I'm From Driftwood is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit archive for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer stories. New stories are posted on the site every Wednesday.
Perry Brass grew up in Savannah, Georgia, and knew he was gay at 15. After being bullied, he attempted suicide. At 17, he went to the University of Georgia where the bullying only intensified. To escape, he fled to San Francisco which he heard was "crawling with queers." After not being able to find work, he finally landed in New York City. But even NYC wasn't as welcoming as Perry had hoped:
[A] month after I arrived in the city, I was barely 19, I was actually involved in a bar raid. And it was in a bar in midtown Manhattan that was a fairly swanky bar. And I was in the back room with a guy I met who I actually knew and we were told basically to freeze because the cops were in the front room where the bar itself was and there was a raid going on. Luckily, I found a back entrance to the bar and I was with this guy that I knew and we ended up in an alley. In Midtown there these alleys between buildings, and it was pouring rain and we were able to get out on the street.
Perry couldn't seem to escape the abuse from being gay, whether it was from bullies or the cops. But one night in June, Perry was at the bar, Julius', when he heard that there was a raid down the street at Stonewall and "the girls" were fighting back. He joined the riot the very next day, finally able to push back against the abuse he had endured his whole life for being gay. Perry recalls:
I didn't have that attitude that a lot of people had which was, "Well, this is the way life is, we just have to accept it, we're given our tiny bit of what I would call our 'stylish freedom,'" in other words, if you had the money you could go to Fire Island, you could go to the Hamptons, and I knew some very stylish queens who did that and they thought this little opening of freedom was all they were going to get and they were just so happy to get it, and I didn't have that attitude. I hated that. I really hated it. So I was very, very happy that Stonewall had happened.
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