Stonewall’s role in gay and lesbian identity has become so monumental, its very importance oppresses. There’s no sliding scale, only pre-Stonewall and post-Stonewall. The short version of the story goes something like this. Gay men and women were long oppressed until, one steamy June night in 1969, the fed-up denizens of a gay club on Christopher Street revolted against a police raid. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the gay-rights movement began.

The reality is a bit more complicated. The battle for gay rights has not been a simple, inexorable climb from marginalization to acceptance. Gay demimondes that had flourished in the 1930s in Harlem and Greenwich Village were suppressed in the 1950s.And a number of gay-rights organizations, such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, preceded Stonewall. Every social movement needs its symbol, its Rosa Park, its Berlin Wall. The mythologizing of Stonewall was perhaps inevitable. But in his new book, David Carter shows that many of the events that led up to it ought to be more clearly understood.

Often forgotten, for instance, is that the Stonewall riots occurred on three separate nights, not one. On Friday, June 28, a number of undercover cops raided the Stonewall Inn (this was a common, if not exactly legal, practice at the time). Some confluence of events – rabble-rousing drag queens; a lesbian patron screaming to the assembled crowd, “Why don’t you guys do something?”; the heat itself – led to the homosexuals retaliating.

The police, not prepared for such resistance from the formerly compliant group, retreated back into the bar. The crowd taunted and abused the police through the bar’s windows, gaining the upper hand, until reinforcements arrived and escorted the trapped policemen to safety. The next night, gays returned to the area and

began rioting again. After a few days of peace, a final conflict flared up the following Wednesday.

The irony of it all, as Mr. Carter elaborates, is that the police for once were not after the bar’s gay patrons: It was the club’s mafioso owners they wanted to bust.The mobsters were not only making money hand over fist serving watered-down drinks in unhygienic squalor to a clientele with few socializing alternatives. They also used the bar as a place to entrap and blackmail Wall Street bankers. In shutting down this racket, the police – though they still mistreated homosexuals and disregarded their legal rights – were indirectly trying to help the bar’s patrons.

A Villager himself, Mr. Carter establishes that the “queer geography” of Greenwich Village – particularly Stonewall’s location near Sheridan Square – allowed a large number of gay people to gather on the streets outside the bar. He points out that the particularly marginal quality of the Stonewall’s clientele – most weren’t polite opera-goers, but homeless youths, transgenders, drag queens, and “scare queens,” who could never pass as straight and had little to lose in rebelling – was critical to the riots’ success.

Mr. Carter also debunks the most virulent Stonewall myth: That the riots were precipitated by Judy Garland’s funeral earlier that same day. No firsthand accounts even so much as mentions Garland, says Mr. Carter.The only article at the time explicitly connecting the two events was written “by a heterosexual who sarcastically proposes the idea to ridicule gay people and the riots,” he notes.

The book’s centerpiece is Mr. Carter’s breathless retelling of the riots themselves, and some of the details are priceless. A Village Voice reporter, who stood on a garbage can for a better view, was upended when a rioter grabbed the can to throw at the club’s windows. Street youths formed a Rockettes-style chorus line and taunted the riot police with the chant, “We are the Stonewall girls / We wear our hair in curls / We wear no underwear / We show our pubic hair.”

Yet as impressive as Mr. Carter’s research is, his writing, filled with solecisms and sloppy thinking, isn’t always up to snuff. Too faithful to his sources, Mr. Carter often includes irrelevant quotes, interrupting his narrative with niggling counterpoints that would be better consigned to the footnotes. And the book’s middle chapters, in which Mr. Carter introduces various personalities, some of whom weren’t involved with the riots but simply were alive at the time and available for interview, are cliched and cartoonish in their “Valley of the Dolls” melodramatics.

The true value of the book lies in the chapters that follow Mr. Carter’s account of the riots, which contain a brief overview of the gay-liberation movement after Stonewall. The Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance formed, modeling their actions on the civil-rights movement (albeit with a distinctly humorous twist: one group handed out flyers following the riots, that asked, “Do You Think Homosexuals Are Revolting?”). On the first anniversary of Stonewall, the activists nervously commemorated the day with a march from Stonewall to Central Park, which has subsequently become the annual Gay Pride Parade.

While Mr.Carter dispels many myths surrounding Stonewall, the seeming contingency of the riots as he presents them – the fact that they just happened to happen – leaves the reader who wants to connect emotionally with the events feeling somewhat bereft of anything to grab onto. His less glamorous history of activism provides that.