In the early hours of March 8, 1970, NYPD officers burst into the Snake Pit, an after-hours gay club on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, one of the only such venues not run by the Mob. 167 gay men were arrested and booked at the 6th Precinct house, which at the time was located just a couple blocks away on Charles Street.
Ken Lustbader, co-director of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, says, though there were several charges the police used to use to harass the LGTBQ community, the men were probably arrested for disorderly conduct. The department would send famous officers into these clubs and bars to attract gay men and then entrap them once a romantic gesture was made by one of the patrons. The officer would then arrest the man for solicitation. Lustbader says an arrest would be akin to a public outing for a gay man and would almost certainly lead to disastrous consequences for his personal life, “Shame, isolation…you could lose your job if you were arrested. You could lose your family. You were expelled from your church, synagogue, and so forth. Your name could be published in the paper.”
Though the Snake Pit raid was typical of the time, such a high tally of arrests was unusual. This may be attributed to Seymour Pine, the infamous NYPD deputy inspector who had orchestrated the Stonewall raid eight months earlier. He led the charge into the Snake Pit that night as well.
He jumped from the window, impaling himself on an iron fence below. The firsthand accounts indicate everybody was using the word ‘faggot’.
In addition to the massive disparity in attention paid to the two events by history, there is one major difference between the two raids and subsequent protests, and it has a lot to do with a young man named Diego Vinales. An Argentian immigrant new to New York City, Vinales was still private about his homosexuality. That night was his first evening at a gay bar of any kind, and he panicked when he found himself being held with 166 other men on the second floor of the precinct house. He jumped from the window, impaling himself on an iron fence below.
“They literally cut the fence off and brought him with the fence to St. Vincent’s hospital…he did survive, but there was basically a death watch,” Lustbader explains. The officers and paramedics who were supposed to be moving quickly to save his life did just the opposite, telling each other to take their time since he was a lost cause.
“The firsthand accounts indicate everybody was using the word ‘faggot’ (to describe Vinales),” he says.
Word spread quickly that a young man was on the verge of death as a direct result of the police brutality handed down that night, and the alliance groups that had come to prominence in the wake of the Stonewall uprising took to the streets to galvanize the masses and hold the police accountable.
“It was basically: we are not gonna take it anymore,” Lustbader says.
The Gay Activist Alliance and Gay Liberation Front worked together, pasting flyers all over the city and educating people about what had happened at the Snake Pit and to Diego Vinales. A candlelight vigil was held outside St. Vincent’s hospital at 12th Street & 7th Avenue, and afterwards more than 500 people marched from Christopher Park to the 6th Precinct. This attracted media attention, and the press coverage of the event was leaning in support of the gay community, a rarity at the time.
“It really showed the power of resistance, the power of the press, and the power of protesting,” says Ken Lustbader. “While Stonewall was a key turning point, the Snake Pit Raid shows that activism serves a role in fighting for one’s rights.”
He says the Snake Pit is important, and the American public needs to be taught far more about miscarriages of justice like the infamous raid.
“With the pushback on LGBT rights now, and the pushback on other rights, it’s really important to stake out this history and say that this is American history, and we should learn from it.” He says it is important for the community to understand things used to be truly dangerous for the gay community even in New York City. “It’s really important for people to walk down that street and sort of understand…that you could get arrested for just being together and being openly gay, that the threat to your safety and yourself was really peaked and acute in New York City in 1970.”