Culture
A Gay Icon Remembers Life in the Village, and in the Village People
Fifty years after Stonewall, Felipe Rose—“The Indian” from the Village People—remembers New York City’s Greenwich Village as the gay rights movement took hold.
Felipe Rose was just beginning high school in New York City when the Stonewall resistance kicked off in 1969.
A native New Yorker, he was living in Coney Island with his mother, and often took the subway with friends to hang out in Greenwich Village. In 1969, as he watched the riots unfold on television over five days, his mother told him, “I don’t want you to go there anymore.”