- On the street you could be literally stopped by the police for holding hands, showing any sign of affection, hugging. In the basically 1960s, if you were gay here in the United States, you were considered immoral, illegal, mentally unstable. You couldn't get a job as a doctor, lawyer, or a teacher or any decent profession, and we were totally invisible. I literally thought I was the only gay person.

So on May 10, 1969, grades were in, so I left Philadelphia and moved to New York and basically started to look for where gay people were because there was no map that said gay community here, gay bars here, gay-- we didn't exist to remember. We were totally illegal in this country. But the minute you walked into Stonewall, there was a change.

You could hold hands. You could kiss. You could show affection, but more importantly for an 18-year-old kid, you could dance your ass off.

So that night, typical night, all of a sudden, the lights flickered on and off, then they came on full force, barging in, slamming people against the walls, shoving people. Once they'd done that and had some peace and quiet going on, they look for people who look successful or professional. They would go up to them, tell them take their wallets out, and literally take the dollars out of their wallets and put them in their pockets.

They wanted to harass the queens, the dykes. Eventually there were more people on the street than in the bar at which point, the police figured we did everything we need to do, and they open the door and they see us there. So their first reaction is disperse. Move on. We didn't.

They kicked the door a second time. Get out of here! Nope, we didn't get out of there. They tried it a third time. Move! At which point, people started throwing stones, cans, or anything else that was lying around.

But that night standing outside Stonewall, all of a sudden, here comes Marty Robinson. And Marty hands me a piece of chalk and says write up and down the street-- of Christopher Street-- on the walls and on the ground tomorrow night Stonewall. We were going to meet in front of Stonewall where we had just imprisoned the police.

So we're basically daring to police on the second night to come out and stop us. Never been happen before anywhere. It's probably the happiest riot that there ever was, and the reason it was happy, it was very simple. The police represented 2,000 years of oppression, everything that each and every one of us had ever gone through.

In 1970, they didn't know us. So the whole idea would be out and proud and loud and in your face meant to end invisibility, and the way you aren't invisible anymore is to be in media. So the best way to change that is if they're not going to invite you to come in is to storm their sets.

So I went on a campaign, which we called Campaign to End Invisibility in the LGBT Community on Television. And I started disrupting TV shows. That was the linchpin to opening media door, and all of a sudden gay people are appearing on talk shows all throughout America. It was amazing. It was almost overnight.

Today if I turn on my TV, I can watch Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, and I feel a sense of pride every time I see them. I feel like maybe I had-- some way I helped get them there.