The audio version of this includes some of the Eric Marcus oral history interviews, so you're going along do-dee-do, and then suddenly you're hearing Marsha P. Johnson's actual voice, and you feel like someone kicked you in the chest. As a heads up.

Anyway, I haven't read about the Stonewall riots/up rising more than the next queer, but I thought this was a really solid look at the period. The book is divided into three parts in an attempt to illustrate the greater cultural shift that happened in New York (and other US cities) around the time.

The first part is accounts of life and documents from the ten years before the riots, including excerpts from Zami, The Motion of Light in Water, accounts of protests, setting up organisations, and letters to the President. It gave an impression of growing consciousness, gaining momentum, cautious first steps, and people getting sick of how cautious the first steps were. There's also some excellent satire bits.

The second part was a handful of first-person accounts of the riots themselves, as well as of the immediate aftermath. Stonewall has always been a snarled, contradictory mess, and I really appreciated the variety of accounts and that the editors just let the contradictions stand. Most of them are impassioned, many admit that they didn't support the riots/uprising at the time, many were ambivalent about who was included and who benefited.

I found the final section, which was snap shots from the post-Stonewall/pre-AIDS era of activism, a little less well put together? To some extent, I think it was intentionally showing a movement fragmenting, sort of a rainbow explosion, but there were a lot more sort of position statements, and a lot fewer personal accounts in this section, which I found disappointing. There was no account of the first Christopher Street Liberation Day parade in New York, though there was one from the San Francisco version, which I thought was an odd choice. There was a weird, rambling lesbian separatist thing.

I definitely appreciated how dedicated the book was to being trans-inclusive and for including so many people of colour. The editor mentioned that far too much of the material is in copyright but with no clear holder, so cannot be used, which is infuriating. I'd love to see the book he would have made if he could. Even with this restriction, it's a high-quality collection, with lots of old friends and new voices I want to follow up on.