Blog of gay bars in las vegas
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In the process, I helped uncover the Mob’s role in New York’s gay bars going back to the 1930s. I covered the Mob’s role in gay bars in my book The Mob and the City: The Hidden History of How the Mafia Captured New York.
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On Thursday, June 27, I will speak on this topic at The Mob Museum. Historian David Carter was the first to extensively detail the Genovese family’s involvement in the 1960s in his groundbreaking book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. Some gay activists later tended to shy away from this ugly past, too. (Though some mobsters also engaged in same-sex activity). The Mafia should also never be mistaken for a gay rights organization it was in it for the money. The Mob, of course, did not like to talk about any of its rackets, but especially those connected to the gay bar scene. Click here to RSVP.įor decades, mainstream Mob histories omitted the Mafia’s involvement with gay bars. Join us Thursday, June 27 for Museum program Stonewall and the Mob: The 50th Anniversary of the Gay Rights Movement. A new generation of honest gay bar owners had to venture into this uncertain territory wary not only of continuing discrimination by society, but of lingering mobsters in the business. LBGT people continued to brave societal repression and organized crime. The Mob’s role in gay bars continued well into the 1970s and beyond in some places. Within days of the Stonewall riots, activists were handing out leaflets in the Village condemning “the Mafia monopoly.” Someone wrote this graffiti on the Stonewall’s boarded-up windows: “GAY PROHIBITION CORUPT$ COP$ FEED$ MAFIA.” Mobbed-up bar owners would periodically let the police run “show raids” to appease the neighbors, and, in the process, sacrifice some of their patrons to humiliating arrests and detentions. Mob-run gay bars were notorious for charging high-prices for lousy, watered-down drinks from bootlegged liquor (“Mafia house beer,” one patron dubbed it.) The Stonewall Inn itself was an unlicensed “bottle club,” often dirty, with no running water behind the bar.
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The Stonewall was secretly owned by Matthew “Matty the Horse” Ianiello, a high-level caporegime (captain) in the Genovese crime family who held hidden interests in a series of gay bars and porn stores in the Greenwich Village and Times Square neighborhoods. Less well known is that the turbulent nights of June 28-29, 1969, were very much a rebellion against the Mafia, as well.
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Photo by Craig Warga/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images. Matthew “Matty the Horse” Ianniello, capo with the Genovese crime family, controlled a large number of gay clubs in New York City in the 1960s and ’70s. “Stonewall” later became seen as perhaps the most important symbolic event in the modern LGBT rights movement. For two nights, gay men and women fought back against the police until they withdrew. Nearly 50 years ago, on June 28, 1969, LGBT people – led by drag queens – rebelled against a raid by the New York Police Department on the Stonewall Inn gay nightclub. Photo from NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images. A crowd attempts to impede police arrests outside the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969.