Until the 1960s ended, queer life in America was policed as crime itself: sodomy laws in every state — with sentences to life, and in California indefinite "sexual psychopath" commitment with lobotomies and forced ECT — masquerade laws jailing anyone in fewer than three articles of "gender-appropriate" clothing, and bar raids netting tens of thousands yearly, names printed in the papers. Henry Gerber, who founded the country's first gay-rights organization in Chicago in 1924, was arrested and broken within months; ONE magazine had to win at the Supreme Court in 1958 merely to be mailable.

Resistance predated the famous riot: Cooper Do-nuts in 1959, the Compton's Cafeteria rising of San Francisco's transgender street queens in 1966, the Black Cat protests of 1967 — each a revolt of the repeatedly arrested. The pre-Stonewall generations, jailed simply for existing, are the movement's uncounted political prisoners.