This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Dublin Pride Grand Marshal Will St Leger hears from fellow activist Bruce Coleman about growing up as a closeted gay man in America and the impact the uprising had on him.

While the Stonewall uprising and subsequent riots on the early morning of June 28, 1969, are generally considered the birth of the modern gay liberation movement in the US, there had been a number of demonstrations and acts of civil resistance by LGBT+ people across America since the beginning of the 1950’s. To understand the origins of the Stonewall Inn uprising, we need to set it against a wider backdrop of changing social and political movements in post-war America.

I first met Bruce and his husband, John Sheridan, in Cork last June at a meeting called by Cork activists to respond to Ireland’s HIV crisis. Bruce and John were members of an ACT UP chapter in New York in the late ‘80s and some of the founders of ACT UP Cork in July of 2018.

I start by asking Bruce about life as a gay teenager in America in the early ‘60s; “I grew up in Princeton. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents as my dad was sick for a while. Like a lot of scared gay kids in those days, I tried looking for information on homosexuality in the library but there wasn’t much encouraging information there and it felt dangerous even to be looking for it.