The only clues that there’s something different about the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York, are the pictures on the wall. They are of protesters in the late Sixties and in one of them there is the bar, marked by a huge sign with people looking glittery eyed and elated.

A framed newspaper cutting from the Seventies describes how it was here, in 1969, that the Stonewall riots took place. “Riots,” say veterans of the era, is putting it a little strongly; “rebellion,” one told me, was nearer to the truth.

But, undisputed, this is the bare history: back then the Stonewall was Mafia-run. The police busted it — nothing unusual in that, Mafia-run gay bars were always being busted.

But this night the regulars — and in those days the regulars weren’t nice bankers having a swift beer on their way home, but drag queens and hustlers — fought back, fed up with police harassment.

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The rebellion, or riot, lasted four nights — and the modern gay rights movement was born. A year later came the first Gay Pride in New York (in the UK, the Gay Liberation Front was founded).

The Stonewall became iconic only later, and returned to being a gay bar about 16 years ago. Now it attracts visitors from all over the world; while the regulars keep a sentry line in the stools down the long bar.

Forty years on, gay life has moved on from Christopher Street, where the Stonewall is situated. The area still has bars and clubs and a lingering counter-cultural vibe, but it is also smart: the Magnolia Bakery, purveyors of fancy cupcakes as seen in Sex and the City, is near by. Last year, the area lost the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, New York’s only dedicated lesbian and gay bookstore.

New York doesn’t have a gay locus, although Chelsea is a hotspot; the Lower East Side, Hell’s Kitchen and Brooklyn have budding scenes, too. The surprise is that big dance clubs are dying out, says Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out magazine.

The end of dancing? What on earth are New York’s homosexuals doing — needlework, consciousness-raising? Certainly the streets of Chelsea (Eighth Avenue between 14th and 23rd is essentially a runway of cruising and eye-twinkling) are filled with big men walking stylish dogs, so maybe pooches are the dancing-displacement activity.

Less than 20 years ago, and not so far away, “the Piers” in Chelsea was the city’s premier open-air sex spot. Now the area has been relentlessly gentrified and where the Piers once teemed with seamy activity is an area of cheery, swept-clean riverside.

The first stretch of the High Line, New York’s new elevated walkway, with the sexiest sun loungers on the planet, opened this month.

The internet, with its promise of easy sex and new friends only a click away, changed the gay scene for ever.

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