How a 1969 screening of an Andy Warhol film became the ‘Stonewall of the South’

To put it gently, Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys was never destined to become a classic of gay cinema.The artist’s take on the Western certainly didn’t captivate lesbian activist Abby Drue in its first 15 minutes, which is all she saw of it before police raided the fateful Atlanta screening she attended on August 5, 1969. She has more regret over never eating the rest of the ham and cheese sandwich she had smuggled into the theater. When the lights came on, her first thought was: Andy is so cheap, the film broke.But then Drue saw all the men leaping over the seats, trying to get outside, only to run into another set of cops entering through the Ansley Mall Mini-Cinema’s fire exit doors. The authorities began barking instructions: “Stop where you are! Do not move!”“And I’m holding a submarine sandwich,” Drue tells The Advocate, painting an unforgettable picture. “I have to admit, I was young, and I thought it was very funny.” The police, Drue recalls, lined up the filmgoers in rows, photographed them, and made arrests on the typical blend of nonsense charges used to target LGBTQ+ people for congregating in private establishments at the time, like lewdness or public indecency. Drue says the only “grass” she had on her at the time was the lettuce in her sub. She left the theater that night with a court date she never ended up having to attend. Her records were later expunged. Others weren’t so lucky.“When we walked out of the theater, it was outrageous seeing the guys being pushed and frisked,” she recalls. “It was horrible. They were just throwing all of them into the van.”Drue recalls that the bulk of the moviegoers — largely gay men, some of them not yet publicly out — ended up getting off with fines. “It was more of an intimidation,” she says. “People weren’t left in jail from it.” But if the police wanted to cow Atlanta’s queer community into submission, the raid backfired spectacularly. “It was the proverbial