For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising an anthology chronicling the tumultuous
fight for LGBTQ rights in the 1960s and the activists who spearheaded it with a foreword by
Edmund White. Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction presented by The
Publishing Triangle Tor.com Best Books of 2019 (So Far) Harper’s Bazaar The 20 Best LGBTQ
Books of 2019 The Advocate The Best Queer(ish) Non-Fiction Tomes We Read in 2019 June 28
2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising which is considered the most
significant event in the gay liberation movement and the catalyst for the modern fight for
LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library's archives The
Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts diaries periodic literature and articles
from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years
following the riots. Most importantly the anthology spotlights both iconic activists who were
pivotal in the movement such as Sylvia Rivera co-founder of Street Transvestites Action
Revolutionaries (STAR) as well as forgotten figures like Ernestine Eckstein one of the few
out African American lesbian activists in the 1960s. The anthology focuses on the events of
1969 the five years before and the five years after. Jason Baumann the NYPL coordinator of
humanities and LGBTQ collections has edited and introduced the volume to coincide with the
NYPL exhibition he has curated on the Stonewall uprising and gay liberation movement of 1969.
