You Have Been Lied to About Stonewall (The Police Were Heroes)

This episode examines the Stonewall riots through primary accounts and historical research, revealing the mafia-run bar’s exploitation of patrons via blackmail, stolen liquor, and unsafe conditions. It details how a small group of officers from another precinct uncovered police corruption and faced violent resistance while protecting lives without firing on the crowd. The discussion covers the bar’s operations, the limited role of certain figures in the events, the broader context of laws aimed at curbing disease spread, and how later narratives have rewritten the incident. It argues for recognizing the officers’ restraint and the raid’s focus on organized crime rather than the patrons themselves. Episode Transcript **Malcolm Collins**:Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Genuinely excited because digging into this subject has completely changed my understanding of the pivotal moment of the Stonewall riots, which is seen as a central part of the gay movement, but it’s sort of a founding moment. It was when the gays pushed back. Let me tell you what. We should absolutely be celebrating yearly the heroes of the Stonewall riot. Wow. The problem being the heroes were the cops. And I don’t mean this in a bombastic sense. I mean, the cops at the Stonewall riots genuinely were brave people saving lives, stamping out corruption, and in a genuinely harrowing situation. So, for people who are unaware, Stonewall was a mafia run bar. Okay? This mafia run bar ran on exploiting gay people, and we will get into this. We... They they would run campaigns where they would blackmail people. One admiral, ended up committing suicide because they were blackmailing him so aggressively. **Simone Collins**:Right. Because by the way, this is... This all happened in 1969, and this was when that could really, like, ruin your life. You know? Now it’s different. This was not then. **Malcolm Collins**:And all of the people... Everything you’ve heard, like, the transgender woman of color through the first break, she wasn’t even there. What? And and we have multiple accounts. Like Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. **Simone Collins**:Wait. So she was just, like, later was like, yeah. It was there, and people believed her. **Malcolm Collins**:And and her her best friend who she said handed her the brick said, that didn’t happen, and she wasn’t there that day. **Simone Collins**:Best friend, former now, I guess. Ouch. **Malcolm Collins**:So, yeah, that’s all fabricated as well. It was almost all white men who were there. Oh, lord. Oh, I’m gonna paint a scene for you. Okay? Okay. So this bar had been paying the police, for cover protection, and they had been **Simone Collins**:Oh, wait. Wait. Wait. They they were paying off a corrupt police force. **Malcolm Collins**:They were paying off a corrupt police force. **Simone Collins**:Okay. Okay. **Malcolm Collins**:Okay. And the police force was letting them know whenever they were gonna do raids, and they would change the lights from blue to white, and everyone would change what they were doing because this was... So the the corrupt police were being paid off by this bar. And a internal... Like, a... Another precinct of police began to dig around. They’re like, **Simone Collins**:this Oh, but they were getting paid off. **Malcolm Collins**:Look really corrupt, and we need to figure out what’s going on. We need to break down whatever’s happening here. **Simone Collins**:And so Wait. **Malcolm Collins**:So they go in. They had only eight officers, including a couple of female officers. Oh. It was six male officers and a couple female officers. They entered a packed bar of around 200 people at 01:30AM. Okay? So they’re in this bar. You know, nobody expects to be, like, arrested or anything like that. Right? Yeah. Lot of these people who went in undercover to try to root out this police corruption are like, you know, we’re the police. We’re gonna start taking names. We’re gonna start arresting people. Now this bar is full of... You gotta understand who went to Stonewall at the time. A huge number of the people were homeless, thugs, gangsters. Keep in mind, this was a... Truly the worst of the worst. I mean, this bar was run by Catholics. I mean, the mafia. Goodness. Sorry. I’m choking there. but, no, truly, like, says, like, genuine dirty scumbags. People were not going there to find love. They were going there to find hookers and prostitutes. Right? Like, that’s what’s **Simone Collins**:big about. Enough to hold 200 people. I’m concerned. You’re just **Malcolm Collins**:a few police. Right? Six guys. 200 people. And then what happened is, obviously, because the bar was used to getting warned about this beforehand and you got a bunch of drunk gangsters in it Yeah. They decide, well, we’re gonna beat up these police officers who are trying to arrest people. So then the police call for backup. But the problem is is that the precinct that controlled that area that they were calling for backup was the one that they were busting for corruption. And so they didn’t send the backup. And so they ended up... Can you imagine how you are? And so the situation is getting worse and worse. They ended up getting everyone out of the bar and ended up like a zombie movie, boarding up the walls of the bar and stuff like that. **Simone Collins**:Oh my. What... Wait. **Malcolm Collins**:The the **Simone Collins**:ace hiding inside the bar? **Malcolm Collins**:Were what? Yeah. They were hiding inside the bar from **Simone Collins**:the How did they get... Did they, like, tear gas inside the bar to get it? What happened? Technology. Oh my god. **Malcolm Collins**:They they didn’t they didn’t have the preparation for what was about to happen. So, anyway, as the resistance started outside and the crowd grew, the officers ended up retreating inside the bar and barricading themselves. The crowd outside threw bottles, garbage, coins, and other objects. Somebody used a Coin Oh, no. Somebody used a parking meter as a battering ram to knock down the door. Oh, that’s where the coins came from. And there was attempt to set the building on fire while the police were barricaded inside, and it was set alight and apart, at a point. The... Pine, the officer, said it was more frightening than anything he had experienced in combat as a war war two vet. **Simone Collins**:Wow. When the gays and the mobsters are mad at you. **Malcolm Collins**:And you’ve gotta understand the restraint that the police are showing in this instance. These people are trying to beat them to death. No. They were severely injured. These people Oh, and **Simone Collins**:they get it. Were... Did they shoot? Did they **Malcolm Collins**:No. So the officer... Apparently, there was, like, an internal discussion, and they’re like, we really need to shoot our way out of this. Like, we’re gonna die here. And the officer was like, if we start shooting, this is gonna turn into a massacre. We have to hold out. So even from the perspective of the gay communities, they’re trying to shut down a bar that’s victimizing the gay community. The gay bunch of hoodlums who are looking for their prostitute that day are trying to break down the wall of of this particular building. Right? And they put their own lives on the line to protect the people trying to kill them, to not do what any sane officer... What I would have done in that instance, which is shoot my way out, which... I mean, holy... Really heroic stuff that we’re seeing here. They they literally lit the building on fire with them barricaded inside it. and we know for a fact that the... One of the trans... Plain trans people didn’t even come until the fire was already burning. and there was only two potential trans people that could have been a part of this, and neither was there at the beginning. **Simone Collins**:Only two? Well Yeah. It was really hard to be trans back then, to be fair. Were... Trans didn’t even exist. Weren’t they just called cross dressers **Malcolm Collins**:back cross dressers and and drag people, but they are... Have always been adjacent to gay culture and distinctly untrans. Wait. So they weren’t... **Simone Collins**:So these people were... Oh, did they call them did they call them transvestites? Is that it? **Malcolm Collins**:It’s a different thing. We’ll get to it later because we’re gonna talk about these two individuals because they were also terrible people. But Okay. We’re we’re we’re gonna **Simone Collins**:get into this more. So the injuries my gosh. **Malcolm Collins**:The police reports, one had a laceration on their eye. Another had a broken wrist, and there were bruises and other injuries, but a a broken risk trying to protect themselves at this place. Now this is all based on a book that Gay City News called the definitive historical account of the Stonewall event. That’s David Carter’s Stonewall, the riots that sparked the gay revolution. So the gay... Like, when we’re looking at stuff here, this is coming from the gay community. Okay? Okay. They did not see one of the trans people who we’re gonna talk about who claims that they started this. They weren’t even allowed to march at pride rallies. They were considered such a bad actor in the **Simone Collins**:Oh my gosh. Wow. But look at that. That was a time when the community policed itself and when they they, they expelled bad actors. That’s meaningful. We always talk about this. And a really core part of being successful community, especially if you’re a breakaway and weird or different in some way, is you have to police your own bad actors. And the... One of the worst things that happened to LGBTQIA plus whatever is they stopped policing their bad actors. Wow. Okay. **Malcolm Collins**:Yep. Well... And I’ve... And and and, I wanna be clear. And the, this is... And I mean very seriously. I I think that we should celebrate Stonewall every year with the kids as a celebration, and I think you should too. And I think that the conservative movement should make this more of a thing as a celebration of how the left twists and rewrites history, erasing the actual heroes in an attempt to serve their agenda. I think Stonewall can be a celebration of leftist gaslighting as well as police because I’m unaware of any major holiday where we celebrate police, and we should have one. So let’s do it. Let’s make Stonewall a police holiday. You could put on pokers in New York. The real heroes of Stonewall are boys in blue. Police celebration because taking down these darn mafia families. You know? **Speaker 3**:They were hunting dirty cops, now they’re fighting for their lives. Angry drunk hooligans with bottles for knives, they barricaded the building and huddled in the dark. Eight officers against 200 aiming to kill their mark. They tore a parking meter up and rammed it into the door. They’ve squirted lighter fluid in and set fire to the flood. **Malcolm Collins**:real real great work on their part and not succumbing to the fear in shooting their way out of this very deadly situation they were in, which they got in attempting to break up police corruption. It wasn’t even really about a gay bar. Anyway... So Wow. **Speaker 3**:They’ll call anti gay bar laws. Bigotry and spite, but the rules had purpose and held back a blight. Nations learned it over generations, never knowing why. If you allow indiscriminate gay sex, young men start to die. So with Stonewall won, gay bars filled by the score. A decade on, the funerals came, hundreds of thousands or more. The AIDS epidemic was Stonewall’s prize. Activists spread AIDS, that’s the reason for the lies. **Malcolm Collins**:Fat... So the Stonewall Inn was controlled by the Genovese crime family. This is one of the big, I think, five crime families. Tony Lorina or Fat Tony bought and converted it into a gay bar around 1966 to 1967 with higher level involvement from Maddie the house... Horse. Most gay bars in New York at the time were mafia run because state law... Liquor laws effectively barred legal establishments from serving gay men, creating a captive market. Fat Tony Laura... No. No. They didn’t have to be. Other gay people could set stuff like this up. this is just the extreme side of the gay community. **Simone Collins**:And hold on. Law against serving alcohol to gay men? **Malcolm Collins**:Yeah. How do you **Simone Collins**:know if they’re gay? **Malcolm Collins**:Presumably, if they are actively hitting on other men in the bar. I think it was more of just a law against exclusively gay bars. I think that’s the only time it would really apply. **Simone Collins**:Okay. **Malcolm Collins**:and so you just... And there were other ways that gay men could date. It wasn’t like this was the only way that gay men could meet up. **Speaker 5**:A great example of this is the club. This started in 1966 and opened at West 38th Street, and lasted from 1967 to 1971. it just didn’t serve alcohol, and it was perfectly legal. This is something that lots of people did. **Malcolm Collins**:This was about serving alcohol to gays in an environment where they were looking for sex, which given that it was this environment, that was created in bars like this that led to the rise of the HIV pandemic. I don’t think that that was a bad or unreasonable law to have on the books. allowing just drunk, constant gay orgies, was... And this happened frequently during this period. Like, we are well aware of, one of my favorite... The things about the gay community, which is why for a period, I actually think gay culture was was pretty cool, was that the gay culture that you grew up with, if you grew up in the eighties, was a culture that was created... Or the eighties and the early nineties by all of the gay nerds. And people can be like, wait. Why was it created by all of the antisocial gay nerds? Why were the gays all the theater kids and stuff like that? Right? and the answer is is because there were cool biker gang gays. There were cool... If you go to the earlier days, but they all had orgies all the time, got AIDS, and died. The a... The gays that survived were the D and D gays, were the were the the theater kids, were the otherwise nerdy **Simone Collins**:Plus gays. Okay. Didn’t go out to bars, **Malcolm Collins**:and then ended up affecting gay culture. Yeah. And I had a... An older gay, like, explained to me. He’s like, I’m so weird. Like, everyone who was popular died. And and everyone who was, a weirdo or an outsider, they were the ones who who made it through. But the point here being is, this law likely saved in in terms of the gays that it did keep from going out and partying like this thousands, hundreds of thousands of gay lives from the the HIV pandemic by delaying when they were exposed to it or how much they were exposed to it and its degree of spread. Again, we have to remember this. This isn’t just being mean to gay people. Okay? There are, like, actual reasons that matter to gay people in the gay community why you would want a law like this on the books. Yeah. And if you’re like, well, that’s not why they put it on the books. They put it on the books because of homophobia. And it’s like, well, you gotta ask yourself, homophobia doesn’t just develop out of nowhere. Like, almost every culture on earth are the vast majority. There are some that don’t have prohibitions against same sex male relationships, but the vast majority is successful ones, whether you’re talking about Chinese or Japanese or Korean or... Yeah. I’m I’m going, like, all over the world here, people. Most African cultures, the South American, most of them, they they had prohibitions against male male sex of the of the large expansionist successful ones. And you can ask, well, why why does almost everyone have these prohibitions? And it’s because it leads to diseases. There’s, like, a very obvious reason. We saw the reason when the HIV pandemic happened. And so while people may not have understood their cultural disgust or, and may have acted on it in ways that were inappropriate, it... It’s not that it was coming out of nowhere. It had a reason behind it. Right? And and the reason why they felt that, quote, unquote, homophobia during that period was because their culture had learned we don’t do this, but not necessarily understood how or why it learned it. And, no, that can happen through cultural evolution. EG, one culture can practice this and one culture cannot, and the culture that doesn’t ends up dying at a faster rate or ends up having elite people in the society die at a faster rate or end up... And then the culture that did practice it ends up conquering them. Like, that’s how cultural evolution works. So You can develop cultural insights without anyone ever understanding why that insight existed in the first place. To continue here, So I’m I’m going through, like, what it was like to be in that because I found it pretty interesting. So it was... It it it was... The interior was painted black. All of the windows were shut. The the the fat guy **Simone Collins**:I hate bars like that. They are so depressing. **Malcolm Collins**:Over four hundred pounds. He controlled the jukebox, **Simone Collins**:the single machine. Tony? So he really was fat Tony. **Malcolm Collins**:Yeah. In the day to day operations, and he handled monthly bribes to the sixth precinct, contemporary. And he also was actually a gay man. Now that didn’t mean that he didn’t also exploit the gay community, but, you know, Catholics facilitating gay bars and the spread of HIV is something we have to remember. Sorry. The mafia. The mafia. I need to remember here. Looking the other way, presumably, mafia families were all so devout. doesn’t seem to affect their behavior, though. But, anyway, we’ll we’ll go into some of what else this Genevieve’s family that these people were facilitating was doing. But, entry to the club facade. So the cover was typically $1 on a weekday and $3 on weekend. You signed a membership book almost always under a fake name, like Donald Duck, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor. **Simone Collins**:Why bother signing the book then? **Malcolm Collins**:There is a reason. It’s a legal reason. It’s so that you could pretend to be a private bottle club and avoid liquor license rules. It’s basically we’re not selling people alcohol. They come in and it’s just a place where we drink with friends. Right? A doorman bouncer looked through a peephole and screamed people. You... Newcomers often needed somebody to vouch for them because it operated as a private club, cash wasn’t supposed to change hands for alcohol. Again, remember, like, that’s how they got around the alcohol laws. Yeah. So patrons received two drink cards or tickets upon entry. Different colors were used on different nights, so people couldn’t stockpile them. Staff pressured you to buy more. Drinks cost about $1 each, expensive for the time, and were heavily watered down, often made from bootleg or stolen liquor. **Simone Collins**:That’s a crate. **Malcolm Collins**:No. This is actually what led the police to this establishment. It had nothing to do with it being a gay establishment. Yeah. **Simone Collins**:Pretty blatant. **Malcolm Collins**:They were tracking stolen liquor. that was the the instigating fact here that was being bribed to the... So, again, no. It wasn’t a gay thing. It was a stolen liquor thing, and the gays were facilitating it. There was no running water behind the bar. Glasses were rinsed in a rubber tub of increasingly filthy water and reused. That’s disgusting. Was linked to a hepatitis outbreak among the patrons. Oh. The men’s toilet cock. **Simone Collins**:You’re going to this barn. You’re getting hepatitis. **Malcolm Collins**:Hold on. We’re not done yet. Oh, what? Toilets were usually clogged and overflowing on the floor. Staff sometimes dumped the dirty glass rinsing water into the toilets, making the plumbing worse, and there was a long trial urinal that had no privacy and an attendant. The place lacked a proper exit, a fire hazard, and basic hygiene. Mafia connected doorman, bartenders, and employees. They were aggressive about shaking down people for money and enforcing rules, pushing drinks, and extracting personal information. Wealthier and more discreet patients were targeted for blackmail and extortion. The, the walls were painted black, poorly lit, was a bad sound system, and broken fixtures. It smelled and felt dirty. It was called a dump or a hellhole. Despite that, it was popular because it was one of the few places where you could go to pick up essentially gay prostitutes, which again is like, why the **Simone Collins**:surviving gays are known for being really good at hosting, like, just great host. I I was gonna say hostesses, but host Yeah. **Malcolm Collins**:Maybe that’s around all the ones who just went to bar. **Simone Collins**:They throw good parties, you know, great tablescapes. Like, yeah, the people who learned how to, like, do this at home and maybe not go to the bar where the **Malcolm Collins**:cops are rinsed. I I... I and I want to be very clear here. This bar that the cops were trying to go to was facilitating a behavioral pattern in the part of the gay community that went to it that killed probably a good number, maybe even the majority of the people who participated in **Simone Collins**:these fraud. Care if... Who’s going there. It’s it’s a it’s a health hazard if there’s a bar that’s spreading hepatitis B by not washing **Malcolm Collins**:them properly. Bar didn’t care about them. It was using them. They could have set up their own things. They could have set up nonexploitative things, but they didn’t get their act together with the community to do that. And even when they did try to get their act together with the community, we’ll see now, they cannot help but scam and exploit each other. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. That’s that’s pretty messed up. Well, I mean, to be fair, there was probably some totally reasonable part of the gay community that was like, that’s gross. I’m not going there. But, of course, we’re not hearing them. This is, like, a No. **Malcolm Collins**:Of course. Good part of the gay community, the part of the gay community that was living better lives. **Simone Collins**:See them because they were living closeted gay lives in the nineteen **Malcolm Collins**:sixties. Were they just weren’t going to clubs that were about having sex with strangers? Yeah. Yes. Okay. So, like, we... It’s important that, like, we are clear about what this club was for. This was not where you went to meet the love of your life and your husband and your whatever. It’s where you went to hook up with strangers. Okay? **Simone Collins**:Ugh. Yeah. **Malcolm Collins**:Alright. So the bribes that they paid to the police were around 1,200 a month, which was a lot of money back then. Yeah. The bar was unlicensed, and it was described as a dump or a hellhole. Employees often associated with engaged in blackmail, extortion, or closet of wealthy patrons. The, Mattachay Society nineteen sixty nine guide, this was like a guide for, like, gay guys, warned... It specifically was like, if you go to Stonehall, well, whatever you do, don’t give any personal information to the staff. They will try to shake you down for it. **Simone Collins**:Well, also, don’t go to the bathroom. Don’t touch any of the walls, and don’t drink anything for the **Malcolm Collins**:Yes. And we could go over this in more detail in another episode because this one’s already gonna run long. But there was a book written called chickens and the bulls, which explained this anti gay ring that was run out of Stonewall that targeted military officers, congressmen, business figures, and entertainers extracting extremely large sums. Admiral William Church was one of the documented... What... No. One of the documented suicides tied to this. The guy running this was Ed the skull Murphy, a figure that after the the suicide and all this later went out and started doing this again, working with other gays in other gay bars. Again, it’s it’s a lot of gays. And we see this in, in abuse rates, in lesbian relationships. We see this with abuse rates in gay relationships. this is really, something that is a a problem, and it... For me, it would make me really hesitant to affiliate with these sorts of communities when I saw the rate of exploitation that is endogenous to the communities to their very inception. **Simone Collins**:And it just blows my mind that... Yeah. The... So if you would ask me before telling me any of this, what... Like, what happened with Stonewall? I’d be like, well, there was some, you know, ruthless attack on some innocent gay bar, and they resisted it. **Malcolm Collins**:Meanwhile, these six men, two women held up doing everything they can to not shoot people, got a broken wrist. They’re trying to ram down the door with a money thing. Absolutely horrifying. So David Carter’s research, which again is seen by... From gay sources to being the definitive research in this field, had a hundreds of interviews with witnesses. Contemporaneous accounts concluded that most of the people at the vanguard on the first night were white men. Drag canes, were present, but they did not play any major role in the events of the first night. **Simone Collins**:Well, they probably didn’t wanna get their hair and makeup or clothing messed up. Good. Like, they lost their money. **Malcolm Collins**:Another reason why they weren’t involved. Okay. Another reason they weren’t involved is most of the drag queens were prostitutes. And the the... They didn’t... Like, in terms of run ins with the police, they were the last ones who wanted to put themselves at the front of a run-in with the police. Also, most of the drag queens were taking on the feminine roles. The idea of this ultra masculine person who pretends to be trans that we see today, like your Alex Vaid Menon, I wanna, like, molest little girls stuff. again, CS quote, I’ll put it on screen here. these types of people did not exist during this period of the gay movement. drag kings were actually attempting to take on a feminine role. And if you’re taking on a feminine role, you don’t run at the police with a knife or a brick or something like that. Okay? That’s a that’s a later type of trans that didn’t exist yet. The... I’m not even gonna try to conform. Okay? But, anyway, to continue. Also, you know, you... You’re a prostitute, so you don’t want to be running at the police because they know who you are. **Simone Collins**:Wait. But but no. Just because you’re a drag queen doesn’t mean you’re a **Malcolm Collins**:sex queen. Most of the drag queens of this period were prostitutes. That’s why you would do it. You would do it so that you would look like a woman because, you know, guys pay more to sleep with somebody who looks like a woman. **Simone Collins**:Not if you’re gay. **Malcolm Collins**:No. Even gay men of this period really preferred the, active role in a sexual relationship. Like, that was seen as the higher status role. **Simone Collins**:Right. You don’t need... Look. We all **Malcolm Collins**:have I understand, but somebody going out and actively presenting as, like, ultra fem was also sort of like a, you know, I’m I’m in the business sort of a thing. It it wasn’t everyone, **Simone Collins**:but it definitely Okay. A thing. **Speaker 6**:So I will read to you what, AI has to say about this. In the mid twentieth century New York and similar cities, there was a long standing overlap between certain forms of phoneme presentation by people assigned male at birth and sex work. This was not universal, and the context differed sharply. Street queens and fairies from the late nineteenth century onwards documented in place like the slide and black rabbit, a subculture of young men who presented femininely fairies solicited other men. Some of this was commercial. George Chauncey’s gay New York and later histories of hustling cultures described this continuum. By the nineteen fifties to nineteen sixties, street queens, often young, sometimes runaways or homeless, who wear makeup, dresses, or partial film attire on the street or in certain bars, were frequently involved in hustling. Esther Newton’s ethnographic work, mother camp based on nineteen sixties feels work, noted young gender crossers outside formal performance spaces often supported themselves through prostitution because open gender nonconformity... No. That wasn’t the only reason. But, yes, this is... It was a thing. This isn’t me making something up. I don’t know how I know this part of history because I didn’t live through it. Maybe I thought in movies. How do I know this? That’s weird. Anyway, I mean, obviously, I wasn’t a gay person in the nineteen sixties. So **Simone Collins**:Suppose. **Malcolm Collins**:So the trans women of color claim refers to Marsha P. Johnson, a black drag queen, who used he, she pronouns interchangeably throughout her life and did not ever identify with the term transgender. And Sylvia Rivera **Simone Collins**:But you said he, she programmed. Like, so which is it? Were they **Malcolm Collins**:basically them? She used either one. When when she was a drag queen... So she was a drag queen. **Simone Collins**:So in drag, he was she. And when not in drag, he was he. **Malcolm Collins**:Yes. Because he didn’t identify as a woman. **Simone Collins**:Okay. Sorry. This is just so... Okay. **Malcolm Collins**:Was a guy who identified as a guy who put on **Simone Collins**:In character identified as a girl. That makes perfect sense. Yes. I Yep. Yeah. Now I understand. **Malcolm Collins**:Who, in his own words, a guy. I am not misgendering him. Okay? He said, quote, the place was already on fire. The riots had already started when he got there. Now note how late this had to be in the riot. This meant the police had already extricated everyone from the building. They had already barricaded the building. People had already tried to break in and were now post lighting the building on fire in a big big enough way that he said, yeah, the building was on fire to kill the police officers. That’s that’s where we are. And note, to arrive at a scene where that’s happening and you participate, you are a bad guy. You are a nut. You are trying to kill people. Okay? You are an evil, bad person. Okay? Everybody who got... I mean, maybe you could say somebody went there that night, and they just happened to got caught up in a raid. Fine. Then leave the scene. Don’t try to murder the cops. **Simone Collins**:My gosh. **Malcolm Collins**:You you... The the bar gets closed down. Other gay hotspots are gonna open. You don’t need to murder the cops for ruining your night, you psychopath. Anyway Wow. So Rivera claimed a leading role. So this is the person who actively just claims a leading role. But Carter said that multiple people were close to the events, including Bob Crawler and Randy Wicker, found no credible evidence that she was there on the first night at all. Johnston reportedly corrected her on this point. Rivera’s presence appears to have been a fabrication completely. and this person was a heroin crack addict bad person who exploited the gay community and was one of the people who was banned from gay pride events. So very bad person, but they’re being held up today as some sort of gay icon, which is... Or trans icon because trans people are trying to colonize gay history that they didn’t play a role in. And this, by the way, is the only person, Rivera, who you could win any legitimate context claim was trans. Alright? **Simone Collins**:Okay. **Malcolm Collins**:And, no, she wasn’t of color in any conventional sense. I’ll put an image on on screen here, but she looked white. I mean, we can we can look her up right now. **Simone Collins**:Like, a tanned white, perhaps? Less white than we look. Maybe it goes outside sometimes white, maybe? **Malcolm Collins**:Nope. Just, like, white. Maybe, like, Jewy. Like, a Jewy white. A Jewy white. Great. That’s that’s all I can think. **Simone Collins**:I will decide. Okay. Okay. Tanned. A tan. A nice tan. What are you talking about? And **Malcolm Collins**:No. Hold on. But this is... No. But this is, like, a tan. This isn’t an ethnic coloring thing. This is **Simone Collins**:a tan. I mean, like, if we’re talking... You know, we’re... This is a this is a Spanish kind of Rivera. This is not **Malcolm Collins**:See, this is a this is what she looks like here, right, next to a black guy. She’s not a black guy. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. She looks European. She looks... I guess, if if we’re talking Rivera, it’s a Spanish European. It is not... Oh, but I love the pictures of her. She’s full on brown. So in the fan art, she brown. In the in the non fan art, she white. That’s very interesting. Very interesting. **Malcolm Collins**:Okay. Very interesting. **Speaker 7**:By the way, if you’re wondering what her ethnicity is, it’s no surprise that she looks white. She’s European. She’s a Venezuelan, which is generally white. Puerto Rican Venezuelan... I mean, I know some people describe his... Hispanics as nonwhite, but they’re... Mean, they’re just Catholics. They’re... I I don’t under... Latin America was colonized by white. Like, people are aware of that. Right? **Malcolm Collins**:Well... Okay. Okay. So, again, the... Not... No trans women of color were to be seen, okay, at Stonewall. There was... And and I’d also point out here why there were no trans... Black, like, people of color at Stonewall Rides. Okay. Do you know why? I’m gonna see if you can guess why. Just like if you are at all familiar with gay history from this period, you would know this. **Simone Collins**:Did what? Did gay people not like trans people? **Malcolm Collins**:They hated black people. Gay people were famously racist. No. What? Yes. It was always seen as a very racist community in its early days. **Simone Collins**:But there are gay black people. **Malcolm Collins**:And they can go to gay black bars is what they **Simone Collins**:would have said. Awfully specific. Were there any gay black bars? No. Don’t answer that question. We’ll just keep going. **Malcolm Collins**:I am sure there were because of the amount of racism in the gay community. **Simone Collins**:Maybe the gay black people of the nineteen sixties had the good sense to not go to gay bars at all. **Speaker 8**:So I can only guess that I must be a reincarnated gay person from the nineteen sixties. Note, I’m joking here. I don’t believe in reincarnation. Just surprised. I have no idea where I learned all this from, but I decided to double check my intuitions about famously racist gay bars in the nineteen sixties with Wikipedia. That’s... Sorry. Not Wikipedia. AI. We’re not tired here. and it said, yes. The claim is historically accurate for a large share of the mainstream gay bars in the nineteen fifties to nineteen sixties and into later decades. Many bars that primarily served white gay men practice racial discrimination, especially against black patrons. This was common across US cities and not unique to New York, and it mirrored a broader racial pattern even in the North. In in New York specifically, in Greenwich Village and other white dominated gay bar areas, many establishments were unwelcoming or openly exclusionary to black and Puerto Rican or Latino patrons. Recollection to the period note that black and Latino friends were not always treated well at other gay bars. Stonewall itself was seen as more lax but still racist. Now if you go down to Simone’s questions about black gay bars, yes, in most major cities, they’re with significant black populations. There were black gay bars or bars that primarily or exclusively served black queer clientele until the mid twentieth century. Examples, in New York, Harlem had a long tradition of a queer nightlife, drag balls, clubs, and Mount Morris Bass, which for years was one of the only Bass houses admitting black men. So... Yes. **Malcolm Collins**:So Like, if you’re going to a bar with a bunch of white underworld members in New York and you’re black during a period of intense racism, you’re probably not gonna go. Like, they’re all gonna be drunk. They don’t care about what the law says. Yeah. They’re all sort of, like, borderline homeless. Out of the prison system. **Simone Collins**:Yeah. Maybe not. **Malcolm Collins**:Yeah. You’re a black gay guy. You know better than to go there. There would there would likely almost no black people there that night. Okay. Just wanna be clear about this. Okay. The revisionism of this stuff. Okay. So now I’m quoting from another gay newspaper or magazine going into the life of this Rivera figure that everybody talks about who threw the first brick. since his death in 2002, drag queen Sylvia Rivera... Now note even a gay publication is referring to him as a male because he was not thought of as transgender, but has surely been turned into a transgender icon. He is now clearly celebrated by trans activists in the wider media as a similar figure in the LGBT rights movement. He is hailed for pioneering activism and feeded for the support and shelter he often offered other marginalized people around Downtown New York in the early nineteen seventies, noting Rivera’s willingness to defy the law have gone so far to anoint Rivera as the Rosa Parks of the modern transgender movement. His legend continues to grow. Some have even claimed that Rivera was effectively initiated Stonewall in 1969. They say he handed his friend a fellow drag queen, Marsha p Johnson, the first brick to be thrown at police during the raid at Stonewall in 1969, sparking a fight and kickstarting the moose men. Johnson, on the other hand, has always told a separate story and never cooperating this, insisting that Rivera was not at the Stonewall Inn on the fateful night in 1969. On Earth. He was asleep after taking heroin 30 blocks north of Stonewall Inn, Bryan **Simone Collins**:make you sleepy, for sure. **Malcolm Collins**:He was a heroined out homeless guy sleeping in Bryant Park that night. Great. This is your figure of great renown. Trim Beck. But then the truth about Rivera has always been darker and more complicated than its contemporary hag... Hagographers, are willing to admit. What we have witnessed over the past two decades is a whitewashing of the real Rivera, a dishonest attempt to present him as Antran’s activism as central to the gay liberation struggle of the nineteen sixties and seventies. According to the village voice piece on Umbers from 1971, all of his Greenwich Village businesses were exploitative. Mike calls himself... This is a quote from somebody who dealt with him. Mike calls him a gay catalyst and flesh peddler. He deals in boy boy sex Christopher’s End with his backstory and nude boy shows. It’s climax fresh. In 1970, Rivera and Johnson needed somewhere to stay and took advantage of their connection with the Umbers. this is a gang related group. He gave them discounted rent on one of his squalid four rooms apartments having just formed their group, the street transvestite action reactionaries or STAR, they turned Umber’s property into something they called the star house. Today, the heart... Star house decided as one of the reasons to celebrate Rivera. It’s recalled as a beacon of radical progressiveness, a home for trans people. As one of the journalists puts it, it is lionized as a pioneering and charitable endeavor, feeding, housing, and clothing the young homeless trans people. But the reality was somewhat different. It had no toilet, water, heat, or electricity. Liquor and drugs were plentiful. The four rooms were strewn with trash and occupied by as many as 20 people at the time. food and other supplies were generally stolen or shoplifted by the residents. What little cash was had came from sex work in the 42 Street area and elsewhere. Again, I told you most of them were sex workers, or begging. conveniently, the building was a next door to one of the Umber’s porn distribution operations, which it used the people who were staying there for. Horrifying. Right? Again, no running water, no electricity, no food but stolen stuff, and, violence was pretty regular at a place like this. In some days, the seedy reality of Star House captured the nature of Star as a group. Despite its right on reputation today, Star’s self styled revolutionary transvestites were not trusted by most of us in the emerging gay liberation movement. Its focus on whoring and radical politics as gay activist alliance founder Arthur Bell described it in 1971, I was largely viewed with horror befitting their mafia connections. There was a dangerous, potentially violent side to their activities that they were aware of, and so many of us avoided them indeed during the nineteen seventies set and occupation of NYU’s Weinstein Hall by various gay rights activists. Rivera argued that radicals needed to take up guns to achieve revolution... Her liberation. given the chaotic criminal nature of the star house, it was hardly a surprise that it was a short lived endeavor. Among the other drag queen insect workers plying their trade from the Umbers property, one was called Bubbles. Bubbles was tasked with collecting rent from young occupants. But by the winter of early nineteen seventy one, Bubbles had pocketed the rent money and left town. Rivera and Johnson were unable to catch up on the rent areas, tried to renegotiate their arrangements with the Umbers. He was not in a forgiving mood. By June 1971, Umbers had already thrown out the lot, saying to one reporter after the, chin, I’ll be effed if I house that bunch rent free. Within two years, of this happening, Rivera and Johnson were expelled from pride marches. Now why were they expelled from pride marches? Let’s go into this. Again, you’re learning a lot. It’s not the history you were taught. **Simone Collins**:There doesn’t seem to be a flattering angle to this. **Malcolm Collins**:Not good. I... I’ll try to steel man it at the end here so you guys can get a steel manning of of how you could possibly think this was a good thing. By the end of the post Stonewall movement, we’re splitting groups like the Gay Activist Alliance, GAA, and many pride organizers wanted a more respectable assimilationist image focused on gay men and lesbians who could pass as ordinary citizens. The the the types of gays that I would support. street queens, drag performers, sex workers, and mostly visible nonconforming people, especially the poor ones of color, who these people were not, by the way. So they... I mean, they were poor, but they weren’t of color. If we’ve looked at images at them, nobody would clock that as a person of color, were increasingly seen as an embarrassment and hurt the causes cases of winning mainstream political support or winning anti discrimination laws. At the nineteen seventy three Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally in Washington State Park, organizers tried to stop Rivera and the star contingent from speaking. Lesbian feminists, including Jean O’Leary, note here, lesbians versus trans people goes back to inception, criticized drag men for exploiting women. Rivera first her way onto stage and gave the famous you all better quiet down speech, accusing the crowd of abandoning the people in jail and the street queens who had been on the front lines. She was loudly booed and heckled. Drag queens, including Johnson, were effectively barred from marching in the official parade that year. They marched ahead of it as... Instead after the event Rivera attempted on aliving. This event marked the end of star, and the group began to break up. **Simone Collins**:Wow. Not a... Not an outcome I would want for anyone that I care about. **Malcolm Collins**:So I wanna be clear. The group that ran this, the Genovese Mafia. They would regularly kill people. For example, I’ll just read a few. I won’t go over all of them because it will get boring. Genovese Tom Rennon in 1930, he was shot in the back of the head with a shotgun. You had a girl Vertaka and Antag Lorenz March thirty two. The Genevieve’s ordered him to be strangled. Oh. Just... I’m not gonna get... They they killed a lot of people. They’re they’re known... They went around killing people. It’s really **Simone Collins**:horrible. Noted. **Malcolm Collins**:I also could go over the case of how they discovered the corruption at the 6th Precinct. **Simone Collins**:No. Maybe they checked the guest book. **Malcolm Collins**:Well Wow. They... And I’ll I’ll note here that this is not... One of the the funny things, actually, I’ll go into is just a little side. One of our fans was like, oh, you need to go into Jonathan Cannes work in the return of gods on exposing this. If you watch this man and take him seriously, his his content is not smart. Uh-oh. It is not. No. It’s a it’s a conservative conspiracy theorist guy who tries to argue that they were doing some sort of, like, dark goddess celebration. **Simone Collins**:Oh, for goodness sake. If men want sex, is this that complicated? **Malcolm Collins**:Gay men being involved in orgies doesn’t require dark goddess worship. And his his points are directly at odds with facts that are key to the case. So, for example, he’s like, well, it aligned with the full moon and summer solstice, and those were important in ancient calendars. And it’s like, it was a secret raid. They had no control over when it happened. What are you talking about? Obviously, the bar did not organize the night that they were raided and shut down by a separate police investigation **Speaker 9**:So, note, he even breaks it down to, like, the day the warrant was handled. He’s like, that was the eleventh. And in ancient calendars, eleven meant, what? Our modern calendar does not align with ancient calendars. That would be purely symbolic in your head. But outside of that, I decided to dig into this guy more because I was just so shocked by the stupidity of this theory. I was like, he doesn’t because there’s no way that the bar could have controlled when the warrant on itself was handled down. And then I realized he seems to really believe in all of this pagan stuff. Like, he thinks all these gods are real and that they’re influencing stuff. And so it’s not that the bar or anyone had to intentionally be doing anything. It’s that that the pagan gods are real and have power over our lives, which I guess some Christians can believe that. To me, that sounds pretty sacrilegious. But... Okay. by the way, for techno Puritans, at least our branch of Christianity, that’s a big no no. No. Pagan gods are not actual gods with power over you, that that fight against the Christian god. There is one god. **Malcolm Collins**:For some other stuff so you can just get into, like, how crack minded some conservatives can be. And I think it’s important that we, as a movement, stay away from this sort of thinking because it discredits the truth of our movement, you know, when we’re when we’re trying to open people’s eyes to stuff. The event was centered at a barter or tavern. Ancient texts associate the goddess with inhabiting or possessing ale houses. That’s where men went to have sex with strangers in that period. Where else was it gonna happen? Yeah. Okay. Rioters performed the dance of Ishtar amid the chaos, chanting words manshing ancient inscriptions of the goddesses going into battle. I highly doubt they were that educated. That, yeah, that does seem a **Simone Collins**:little highbrow for this this place. Were drunk street thugs. **Speaker 11**:Just for context, we do know what they sung when they danced there, and it was not an Ishtar battle cry or something. It was, we are the Stonewall girls. We wear our hair in curls. We wear no underwear. We show our pubic hair. We wear our dungarees above our Nelly knees. so, yeah, not... As I said, this was a place about having sex with strangers. Right? Like, they make that very clear in the song. **Malcolm Collins**:Okay? Out of context. For their prostitutes. Bean cups. Yeah. Lion symbolism? I don’t know if the bar had lion symbolism or not. **Speaker 10**:So I decided to look it up and to just highlight how ridiculous the theory was. There was nothing lion related associated with the stonewall in. It was a nearby establishment. And when you think about how common lions are used in, insignia and stuff like that, I mean, yeah, of course, you could, if you’re looking within a couple blocks of it, find a lion somewhere in some logo. **Malcolm Collins**:I don’t I don’t think that it would be meaningful if it did. I mean, it could, but I... I’m I’m not familiar. Next one here. A woman named Storm or Stormy de la vre something is described as a key figure who helped spark the resistance. Khan links this to him calling for the goddess, a loud thundering storm. So does he think the goddess is actually real and that the goddess put her in that position because of her name, or does he think that people are generally aware of ancient goddess tradition so much, they chose as a leader of their movement, somebody who just happened to have a name that sort of sounded like something the god was related to? Do you not see how crazy that sounds? Like, even if you are creating a cult, that’s not the way you do it. You don’t choose as your leader a guy who happened to be given a name close to one of the goddesses and then have your own operation shut down on a night to match some sort of prophecy. I mean, it almost sounds like this guy believes all the pagan stuff, which I really warn against. I said, well, you gotta stay away from mystic brain nonsense because it’ll get into you, and then you start to get mystic brained. And he said the name Stonewall itself is referring to a goddess, the stone that breaks the stone wall. I... What? Let’s see what Stonewall was named after. **Simone Collins**:I mean, wasn’t it a brick building? The the outside looked kinda like a brick wall. I guess they could’ve called it brick wall. Who cares? **Malcolm Collins**:But It was in... It was believed to be inspired by the nineteen thirties book, The Stonewall, recognizes the first autobiography of a lesbian, but it wasn’t a gay bar. So that’s that’s gotta be wrong when it was converted. Because it was originally called Bonnie’s Stonewall Inn in the nineteen thirties, and it was converted to a gay bar by the the Catholic. So these are gay people who made this up later. I guess the answer is is we don’t know what the stone... Why it was named Stonewall. Yeah. But it it goes back to the nineteen thirties well before any of this and when it was just a normal bar and inn. Probably, as Simone said, because it had a stone wall at some point in its history that presumably was Scribing **Simone Collins**:what it looks like. You know? **Malcolm Collins**:And he and he says that then rioters try to break in and violently set fire to it. That’s that’s not... It wasn’t a pagan celebrate. We can just call things what they are. A bunch of hoarding games. **Simone Collins**:As it is. We don’t need it to be more crazy. **Malcolm Collins**:Now I’m gonna steel man the other side of this. Okay? **Simone Collins**:Okay. Okay. Yeah. How are we gonna? **Malcolm Collins**:first, I want to be clear. I do not think that there is any way you can legitimately steel man these officers whose lives were put in danger, who are investigating theft and police corruption as in anything other than morally exemplary people for getting out of this without opening fire on the crowd. that was crazy risk to their lives. The police response was delayed. there is... I just think you’re a morally disgusting person if you do that. these guys appear to have been genuinely decent people from everything that we are aware of, in a really trying situation and did everything they could. Okay? What what can you say? You can say, well, gay men didn’t have anywhere else to meet during this period. That is not true. They could have met in places where they weren’t drinking. What you mean is party. And, okay, that’s a little unfair. Gay men like to party. Right? So why not start something outside of a mafia controlled thing? Well, the mafia could shut it down. Right? Because the mafia makes money off of this, and the mafia can be violent. And so they don’t want other gay bars operating in a in a above the board type of matter when they can exploit this. So, okay, I can go with that. Right? And then you could say, well... And that environment was created by the laws. And so the laws, because they were created with a discriminatory intent, were bad in that they created these environments and the need for police action or the ability for the mafia to corner the market. The problem is is that the laws objectively were a good thing for the gay community in terms of disease spread as we know. Right? Like, if... Even as a gay person, if you were king of all gays during this period and you had any awareness of what was about to happen to the gay community or even during this time, there were huge disease outbreaks in the gay community, and you’re like, I want to Magnanimously do something that’s good for the gay community. You would have had these long, but you’d say, but that’s not why they were on the book. They were on the book for discriminatory reasons, so it doesn’t matter other effects they may have had on the community or what you would have wanted as a member of the community or blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Okay. Okay. I can I can buy that, And you could say, and then it made sense to begin the protests around these sorts of places because these were the gathering houses for young gay men? Or you could say, hey. Come on, Malcolm. Not everybody who went there was looking for a prostitute or something like that. And this is the case, but there was definitely prostitution run out of there. Like, was one of the things it was known for. Right? A lot of these figures who were talking about hierarchy of the movement were known for that as well. The the... Then what you can say, and I think that this is probably the more honest answer is that it wasn’t all prostitution, is the gay community they... At that time was in part about financial exchanges. **Simone Collins**:You mean as in for sexual exchanges? **Malcolm Collins**:Yes. In in the same way that, like, the effective altruist community ended up developing this idea that, like, you’re a girl in the community, and, you know, one day you end up sleeping **Simone Collins**:with someone and they get Like, kind of financially supporting each other. **Malcolm Collins**:And then you’re like, oh, you know, it just sort of becomes normal to give girls money for sex in in the effective ultra risk community. And and it ends up creating an expectation among certain individuals in the community that that’s gonna happen if you’re taking on the female role in a relationship, especially when you’re in these. And and what creates that environment? Frankly, like, polyamorous environments naturally create that phenomenon. Because, if a person has multiple people they can sleep with at the end of any given night and they are desirable, you, the person who wants them to sleep with you, has to have a reason. Right? Like, why am I sleeping with you and not this guy at the end of the night? Right? there’s multiple guys here who want me. It’s like, well, I got some money. And then that develops into a system where it just becomes a normal part of a sexual relationship in this early community. And I don’t think it’s a good thing that it happens. I think it’s a horrible thing that it happens. I think it’s a horrible thing that the community normalized But you **Simone Collins**:can understand how it comes to happen. Like, there’s... There are understandable market forces driving this that are... It’s not like someone planned on it to go that way. It just tends to go that way. **Malcolm Collins**:Yeah. It just tends to go that way, right, in very promiscuous environments where where, you know, this sort of thing happens. **Simone Collins**:Where it’s understood that there’s... Where... Well, I guess where to begin with, you have a free exchange, an unregulated free exchange. Yeah. **Malcolm Collins**:Yeah. So that’s that’s the best deal, man, I can make of this. I I don’t think it’s a a good deal, man, because the the officers were there about stolen liquor and police corruption. But they **Simone Collins**:don’t necessary... I get... You know, like, it’s a... There are 200 people in that bar. I could also see, you know, you’re there. It’s late at night. You... You’re drunk on... And possibly poisoned by whatever it is that you’re drinking. So it’s not exactly as your faculties are 100% online, And you don’t know that they’re there because of some mafia connection that you vaguely know about. You might think that they’re there because there are various criminalized aspects of being gay. and so you’re afraid they’re coming for you, and then you’re pursuing that. Great steelman. **Malcolm Collins**:Yeah. **Simone Collins**:So I I could see that they’re just like, oh, man. They are coming for me. Also not thinking very well. I’m gonna fight back. And And I I also **Malcolm Collins**:wanna be clear here where you can be like, well, they started arresting random people. They didn’t start arresting random people. On the first day, the people who were booked were the staff, and that was it. it was not like anyone who happened to be there that day. They were not being unreasonable. They didn’t even arrest many of the rioters to my understanding or any maybe. **Speaker 12**:So I decided to fact check this, and it looks like, originally, it was just focused on the people working at the bar and obviously doing the illegal act of selling the alcohol that was stolen. But later on, when the violent resistance began to happen, there were arrests outside of that group. Specifically, there was a heterosexual folk singer who threw a brick or something at the cops and who was arrested, which seems perfectly, like, good good good to me. There were 13 arrests. Some claim that it was the gender checking of butch lesbians that led to this, but this doesn’t align with the other accounts that we have of this. It appears it was mostly, just a resistance to... Did somebody screwing up their night? That that appears to be what caused this from what I’ve seen of the bulk of the historic accounts, and a lot of the other stuff appears to be revisionism. **Malcolm Collins**:I’ll check that afterwards. But, yeah, they were just being completely reasonable law enforcement officers trying to shut something down that was a net negative for the gay community in numerous ways. And as we can see after things like Stonewall were shut down, the good part... There was a positive part of the gay community. Right? This was the part that didn’t let these people come into their events. Right? They’re like, we wanna create wholesome gay. We wanna create gays who have good lives, who aren’t degenerate heroin heads living in a a a slothouse and exploiting homeless people for sex. Right? Like, that’s that’s not what we want the gay community to be. And Stonewall always, in its reality, represented the antithesis of that. It represented the sexual exploitation of a vulnerable community. And so going forwards, and I really want people to hold me to this, so let’s make sure you guys remind me of your email or whatever. Next time, the Stonewall stuff is coming up, and we should try to organize. I wanna reach out to the other podcasters I know, to try to organize, Stonewall events. I I think we should. I think we need to, one, remember these brave police officers in the line of duty that almost died, and that saved the lives of this crowd by not doing what I think anyone else would have done in an instance like that. and I think that we need to who un... Who uncovered police corruption. And we need to do that in a way that highlights the, rewriting and, gaslighting of history. **Simone Collins**:That’s crazy. I think a new arc with our podcast might be historical revision because that’s something that’s been coming up in a lot of the stuff I’ve been reading lately. So, yeah, I’m starting to have this crisis about stuff that I thought was true and what... Who would... And what I can trust, and it’s not looking good. **Malcolm Collins**:But at least we **Simone Collins**:can shed light on different things. So **Malcolm Collins**:Well, you guys can come here. Get your education at base camp. **Simone Collins**:Bring some marshmallows. We’ll start a fire. It’ll be great. **Malcolm Collins**:I, oh, it’s starting. So I updated the Artfab API because Grok wasn’t accepting it for some people’s compute accounts. Basically, it gave too many instructions, and Grok was weird about that. It was like, oh, this is too much at once or something. **Simone Collins**:Someone, I think, was tweeting about this. **Malcolm Collins**:Yeah. So I fixed that. So now there’s a special way to paste it in for Grock that Grock will handle. And all of the other have been reinforced, but one of the new features I made for it was to improve the face to face comic making system. It’s so cute what you made for our kids. Yeah. It’s way too difficult to do what I did with any sort of manual human interface. It really only works with an API. But if you do have the API, you can give it a family photo and say... Or, like, collection of family photos and say, make family comics from this. And that’s what it did for our kids. It made comics with their likenesses in anime format, going on adventures that they would care about it. Know, give it your kids interest and everything like that. And this all originally came out of a not safe for work comic system I was building for character consistency and not safe for work stuff. And now I’m **Simone Collins**:Well, what produces children, Malcolm? Sex produces children. Look. It is the NSFW that is required for the wholesome. Okay? You can’t have wholesome without NSFW. In our family, Simone. I know. With our IVF, it’s science and money. But for most people, it’s NSFW. So Oh, for for long. **Malcolm Collins**:We... I I really hope we can we can end sex. I I think it’s, you know, one of the key flaws in the human biology. When people are like, what are the genetic modifications you would change of... No sex, number one. **Simone Collins**:I mean, just, you know, after the miscarriage that will not end, I feel like a big one is the human gestation sometimes. Oh, did you... I don’t know if you saw the email from the people we cannot name. It’s crazy. Did you did you... Oh, okay. We’ll talk about it after because I cannot say anything. **Malcolm Collins**:It’s really exciting. **Simone Collins**:It’s really exciting. **Malcolm Collins**:No. You can tell me, I can cut it out. What what is exciting? **Simone Collins**:What’s happening? That’s Yeah. That’s awesome. It’s so awesome. It’s so freaking cool because that is a first. That is a huge breakthrough. Anyway, I’m so excited. Yes. So excited. **Malcolm Collins**:Yeah. And and, like, we own a part of that company. Oh my god. **Simone Collins**:The foundation. Better. The foundation. **Malcolm Collins**:The the pragmatist foundation. just for what was cut out there so people are aware is we talk about this sometimes on the show, but when you’re paying our fab or donating to us, generally, what you’re actually donating to, we have yet to take a single dollar from anything we’ve made from YouTube or donations or subscriptions or our fab and put that to our daily life. **Speaker 13**:Simone demanded a correction here that apparently some small amount at one point did go to our daily life, but generally speaking. **Malcolm Collins**:All of that money so far has gone into a nonprofit foundation that serves the goals that we say we stand for. Eventually, we’ll live off of it, but for now, it goes to our goals. And at a period, a lot of money had built up in this particular foundation, and so we began to invest in cutting edge technology that we think could dramatically improve the human condition. one of them that has been leaked that we’ve invested in is g... Germline gene editing in humans. That is not where we just had a major breakthrough. It was in another one of the technologies we’re really passionate about. but the... One of the... One of our investments in that field had... I I... I’d say the White House approved level breakthroughs in their technology, which I was also really excited to see because when you’re looking at cutting edge technology of of the type that Simone and I care about, I think that there’s this perception that, like, mainstream Republicans are not about this stuff. The mainstream MAGA movement is about stuff. **Simone Collins**:Have to happen off the books. Know? What’s that sovereign city Prospera? **Malcolm Collins**:Yeah. Well, it’s all gonna happen in secret places and off the books and everything. And and and and what we’re seeing instead is that the White House is facilitating these leaps, which also if you’re wondering if you’re going to hate this sort of research, be like, well, would multiple people in the White House be involved with something I would really hate? Probably not. So if you understood the technology, you wouldn’t hate it. **Speaker 4**:They were hunting dirty cops, now they’re fighting for their lives. Angry drunk hooligans with bottles for knives, they barricaded the building and huddled in the dark. Eight officers against 200 aiming to kill their mark. They tore a parking meter up and rammed it into the door. They’ve squirted lighter fluid in and set fire to the flood. You don’t set fire to a bolted room to scare. They wanted to burn them alive trapped in there. They radioed for backup, but the backup didn’t come. The person down the block was on the take and playing dumb. Everyone had a gun and the easy way out was clear. Shoot a path out through the crowd and get out of here, but a volley through the door risk of bodies in the street. So they put their own lives on the line and held against the heat. Mail out the back. Scummerfie worked the door and blood came in inside. Admiral William Church paid until he couldn’t, then he died. They took their cash, they took their lives, they gave them hepatitis too. That bar was never a friend to gaze. It bled them through and through. The sixth prince and took the envelope and looked the other ways. They took the bar so they could keep exploiting the gays. Inspector Seymour, prime suspected a crooked cop so he risked his life to put the corruption to a stop. So raising glass to the boys in blue, eight against 200, but they saw it through. They saved lives of gaming. They stood for what’s right, and the very people they saved tried to set them alive. Now they’ll tell you of the villain who let the first brick fly, but the witnesses who stood there say that story is a lie. Rivera was crashed out on heroin 30 blocks away. Such a predator pride events themselves would bar him one day. A Marsha, a drag queen, and nothing more did not even arrive until fire was on the floor. Anyone who tells you what trans was, there is a liar. Appropriating gay history is apparently fire. They’ll call anti gay bar laws. Bigotry and spite, but the rules had purpose and held back a blight. Nations learned it over generations, never knowing why. If you allow indiscriminate gay sex, young men start to die. So with Stonewall won, gay bars filled by the score. A decade on, the funerals came, hundreds of thousands or more. The AIDS epidemic was Stonewall’s prize. Activists spread AIDS, that’s the reason for the lies. The only ones who saved the life that night were the eight who wouldn’t shoot to win a fight so every Jew. When the banners fly, never let them gaslight you with a lie for the eight who stood their ground in ‘69 and rooting up dirty cops and holding the thin blue line. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe