987), 36-37. ↩︎
29. “Nude Sunbathing at Riis Park is Banned by New State Law,” New York Times, June 27, 1983, B3. ↩︎
30. “11 Men Arrested at Riis Park as U.S. Begins a Crackdown,” New York Times, July 23, 1974, 75; jah Elyse Sayers, “Erosion and Accretion: Mobilities of Sand, People, and Memory at Queer Riis Beach,” PhD diss., (City University of New York, 2026), 82, 89, 92. ↩︎
31. Sayers, “Erosion and Accretion,” 114-120, 135-144. ↩︎
32.  Inclusivity keeps expanding—last summer organizers fundraised to buy a community beach wheelchair with thick wheels for the sand and installed an accessibility mat. ↩︎
33. “Ralph Hopkins” interviewed by J Wortham, Waterfront Queer Stories: Elders’ Resilience Amidst Changing Tides, https://eldersproject.incite.columbia.edu/collections/jenna-wortham ↩︎
34. Sayers, “Erosion and Accretion,” 62, 162, 177-179. ↩︎
35. jah Elyse Sayers, “Black Queer Times at Riis: Making Place in a Queer Afrofuturist Tense,” Wagadu 22, no. 1 (2021), 57-104, https://digitalcommons.cortland.edu/wagadu/vol22/iss1/4/ ↩︎

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Mars Plater

Mars Plater (they/them) is an Assistant Professor of History at UConn-Stamford who studies the unruly parks of nineteenth-century New York City and communes with the sea as much as possible.

Latest posts by Mars Plater (see all)

• Celebrating the Past While Constraining the Present: Queer National Parks in New York City - June 19, 2026