Please read this man’s letter to the president dated March, 2013, and also read the president’s response dated Nov, 2013.
People have asked me to repost the letter that I read last night at the Pride Rally. When I finished reading it there was a tremendous round of applause. I cut them off by saying “Wait, here is the icing on the cake, President Obama wrote me back.” As far as I know this is the first time in history that a president has written to any of the street kids who were at the Stonewall Riots.
My Letter to the President:
March 6. 2013
President Barrack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500.
Dear President Obama,
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” That statement kept going through my mind as I listened to your inauguration speech. It was a moment that was so surreal … I never thought I would hear these words in my life from a president:
“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, an Selma, and Stonewall.”
My Facebook page got hit like crazy. Family and friends keep calling me on the phone to ask if I heard it. I did, and at first I didn’t believe my ears. I thought you must been talking about slavery in Stonewall, Mississippi. I mean after all it was also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Then it dawned on me. You were talking about the Stonewall Inn. My Stonewall Inn. My eyes filled up when I thought back to the first night at the Stonewall Riots when I was a 20 year old gay kid at the bar the night of the raid.
You see Mr. President; I was there for the first 2 nights of the riots. It was like a war zone. I saw garbage cans burning in the streets; bricks being thrown in the air and young silly little gay kids like myself being beaten by police officers and the tactical police force till they bleed. All this violence because we wanted to dance alone and be unseen from a society that did not want us. I was so unaware at the time that I was being denied my rights as an American, but I that I was also being denied my basic human rights. It is kind of funny when you think about it; my grandfather came to America as an Irish immigrant. He got a job as a laborer assembling the new Stature of Liberty in the New York Harbor. The same one with the mounted plaque that reads “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” I yearn to breathe free Mr. President.
As gay man back then in 1969 I could not serve openly in the military. I could not get a license to practice law or be a hairstylist; if I was trapped doing something “Lewd”. I was dammed by almost all religions. The American Psychiatric Association told me that I was mentality ill. I was not allowed to get married, and had to keep my love of another man hidden. I could not adopt children. I was not allowed to receive a legal drink in any bar in New York City without them loosing their license for serving a “sexual deviant.” It was a life that was bleak and filled with one word “NO” and to top it off that night in June 1969, they were now going to tell me I couldn’t dance … not even hidden in back of a dark bar.
You made me proud sir when you mentioned that significant part of my life, but it is a battle that is not over yet, and we still have a big fight on our hands. I still have not gotten to dance that dance I started 44 years ago. The big joyous “I Am A Completely Free Gay American Dance” yet, and I so badly want to dance that dance before I meet my maker … not just have spent my life listening to the music.
Thank you for making that dance floor a little bit more accessible and starting to play the music.
Sincerely yours,
Daniel (Danny) Garvin
Stonewall Inn Veteran
