by Evelyn Bailey
All over the world, gay pride parades, picnics and festivals are held – to remember, to celebrate an event that changed the course of history – Stonewall!
What really happened that Friday night? What follows are excerpts from an eyewitness account given by Morty Manford taken from Making Gay History by Eric Marcus.
In the Fall of 1968 Morty Manford began his freshman year at Columbia College. One of the first things he did after arriving was to call the Student Homophile League. Morty attended a meeting but was not “terribly inspired by what I saw, and nothing they were doing really interested me.”

