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At the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, gay pride flows freely. Patrons file in casually, many oblivious to a time when expressing your sexual orientation could spell trouble, a time when same-sex slow dancing in a bar could very well lead to arrests.

"They would be standing on the corner of Greenwich Avenue in Christopher Street, which was called 'the corner' because it was the main social rendezvous spot for gay men," explained author/historian David Carter. "And a police man would come up to them and take out his billy club and whack them on the back of their legs and say 'move on, faggots.'"

To that end, gay and lesbian civil rights groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Belitis had been strategically working to end the harassment and oppression. But emotions could not be contained in the early morning hours of June 28th, 1969, when police had once again raided the Stonewall Inn, at the time a mafia run gay bar, operating without a liquor license.

The action set off a violent confrontation between police and patrons.

"People collected in the streets," said Carter. "They began to chant when they saw people being arrested and mistreated by the police, including a lesbian who put up a terrific fight against being arrested; the crowd went wild."

A community became galvanized and a mass movement was born, sparking off six days of rioting.

"It changed the tone immediately to a militant tone, to a in-your-face tone, to we are not going to apologize for ourselves, we are going to demand our rights now and demand them hard," Carter said.

"You had a mass of people quickly start new organizations, such as the Gay Liberation Front, who really can then marshal thousands of people to a political protest in a way that would have been unthinkable in the early 1960s, where you would be lucky if you could get 30 people," said New York Public Library exhibition curator Jason Baumann.

The fight continues today. After 40 years, there is not one federal civil rights law protecting LGBT citizens. In New York, the fate of a same-sex marriage bill hangs in the balance in a very fractured state Legislature.

Carter believes the community needs to look back to move forward.

"We need to take a leaf from Stonewall and from the gay liberation movement that came out of stonewall," he said. "They harassed politicians until they would give in and quit the oppression."

It's with this in mind that marchers will again take to Fifth Avenue this coming Sunday in a show of solidarity.