When the wall came down: In New York 25 years ago, it was illegal even to serve drinks to gays. Then, on 28 June 1969, a bottle was thrown at police in a Greenwich Village bar and the gay rights movement began. Peter Pringle reports

Mention Selma, Alabama, or the universities at Berkeley or Kent State to an American who grew up in the Sixties and Seventies and there will be instant recognition: civil rights marches, sit-ins, riots. But say 'Stonewall' and the chances are the response will be something like, 'Stonewall? Stonewall Jackson? Are you talking about the Civil War?'

Yet hundreds of thousands of people wearing 'Stonewall' buttons and T-shirts and waving 'Stonewall' flags are expected in New York this week. They are all homosexuals. Many will visit the Stonewall Inn, a bar on Christopher Street in the heart of Greenwich Village, which to millions of gays and lesbians around the world is a shrine from the Sixties. It was at the inn, in the small hours of 28 June 1969, that a drag queen, usually identified as Sylvia Riviera, is supposed to have thrown a bottle at a policeman and started three days of rioting.

'Go to hell', 'Leave us alone' and 'Kill the cops', rioters shouted at police as they made another of their frequent raids on the bar, hoping to arrest a few 'queers' and charge them with disorderly behaviour. Several arrests were made that night as the police swept through the darkened rooms filled with drag queens, male prostitutes and homosexuals. At one point, police barricaded themselves in the bar and were pelted with bricks and bottles. A dozen civilians and police were injured.

Though the number is trivial compared with those killed and injured in the black civil rights marches and the protests against the Vietnam war, the event is accepted as the start of gay people's resolve to fight for public tolerance. After Stonewall, the police ended their raids on gay bars and stopped their policy of entrapment of homosexuals. Gays launched themselves into politics and social activism. It was the birth of the modern gay and lesbian movement. Sodomy was illegal until the Seventies, and gays who were arrested or entrapped were charged with intent to commit a crime. Even today, sodomy is a felony in more than half of America's 50 states, and in New York State there is still no law protecting homosexuals from discrimination in the workplace.

The 25th anniversary of Stonewall this month coincides with the Fourth Gay Games, which feature men and women from 44 nations competing and discussing gay rights on an international level. As gays stroll around Greenwich Village, mulling over their history, expressing their solidarity and airing differences, they have produced faded snapshots of what really happened at the Stonewall Inn and new insights about the wider and more pressing issues of gays growing up in America today.

The old inn is no more. It was a bagel shop for a while and then a new bar was built on the same site. That has not stopped crowds gathering outside each day and foreign television crews asking questions of the bar's patrons as they sit inside, chatting and scanning the profusion of gay literature, including the Advocate, the national gay and lesbian magazine.

As a matter of record, the magazine asks in its June issue, did Sylvia Riviera really throw the bottle that triggered the riot? And was the riot planned, or a spontaneous reaction to the death of Judy Garland, a gay icon because of her own homosexual experiences. Ms Garland's funeral that day had attracted several thousand gay mourners, many of whom had returned to Greenwich Village to drown their sorrows. Had there been no funeral, would there have been riots?

In the gay community such historical teasers were being chewed over like the folkloric debates about the origins of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 or the Fire of London. Did Mrs O'Leary's cow knock over the lantern in the family barn? Did the London blaze really start in a bakery in Pudding Lane?

Martin Duberman, director of Lesbian and Gay Studies at New York's City University and author of an account of the riots, says the idea that Garland mourners led the attack on police is 'fake only schmaltz'.

And what about Sylvia the bottle-thrower? Bob Kohler, who runs a gift shop and witnessed the riots, says teenagers began the violence 'and they wouldn't have known who Judy Garland was'. Jeremiah Newton, another Stonewall veteran, disagrees. 'It was the drag queens . . . they had nothing to lose.'

This is the point of the Stonewall riots. Gays in New York had had more than enough of police raids and harassment. Every night cops came to their bars to collect protection money. In the days before Stonewall, it was illegal even to serve drinks to homosexuals. They were considered undesirable citizens. If Judy Garland's death did not trigger the riots, some other event would have.

To revisit those days of repression in Greenwich Village, I was fortunate to have as my guide the gay journalist and historian Charles Kaiser, who grew up in the Sixties and is writing a history of New York's gay movement.

Our first stop was Julius's Bar on West 10th Street, one of the last remaining of the early gay bars. It was a place where, only a few years before Stonewall, the slightest hint of homosexuality drew a rapid reprimand from the barman and possible arrest from an undercover cop. 'Any sideways glance and the barman would yell, 'Face the bar',' Kaiser says.

Shortly before Stonewall, gays decided to test the law. A homosexual went to the bar, asked for a drink and announced he was gay. The barman called the police and the man was booked, charged with disorderly conduct. The case reached the state appeals courts before it was thrown out. The gays had won. But at other gay bars, almost always run by the Mafia, the police raids continued.

As we walked along Christopher Street, with its Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, we talked, inevitably, about Aids. Kaiser's generation, now in their forties, had grown up not having to worry about HIV. They had been lucky, he explains, and when the virus became known they had been careful, reducing infections to about 1 per cent a year. The next generation, youths of the Seventies and Eighties, had been hardest hit; many had given up taking precautions.

Kaiser says he knows an increasing number of gays his age who have been HIV negative for years but are now deliberately getting themselves infected. 'They no longer want to think of being the last of their group to be alive, or live with the uncertainty of catching the virus,' he says. 'They argue that being newly infected with the virus is the least stressful condition: you won't become sick right away, you won't spend the rest of your life burying your friends, and you can stop worrying about Aids.'

Gays growing up today as part of Generation X are a mixed bunch. The fearless and foolish contribute to terrifying statistics which show that one-third of young gays in San Francisco will be infected with HIV by the age of 30. Others say they don't want to live in gay ghettos any more. They didn't grow up spending years in the closet and don't relate to the 'gym boys' of the gay press. They say they want to assimilate into society and live normal lives.

At least one section of society is not stopping them. The New York Police Department has a growing number of openly gay cops, such as Lieutenant John Jirak and his lesbian assistant, Detective Vanessa Ferro. They are in charge of protecting gay bars, not raiding them.

(Photograph omitted)