Lindsey Graham
speaker
14,913 appearances
188 recordings
51 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard 16 Sep
Lindsey Graham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 118 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 35.
Appearances
American History Tellers · FAN FAVORITE: Stonewall | Why Don't You Do Something? | 3 · 16 Sep 2026
podcast
We were all the same.
That was comforting.
But not everyone felt welcome.
Some patrons recalled that lesbians were often turned away for looking too straight.
Others claimed that transgender people were turned away.
But for many, including writer and Stonewall patron Vito Russell, it was a bar for people who were too young, too poor, or just too much to get in anywhere else.
Over the next two years, Stonewall grew more popular, nestling itself into the fabric of the LGBTQ community.
But beneath the nightly party, something else was going on.
The four businessmen who had remade the Stonewall into a popular, dance-friendly venue were members of the Italian mafia, the Genovese crime family.
The owners had provided a sanctuary for the LGBTQ community in the village, but they'd also created a trap where the mafia could turn huge profits by preying on their own clientele.
Through blackmail and corruption, they were putting their gay customers at risk and threatening to bring down the bar that was quickly becoming a cornerstone of New York's gay nightlife.
By 1968, the Stonewall Inn had become central to the fabric of the LGBTQ community in New York.
But for Stonewall's mafia owners, the steady stream of business only meant one thing, profit.
With their rent hovering around $300 a month, the bar's owners were pulling in around $12,000 over an average weekend.
The police crackdown on gay bars throughout the 1960s had created a vacuum that the mob was eager to fill.
They found that the cops would look away for a price.
Like many other gay bars in the city, the Stonewall made regular cash payoffs to their local police precincts.
Chuck Shaheen, one of the men who helped the Genovese family open the club, would later confirm that these payments were made on a regular basis, saying, The police were very much on the payroll of the Stonewall.
Once a week, they would come by to collect.
There were two envelopes, because in those days there was an officer and that was his beat, and then someone in the precinct, usually the captain or the desk sergeant, would get an envelope.
Showing 221–240 of 14,913 · page 12 of 746
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