He witnessed the Stonewall riots. Now he's a lifelong ally

On the night of Friday, June 27, 1969, Lucian Truscott IV, scion of a military family, descendant of Thomas Jefferson, recent West Point graduate, Village Voice contributor, and future best-selling author, was going out for a drink at the Lion’s Head in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

But what was happening at the nearby Stonewall Inn stopped him in his tracks.

“I walked right into the riot as it was taking place,” Truscott says. “I realized right away it was a story.”

Voice columnist Howard Smith went into the bar to gather information, while Truscott stayed outside “and watched the escalation of what was happening,” he recalls.

Acclaimed author and journalist Lucian Truscott IVFacebook/Lucian Truscott IV

Raids on gay bars were common. Most of the bars were controlled by organized crime, which would pay off police to look the other way — but if the mob wasn’t paying soon enough, the cops would raid the bars, Truscott explains.

At first cops were just bringing patrons out in handcuffs. The gay men, transgender women, and others who drank at the Stonewall were used to arrests, and they’d have friends bail them out. But on this night, some didn’t want to be arrested, and they started throwing things.

One person threw a cobblestone through the window of the Stonewall. Then someone lit a newspaper on fire and threw it into the bar. The fire was put out, but “the riot kept going on, people were yelling, throwing pieces of wood, anything they could,” Truscott says.

Things eventually calmed down, but walking past the Stonewall the next day, Truscott realized something was going to happen that night. “The real riot was Saturday night,” he notes.

“Hundreds of people gathered around Stonewall, filled up Christopher Street so traffic couldn’t pass,” he says. The police tried to disperse the crowd, but the Stonewall customers outwitted them, running away on the Village’s twisting streets and coming back up behind the officers. Some patrons started a kick line, singing, “We are the Stonewall girls.”

Truscott’s report on the Stonewall riots in The Village Voice, July 3, 1969Village Voice Archive

“It was something to see,” Truscott says. “The cops had never seen gay people stand up to them.” But no one knew at the time that it was “the Rosa Parks moment for gays,” he says, referring to how the Stonewall Uprising catalyzed the LGBTQ+ rights movement in a way similar to how Rosa Parks’s protest catalyzed the Civil Rights Movement.

By Sunday, the rioting was pretty much over. Near the Stonewall that day, Truscott ran into poet Allen Ginsberg, and they went into the bar. A stereo was playing music in the back room, so “Second Lt. Truscott and Allen went into the back room of the Stonewall and danced,” he says. When they parted that night, Ginsberg told him, “Protect the fairies, Lucian.”

Truscott is straight, but he has been a staunch LGBTQ+ ally for decades. Being gay is a part of nature, like trees, he notes, and “you can’t be against trees.” He used some gay slurs in his Voice story, but many people, including gays, used them at the time, he says. Some objected, though, and “the first gay Pride protest was against me,” he says. He apologized and quit using the terms.

He went on to write Dress Gray, a best-selling novel about the murder of a gay West Point cadet, and other well-received books. Dress Gray was adapted into a TV miniseries by Gore Vidal.

A plaque commemorates the riots on an exterior wall of the Stonewall InnPeskyMonkey/Shutterstock

Truscott deplores the racism, homophobia, and transphobia coming out of the Trump administration. The trans military ban is a “crock,” just as the gay ban was, he says. “Trans people have been in the military as long as there have been militaries,” he points out, and have served honorably.

Noting that people of color, women, and immigrants are under attack as well, he says, “I would love to sit down with [Trump aide] Stephen Miller and ask him what’s wrong with living next door to somebody who is an immigrant.”

So the battles of yore are being fought again, but they’re worth fighting, Truscott says, and he thinks the pendulum will swing back. And we must not forget history like Stonewall, he adds.

“Something enormous changed,” he says. “The enormity of it turned out to be casting off the idea that there’s something to be ashamed of if you’re gay.”

“It’s something that happened to me, but it happened to American history,” he says of Stonewall. “That it happened was important.”

This article is part of The Advocate’s Mar-Apr 2026 print issue, now on newsstands. Support queer media and subscribe — or download the issue through Apple News+, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader.