The History of Pride Month & Ties to Italian Mafia - Stonewall
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
198.72203
Summary
The Italian Mafia owned the only gay club in New York City, Stonewall, and it was a cash cow for the Genovese family. The problem was, it was dirty, it smelled horrible, it had no running water, and the place smelled horrible. They made money by blackmailing people who went to the club.
Transcript
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Do you know the Italian Mafia gets credit indirectly for the gay pride month?
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Did you know in New York City, the mob ran by Fat Tony Loria, not Salerno, the boss,
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Fat Tony Loria, who was connected to the Genovese family,
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And it was dirty, it was nasty, no water, toilet, the place smelled horrible.
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It was a form of having blackmail of people that would go to this underground gay club
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because at that time, you couldn't go to a gay club.
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If they found out you had any kind of things, you could get a fine.
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You could have a lot of different things that can happen.
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There was this one club that Italian Mafia decided to open up called Stonewall.
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That led to the current pride month that we're celebrating today.
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So thank you to the Italian Mafia for starting the pride month.
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If you get value out of this video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel.
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So by the way, I want to show you this article written by the New York Daily News on July 6th of 69.
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Tell me if they can write anything like this today.
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I don't even know if the Babylon Bee can write that today.
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However, in the 50s and 60s, you got to know the climate.
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At that time, if you were gay and you went to a bar, they couldn't serve you alcohol.
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If they did, they can revoke that bar's license.
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In 1952, just to kind of tell you what it was qualified, that is like 73 years ago.
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Not that long ago, homosexuality was seen, was listed as a sociopathic personality disturbance in DSM-1.
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And just until 1973 is when the APA removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in December of 73.
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The mob looks at this and says, look, we don't have a liquor license.
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Sell whatever kind of cheap liquor that we can make to sell these guys.
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And this place was a hotspot for drag queens, transgender youth, many of them allegedly working as prostitutes that you would read about.
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Stonewall was a cash cow for the Genovese family.
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They're making a lot of money coming in underground.
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Wealthy, influential, closeted men would go there.
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And imagine, we hear a lot of bribery stuff, Diddy, Epstein, all this stuff.
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You had re-read stories about this through Roy Cohen, that Roy Cohen would put parties and a lot of influential people would come.
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Then they get the video and then you're watching.
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This entire time they're paying the cops to bribe them.
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All that is happening until all of a sudden, crisis breaks out at this place.
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Everything's going good for these guys until June 28, 1969.
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Whether it's because they stopped paying the bribes to the cops or the cops are just finally sick of it saying this is getting rowdy.
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They bring cops to take the transgender or guys that are dressed as a woman, whatever you want to call her, into the bathroom saying, what are you?
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And then all of a sudden, people are getting mad.
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They're tearing their entire, the place that they go to, to congregate, to hang out.
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The only place that they have that's only two miles away from Studio 54, they're destroying the facility.
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So cops are inside the club now, inside Stonewall.
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The whole smelly, everything that's going on, they're inside.
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The place they go to, they try to set the place on fire.
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This is where the whole thing, Pride Month, started with this.
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Obviously, the motive was a different motive, but that's how this whole protesting got started back on June 28, 1969.
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So a lot of times, you'll hear a name, a face being used from this whole stone wall that, you know, 4 a.m., this is going on.
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They're rioting, 600 people showing up, all this other stuff.
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You'll hear Malcolm Michaels Jr., a.k.a. Marsha Johnson.
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While, you know, many reports say that, you know, he was passed out down the street on heroin, doesn't show up till 2 o'clock in the morning.
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Protests started very early, but this is the face of it, right?
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Those are the claims that they're not accurate.
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And a lot of times, they'll say, well, you know, Marsha Johnson was a transgender and all this other stuff.
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Marsha Johnson never called himself a transgender.
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He would say transvesti or a drag queen or a gay man, but he hadn't gone through the whole procedure.
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So this was going on, and they're rioting and they're protesting.
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I mean, just visualize these strong gay men turning it over.
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Like, that's some powerful stuff to be able to do.
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I mean, setting garbage on fire, you know, pelted of officers with bricks and other debris.
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This is an intense protesting with a lot of tough gay men and women that are there on that date.
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Every year on Christopher Street, let's do this protesting out there and go and do our pride.
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They call it the gay rights activists that they held us once here called the Liberation Day March.
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And then obviously spreads all across the country.
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You got the AIDS epidemic, which roughly 89,000 people died in America.
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87,000 to 89,000 people died in America because of AIDS worldwide.
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Then in 1999, the man had a very good friend that was very helpful to him at the office, Bill Clinton.
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He decides to declare June as the Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.
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Then a close friend of his, a man named Barack Obama, he becomes president.
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He decides to take it to a whole different level.
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And he expands the proclamation to LGBT Pride Month and added representation, of course, for bisexuals and transgenders.
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Then Joe Biden, the great Joe Biden, he comes in.
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He takes it to a whole different level in 2021.
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He designated it as LGBTQ plus Pride Month, further inclusion for queers and ever-expanding plus community.
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I mean, every time there's a liberal president, they just added new letters to it.
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And then by today, while you're watching this, if you go and ask on ChatGBT or Google, how many days do we have dedicated to this?
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125 days a year, 34% of the year is dedicated to celebrating sex and gender minorities.
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If you have an uncle that's gay, you can tell him we celebrate you once a year.
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Can you imagine this kind of stuff that we're talking about?
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I'm going to give you a crazy stat here for you to think about.
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In 1960s, do you know what percentage of Americans had a child under the age of 18?
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44% of Americans had a kid in their house under the age of 18.
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24%, and then this becomes a movement that we're kind of like supporting, and then people
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are sitting there saying, well, Americans are not having a lot of babies.
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We need illegal immigrants to come over here because we need labor.
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Or maybe we need to sit here and say, hey, listen, guys, awesome.
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It's your private life, whatever you want to do.
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We don't need to say, I don't need to advertise what I like to do in the bedroom myself.
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Just like whatever you want to do in your bedroom, it's none of my business.
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Go buy whatever sex toys, man, woman, do whatever you want to do.
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We can give any kind of a day for you to choose.
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And we're wondering why, you know, we went from 44% to 24%?
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Why don't we recognize moms, dads for what they're doing?
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What do you think would happen is for every day, we put a single father day.
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We recognize fathers that don't, are not that big fathers.
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What if we put all these different things that we recognize?
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Kids, parents, working together, nucleus family.
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So, of course, when you recognize these types of numbers, and then now you hear percentages
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Did you know 9.3% of the U.S. population as of Gallup poll, 2025, part of the LGBTQ community?
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Or is this starting to convert and advertise and get into schools and all this other stuff?
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Right now, you're seeing all the numbers on funding for gay pride and pride month stuff
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that's declining and all across San Francisco, all these other places.
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Or is it getting to the point that some people are saying, look, man, can we just go back
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Do whatever you want to do in your personal life.
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But you came from a man and a woman who chose to have a kid.
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If we do that, we have a fighting chance of bringing that number back up to us, having
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2.3, 2.4, 2.5 kids per versus we're down to 1.9, 1.7.
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And the moment you're no longer at 2.1, it starts going like this.
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So, you may or may not agree with what I'm saying.
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If you know somebody, part of the Genovese family, call them right now.
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If you got value out of this video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel.
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If you enjoyed this video, I did another video a couple years ago about the dark side of
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the LGBTQ, who's funding it, the money, the dark money, where it's coming from.