Horowitz was arrested and hauled to the police station, where he recalls officers beating protesters with nightsticks. Horowitz and his boyfriend at the time joined the second night of demonstrations at Christopher Park, a tiny patch of green across the street from the Stonewall Inn. “Gay people were definitely not immune to a desire for equality-we just got started a little later.” “I think Stonewall came out of the protest spirit of the 1960s, when so many people started to stand up and try to take what was theirs,” recalls longtime Greenwich Village resident Gil Horowitz. Photo credit: Diana Davies/New York Public Library The Stonewall Inn in 1969, the year of the riots. It was a spontaneous act of defiance that exploded into five nights of violent clashes between police and the LGBTQ community and its allies-events widely recognized as the spark that ignited the modern LGBTQ rights movement. But that night, rather than submitting to arrest or dispersing, some of the patrons fought back. Police raids on gay bars in the city were common at the time, so nobody was surprised when officers barreled into the Stonewall Inn late on June 28, 1969. In the late 1960s, the Stonewall Inn-a bar on the ground floor of a modest brick building in Greenwich Village-was a popular gathering place for New York City's LGBTQ community.