This account will no doubt cause some distress for many, but I feel compelled to tell truths about Stonewall, instead of merely passing on myths.
Yes, mythologies are important and provide glue to establish and spread shared identities — identities so under fire at this moment. Yet our peoples and our true stories are so often glorious! We need to love those who built our shared legacies, even if it was unintentional. I wish I’d known just a smattering of this stuff as a baby dyke in the ’60s, when I twisted around miserably, thinking I should be doing … something? And no matter what that might be, I felt so clearly like I was the only one of whoever and whatever.
Thankfully, times have changed. There is now information and clear chances to jump into something grander than yourself. That presupposes queer kids still have access to materials, perhaps even a Target Pop-up Pride shop (the shop we patronized recently in Brunswick sits on the main traffic area in the store’s middle, and no one fluttered an eyelash at my rainbow-y purchases).
But can we expect baby queers to join something without accurate accounts detailing who we are, how we got here, how we might defend ourselves based on past experience, how there have been millennia of recorded history of same sex love? For example, in Egypt we find Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, the “Overseers of the Manicurists of the Palace of the King” (Pharaoh) nearly 4,500 years ago. Current archaeological evidence puts us even further back.
Those are facts. Here are more.
Myth: the Stonewall Rebellion was carried out solely by Black and Latin trans women.
Whose riots constituted the actual rebellion? If we look at the famous Fred W. McDarrah photographs taken on the second riot night, we see a preponderance of white “street rat” kids (“street rat” was the self-title many of the kids gave themselves, kids with essentially nothing and nowhere to go).
Were there Black and Latin participants? Of course. How many? We just don’t know. As per usual with an New York City raid, a larger percentage of people of color were arrested. After arraignment, using fake ID, most of them vanished like smoke. Did they return? Who can say? There are people who are unidentified throughout the photographs.
The Women’s House of Detention (since razed) was about 500 feet from Stonewall. It held women, dykes, femmes and trans men. The prisoners, mostly Black and Latin, were ecstatic about what they saw happening below, and responded by near-rioting in sympathy, smashing up things, burning possessions, setting fire to toilet paper rolls and other items and throwing them out the windows in solidarity with what was happening.
Myth: the neighbors complained and wanted Stonewall shut down.
Actually, there were few neighborhood complaints. More typical was the reaction of Shirley Evans, who lived in the Village with her two children. According to “The Stonewall Riots: The History and Legacy of the Protests that Helped Spark the Modern Gay Rights Movement,” “Up until the night of the police raid there was never any trouble there. The homosexuals minded their own business and never bothered a soul … It was just awful when the police came. It was like a swarm of hornets attacking a bunch of butterflies.”
Greenwich Village had a long history as a stubbornly independent place where queers, lefties, anti-war, anti-capitalist, pro-civil rights, and pro-freedom of thought people lived together. Many residents had no problem with queers, but they hated the cops, having run-ins and arrests at demonstrations, at meetings, while sitting on stoops, etc. When the riots began, people living closest went to check it out. When they saw the situation, many called friends and neighbors on the pay phones and urged them on. Thus a number of commie pinko straights participated.
Myth: Marsha P. Johnson threw the first brick.
Marsha said repeatedly on the record through the years that “I did not throw the first brick … I was uptown” as the scene unfolded, and she did not get to Stonewall until around 2 a.m. She then joined in, hurling bricks and bottles, even shimmying up a light pole and dropping a heavy chunk of concrete onto the top of a cop car, causing a cave-in.
Myth: Storme DeLarverie was the dyke who sparked the riots.
Storme, who had a long career as a drag king, was slim and of average height. Interestingly enough, she called herself the “guardian of the lesbians in The Village.” She actually patrolled the streets of Greenwich Village with a concealed rifle, making sure all the lesbians and street kids were safe. If she saw any “ugliness,” she’d shut it down immediately. She continued doing her rounds every night, even into her eighties.
The actual dyke who started the riots? She was short, stocky, young, and really fought the cops, beginning within the bar. A cop shoved her into a squad car, making the arrest. She extricated herself, began to run, and was captured again and more forcefully shoved into the car.
The crowd was decidedly not liking this and began focusing on her. A second escape meant brutal cop attention as one beat and dragged her, while she was yelling and getting body slammed to force her in. But somehow she managed to escape again, yelling and fighting.
The third time, the cops were viciously subduing her with nightsticks, blows and curses, and she started screaming at the crowd: “Why don’t you do something?” Their glowering and muttering transformed and hardened, for “she set the whole crowd wild, berserk!” according to “Stonewall — The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution” by David Carter.
People began to throw pennies at the cops, i.e., “coppers” (this is what you’re worth). And then there was a barrage of change, heavier objects followed, and this all provided oxygen to the fire burning in people’s breasts. Once this fire was fanned, it took days to put out.
The myth I really hate for probably not being true? My Puertorriqueña girl Sylvia Rivera spoke many times about what it felt to be at Stonewall then, how it was the revolution, and she wasn’t going to miss a minute of it. She often recounted that while she did not throw the first Molotov cocktail at the police, she did throw the second.
But I have lately learned that for a few years following the Rebellion, Marsha could be overheard admonishing her: “Girl you know you weren’t there.” Sylvia did provide somewhat conflicting reports during the immediate post-Stonewall years. She was a using addict and alcoholic, and it took many years before she sobered up.
So, who can best encompass the actual reality of Stonewall? No one person. But Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, a visual and tactile artist born in 1948, appears in the sole Friday night photograph, and recalls what Stonewall meant to him and other “street rats” in “The Stonewall Reader”:
“[I]t was like being in one of those worlds in a snow globe, because outside was death and murder … Many of us had gotten thrown out of home before finishing high school. WE WERE STREET RATS. Puerto Rican, Black, Northern and Southern whites, ‘Debby the Dyke,’ a Chinese Queen named ‘Jade East.’
WE ALL ENDED UP TOGETHER AT A PLACE CALLED STONEWALL. [And] Mother Stonewall was being violated. They forcibly entered her with nightsticks … the music box broken; the dancing stopped … [It] was a ghetto riot on home turf. The total charisma of a revolution in our CONSCIOUSNESS rising from the gutter to the gut to the heart and the mind was here … Our Mother Stonewall was giving birth to a new era, and we were the midwives.
THAT NIGHT the ‘Gutter [Street] Rats’ shone like the brightest gold! And like that baby found by Pharaoh’s daughter in a basket floating down the Nile, the mystery of history happened again in the least likely of places.”