Casting the First Stone : STONEWALL, <i> By Martin Duberman (Dutton: $23; 330 pp.)</i>

The Stonewall Inn, a tacky, Mafia-run drag bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, was an unlikely breeding ground for a social revolution in 1969. Few homosexual rights activists, whether the coat-and-tie moderates in New York’s Mattachine Society or the denim-clad radicals at Columbia University’s Student Homophile League, had ever stepped inside. But when, on the night of July 27, a handful of the Stonewall Inn’s rowdy patrons--most of them socially-outcast drag queens--refused to submit to a routine police raid, it triggered a street melee that raged, off and on, for four nights.

By the time the violence subsided, the modern gay movement had found a defining symbol. The exact details of the raid and the subsequent riot may have been sketchy, especially as they filtered into the gay imagination nationwide, but the image was potent: Challenging a repressive authority, gays had not only stood up for themselves, they had actively fought back. Stonewall became a rallying cry for a new generation of gay activists who were to come out in ever-increasing numbers.

“Stonewall,” by gay historian Martin Duberman (also author of “Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey”), offers a vivid and stirring recreation of the Stonewall riot, probing beneath its symbolism to discover the social forces it unleashed. Significantly, Duberman doesn’t place Stonewall at the beginning of his study; instead, he reserves it for his penultimate chapter, astutely portraying it as a culmination of two decades of social change during which the fledgling gay movement gradually came into focus.

No one could have predicted that the flash point would happen at that particular bar on that particular night. (Although, in a historic footnote of some irony, earlier that day more than 20,000 fans--many of them the boys in the band who represented the old gay order of closeted accommodation--had attended the Manhattan funeral of gay icon, Judy Garland; one of them, who would end up at Stonewall that evening, proclaimed it “the end of an era.”) Clearly, a revolution was simmering, just waiting for a spark.

The Kinsey Report of 1948, with its estimate that one in 10 Americans was gay, had encouraged a small vanguard of homosexual activists to challenge the reigning psychiatric orthodoxy that homosexuality was pathological. (Even as late as October, 1969, Time magazine was still insisting that homosexuality was “a serious and sometimes crippling maladjustment.”) Taking their cues from the civil rights movement, though it too was quite homophobic, gay activists moved from clandestine meetings to modest, but brave, public demonstrations. In April, 1965, 70 men and women, dressed as neatly as federal bureaucrats, marched in single file in front of the White House, with placards calling for “Equality for Homosexuals,” the first time gays had ever demonstrated in the nation’s capitol. The following year, a police raid on Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco ignited three nights of rioting that was almost a rehearsal for Stonewall. That same year, a group of activists in New York successfully challenged a State Liquor Authority regulation that prohibited bars and restaurants from serving homosexuals.

Duberman doesn’t simply trace the movement’s early, tentative steps with dispassionate hindsight. Instead, implicitly adopting the 1960s slogan that “the personal is political,” he skillfully dramatizes the rise of gay liberation by telling the intersecting life stories of six emblematic individuals: Foster Gunnison Jr., a relatively conservative, cigar-smoking WASP, active in the homophile movement that took the first steps in identifying and organizing around homosexual rights; Craig Rodwell, a Midwestern emigre to New York who daringly opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore in 1967 after deciding his fellow homophiles were too cautious; Karla Jay, a student activist at Barnard whose frustration with the male-dominated New Left led her to join the radical feminist collective, Redstockings, in 1969; Yvonne Flowers, a jazz-loving black lesbian searching for her place amid the often competing demands of black, women’s and gay causes; Jim Fouratt, a frenetic young firebrand, ricocheting between off-off-Broadway, the Yippies, anti-war marches and the Black Panthers; and Sylvia (Ray) Rivera, a street-hustling drag queen, the only one of Duberman’s six actually inside the Stonewall when the raid began.

Although the details of their lives, which he recounts in sympathetic detail, could not be more varied, Duberman argues that the one trait all six had in common is they were “transhistorical” personalities who refused to buy into the conventional roles that their society offered them. They were “somehow never...fully socialized into the dominant ideology, into its prescriptions and limitations,” he explains. “They exist(ed) apart, a form of genius.” Having fought personal battles to claim their individual identities, they were ready to band together under the banner of gay liberation when, in the wake of Stonewall, gay lib suddenly took its place among the liberation movements of the late ‘60s.

As their numbers quickly multiplied, new activist organizations like the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance stepped to the fore, openly rejecting the tactics of the older homosexual activists--often without knowing much of what the preceding groups had achieved. Even political movements have their generation gaps, as the current tensions between the gay “Establishment” and the newer generation of self-defined “queers” attest. Countering such historical amnesia, Duberman not only offers a scrupulous account of such pioneering organizations as the Mattachine Society, founded in Los Angeles in 1950, and the Society for Individual Rights, formed in San Francisco in 1964, he also corrects for the East Coast-bias that has often ignored the precedent-setting work of West Coast gay liberationists.

For all its resonance, Stonewall might not have become such an enduring symbol if the new generation of activists it spawned had not immediately hatched plans for an annual march to celebrate the event and the new sense of gay identity it empowered. The thrilling climax of Duberman’s book is the first annual gay pride march held in New York City on June 28, 1970, and a concurrent march that took place on Hollywood Boulevard, to mark the first anniversary of the Stonewall riot.

Finally--as if bringing down the curtain on an epic miniseries--Duberman’s six champions all come together for the first time in one demonstration of unity and purpose. Duberman applauds their victory: “They were all, in their own ways, euphoric, just as, in their own ways, they had all somehow come through, had managed to arrive at this unimaginable coming together, this testimony to a difficult past surmounted and a potentially better future in view.”

For all the obstacles the movement has confronted in the 24 years since--from Anita Bryant to AIDS to hateful attacks from the religious right--that liberating sense of struggle, community and self-determination still resonates in the gay pride marches held in cities across the nation every June. And “Stonewall” is an illuminating reminder of how it all began.