Anybody interested in the specific events of that night or in the history of gay and lesbian life before and since should head directly to the main branch of the New York Public Library, where a remarkable exhibition, "Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall," is in the Gottesman Exhibition HallÄespite the inclusion of artists like Charles Demuth, Reginald Marsh and Keith Haring, this isn't an art show at all, but a big, exhaustive display of thousands of cultural artifacts - photographs, books, letters, posters, banners, pamphlets and other ephemera - related to gay life in America from the end of the 19th century to the present.Ärawn from the library's International Gay Information Center Archives, "Becoming Visible" is the first major exhibition on its subject ever mounted, the library says. In an often-told story, the gay movement had its political beginnings on June 28, 1969, when the clientele of a Greenwich Village bar called the Stonewall Inn physically resisted police harassment for the first time.
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Yet even when overcrowded and wildly uneven in quality, the shows' wealth of individual voices demonstrates why the gay presence has so long been a catalytic force in this city's visual culture. Some of the shows are solo exhibitions most are large, ad hoc group gatherings that would have profited from judicious nips and tucks.
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The 25th anniversary of gay liberation this week has been ignored by New York's major art museums, but a few other public institutions and art galleries have picked up the slack with exhibitions on gay and lesbian themes.