The Secret History of the Stonewall Riot

In "Stonewall at 40 [1]," Frank Rich celebrates in the NYT the June 28, 1969 Greenwich Village drag bar riot that symbolically launched the gay liberation era:

On Monday, President Obama will commemorate Stonewall with an East Room reception for gay leaders [2].

Rich never mentions, and I suspect that Obama won't either, that the catalyst for the riot was Judy Garland's funeral [3] the previous day, and that most of the rioters were cross-dressers.

Rich goes on:

After the gay liberation movement was born at Stonewall, this strand of history advanced haltingly until the 1980s. It took AIDS and the new wave of gay activism it engendered to fully awaken many, including me, to the gay people all around them. But that tardy and still embryonic national awareness did not save the lives of those whose abridged rights made them even more vulnerable during a rampaging plague.

Uh, I think a big chunk of history has been shoved down the Memory Hole here. The 1970s were not a time when gay liberation "advanced haltingly;" in reality, the 1970s were when all effective legal restrictions on industrial scale homosexual promiscuity [4] were utterly ended in precisely those cities -- e.g., San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York -- where AIDS broke out most virulently [5] in the early 1980s.

Gay liberation caused the AIDS epidemic.

What's even more striking is that this huge historical event of the recent past has been so distorted that, according to Google, nobody in the history of the Internet has ever before posted the words:

"Gay liberation caused the AIDS epidemic" [6]

Instead, we're all supposed to believe AIDS was caused by discrimination against homosexuals in the military [7], the absence of gay marriage [8], and/or Ronald Reagan [9]. Indeed, it's precisely because the evidence for cause and effect is so overwhelmingly clear that the pressure to lie and to submit to others' lies is so intense.