A Milwaukee bar fights off the men who came to clean it out, Atlanta police stop a Warhol film to photograph the audience, and Uruguay’s first same-sex wedding takes place at a hospital bedside at five to eight in the morning.
1961
A Beer Bottle in Each Hand
The Black Nite fights back in Milwaukee, eight years before Stonewall
The Black Nite was a gay bar at 400 N. Plankinton Avenue, just south of downtown Milwaukee. It had one rule that set it apart from the rest of the city’s gay bars: you could dress how you liked. Drag queens and trans women were turned away almost everywhere else, including by other gay bars. At the Black Nite they were the regulars.
Josie Carter was one of them. She was young, Black and trans, worked days at a metal stamping plant, and her partner worked the door.
In the early evening of August 5, 1961, four servicemen turned up, all around twenty years old. They had come on a dare - walk into the gay bar, come back with proof. They would not show identification and they would not sign the visitors’ book, and so the bouncer would not let them in.
He told them to leave and took one of them by the arm. All four turned on him.
Carter was inside in her bathrobe. She picked up a beer bottle in each hand and went out to help him. “I went out there with a beer bottle in each hand, ready to knock some heads,” she said later. She hit one of them hard enough to dislocate her own finger and put him in the county emergency hospital.
The servicemen left. On their way out they said they would be back with friends, and that they were going to clean up the Black Nite.
The manager wanted to shut the bar for the night. Carter told him to open as usual, and spent the hours between then and closing time going round Milwaukee telling people what was coming.
At one in the morning the men came back, somewhere between twelve and twenty of them. About seventy-five people were inside, waiting.
Badly outnumbered, they went for the building instead. Every window. The furniture. The entire stock of bottled liquor. The jukebox. Someone pulled the microphone off its stand and used it to smash the electric organ. The damage came to around $2,000, which is something over $20,000 today. Three people from the bar were taken to hospital, one of them a thirty-six-year-old concussed by a flying bar stool.
The fight at the Black Nite was not with the police, and that is what makes it unlike Stonewall or Compton’s Cafeteria. Someone had the sense to write down the licence plates, the police traced the men and arrested them, the judge, Christ Seraphim, let them go for insufficient evidence.
The bar did not last much longer. The city made it change its name in 1962, and in 1966 it was pulled down for a freeway extension that was never finished. The ground where it stood is still empty.
Carter told the story to an oral history project in 2011. “We didn’t start anything, but we sure as hell finished it.”
She died in 2014, at seventy-three, having refused any recognition for it while she was alive. She left a son and a long list of people she had taken in and raised after their own families threw them out. In 2022 Milwaukee County made the site a landmark, the first LGBTQ one in the state, and on August 5, 2024 a marker went up and the governor of Wisconsin declared it Black Nite Remembrance Day.
Atlanta police stop a Warhol film to photograph the audience
Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey filming Lonesome Cowboys in Arizona, January 1968. Photo: XmchaikenX, CC BY-SA 4.0. Source.
Andy Warhol shot Lonesome Cowboys on a dude ranch in Arizona in January 1968. It is a western with almost no plot, a lot of half-dressed cowboys and a sheriff in drag. Wherever it played it caused trouble. The FBI watched the production and sent agents to the San Francisco premiere. In London the police arrested the entire audience.
On August 5, 1969, six weeks after Stonewall, it was showing at the Ansley Mall Mini-Cinema, an art house near Midtown Atlanta with a largely gay clientele.
About seventy people were in the room. Fifteen minutes in, the film stopped and the house lights came up. Ten Atlanta police officers were standing in the aisles and the exits were blocked.
“They had everybody get up and line up,” Abby Drue, who was there, remembered. “We had popcorn in our mouths. I think I had a submarine sandwich I was in the middle of eating.”
The police arrested the manager and the projectionist under a Georgia obscenity law, passed the year before. Fulton County’s solicitor, Hinson McAuliffe, had ordered the raid as part of a campaign against, in his words, these people dealing in obscenity.
The police went down the line photographing the audience one at a time and writing down their names and details. The chief of police later gave the reason: to identify known homosexuals.
Most of the people in that queue were never charged with anything. The photographs were the punishment. In 1969 a picture of your face in a police file, filed under homosexual, could cost you your job, your flat, or your children, no need for a conviction.
“When we walked out of the theater, it was outrageous seeing the guys being pushed and frisked,” Drue said.
Six days later several dozen people protested outside the offices of the Great Speckled Bird, Atlanta’s underground paper. The police maced them and made arrests.
Not long after, activists met at the New Morning Café in Emory Village and founded the Georgia Gay Liberation Front, with Bill Smith leading it. It registered voters, campaigned against the state’s anti-gay laws, and in 1971 marched down Peachtree Street after the city refused it a permit. Atlanta Pride grew out of that march.
“I truly believe the Lonesome Cowboys raid was the spark that ignited the Atlanta homosexual population,” Drue said.
Uruguay’s marriage law takes effect, and the first wedding is at a bedside
Uruguay first recognised same-sex civil unions in January 2008, the first country in Latin America to do so. Five years later it would recognise same-sex marriage.
The bill was written by Michelle Suárez, the first openly trans person to graduate from a Uruguayan university and the country’s first trans lawyer. It passed the Chamber of Representatives 81 votes to 6 in December 2012 and the Senate 23 to 8 the following April. President José Mujica signed it on May 3, 2013, and it took effect on August 5.
Uruguayan marriage has a waiting period. You register at the civil registry, and about ten working days later you marry.
There is one exception. If a doctor certifies that one of the two is in imminent danger of death, the registrar comes to you and the wedding happens at once. It is called a marriage in extremis.
At five to eight on the morning of August 5, 2013, Luisa Salaberry of Montevideo’s Registry Office 1 carried a certificate like that into a hospital and married two men, one of them dying of cancer. He was lucid, she said afterwards. She called it very moving.
It was the first same-sex marriage in the history of Uruguay. He could not wait ten days, and the day before there had been no law under which to marry him at all.
Across Montevideo that same morning, before it was light, Sergio Miranda and Rodrigo Borda were queuing outside the civil registry to be the first couple in the country to put their names down. They had been together fourteen years.
They waited out the ten days. On August 22 they danced a waltz at the entrance of the registry office and left under a shower of rice and rose petals. Michelle Suárez, who wrote the law, was one of their witnesses.
