First of all, the story of Stonewall is very complex. There is a lot of different accounts of what happened and who was there.
Let’s begin with Marsha and Sylvia.
1) Marsha P. Johnson was a gay man/transvestite/self-identified drag queen.
“Johnson’s concept of her gender identity varied throughout her life. In the early 1970s, Johnson simultaneously identified as a “gay transvestite” and briefly considered surgical transition,[18] the latter of which she ultimately rejected, saying in an interview on June 26, 1992 (ten days before her death), “I’m a man.”[3]”
He was for transgender rights, that’s true, but he himself was not transgender or transsexual.
2) Sylvia Rivera is a bit more complicated. Sylva referred to herself as a gay man, a transvestite, and a pre-op transsexual. So she may or may not have been transsexual, but that is not for us to assume.
~ “My first lover taught me how to make love to another man, and in my youth I was always supposed to be the bottom. This is the way I thought a relationship was…an effeminate gay boy was solely to be the bottom. My lover was a butch-looking boy, very butch. Actually, no one even knew he was gay.
~ “People now want to call me a lesbian because I’m with Julia, and I say, “No. I’m just me. I’m not a lesbian.” I’m tired of being labeled. I don’t even like the label transgender. I’m tired of living with labels. I just want to be who I am. I am Sylvia Rivera. Ray Rivera left home at the age of 10 to become Sylvia. And that’s who I am.”
~ “What about the term “drag queen?” People in STAR prefer to use the term “transvestite.” Can you explain the difference?
A drag queen is one that usually goes to a ball, and that’s the only time she gets dressed up. Transvestites live in drag. A transsexual spends most of her life in drag. I never come out of drag to go anywhere. Everywhere I go I get all dressed up. A transvestite is still like a boy, very manly looking, a feminine boy. You wear drag here and there. When you’re a transsexual, you have hormone treatments and you’re on your way to a sex change, and you never come out of female clothes.
You’d be considered a pre-operative transsexual then? You don’t know when you’d be able to go through the sex change?
Oh, most likely this year. I’m planning to go to Sweden. I’m working very hard to go.
It’s cheaper there than it is at Johns Hopkins? It’s $300 for a change, but you’ve got to stay there a year.”
Very few drag queens were allowed into Stonewall and the bar was meant for gay men.
“Eric Marcus, Making Gay History
Actually, it was the first time I had been to the friggin’ Stonewall. The Stonewall wasn’t a bar for drag queens. Everybody keeps saying it was. The drag queen spot was the Washington Square Bar, at Third St. and Broadway. This is where I get into arguments with people. They say, “Oh, no, it was a drag-queen bar, it was a black bar.” No. Washington Square Bar was the drag-queen bar.If you were a drag queen, you could get into the Stonewall if they knew you. And only a certain number of drag queens were allowed into the Stonewall at that time.“
“Martin Duberman, Stonewall
Washington Square was Sylvia’s special favo[u]rite. It opened at three in the morning and catered primarily (rather than incidentally as was the case with Stonewall) to transvestites[.][…]If she was going out at all… she would go to Washington Square. She had never been crazy about Stonewall, she reminded Tammy: Men in makeup were tolerated there, but not exactly cherished.”
From Marsha: “Well, uh, at first it was just a gay men’s bar. And they didn’t allow no, uh, women in. And then they started allowing women in. And then they let the drag queens in. I was one of the first drag queens to go to that place. ‘Cause when we first heard about this… and then they had these drag queens workin’ there. They didn’t never arrested anybody at the Stonewall. All they did was line us up and tell us to get out.”
From Sylvia herself: “What people fail to realize is that the Stonewall was not a drag queen bar. It was a white male bar for middle-class males to pick up young boys of different races. Very few drag queens were allowed in there, because if they had allowed drag queens into the club, it would have brought the club down. That would have brought more problems to the club. It’s the way the Mafia thought, and so did the patrons. So the queens who were allowed in basically had inside connections. I used to go there to pick up drugs to take somewhere else. I had connections.”
Sylvia was said to not have even been at the Stonewall riots.
“Paul D. Cain: Where’s Sylvia Rivera? Duberman’s Stonewall placed her at the bar on the first night of the riots, yet your book makes absolutely no mention of her (although you do mention her buddy, Marsha P. Johnson). Do you think that, like so many others, she fabricated her remarks about being there?
David Carter: Yes, I am afraid that I could only conclude that Sylvia’s account of her being there on the first night was a fabrication. Randy Wicker told me that Marsha P. Johnson, his roommate, told him that Sylvia was not at the Stonewall Inn at the outbreak of the riots as she had fallen asleep in Bryant Park after taking heroin. (Marsha had gone up to Bryant Park, found her asleep, and woke her up to tell her about the riots.) Playwright and early gay activist Doric Wilson also independently told me that Marsha Johnson had told him that Sylvia was not at the Stonewall Riots.Sylvia also showed a real inconsistency in her accounts of the Stonewall Riots. In one account she claimed that the night the riots broke out was the first time that she had ever been at the Stonewall Inn; in another account she said that she had been there many times. In one account she said that she was there in drag; in another account she says that she was not in drag. She told Martin Duberman that she went to the Stonewall Inn the night the riots began to celebrate Marsha Johnson’s birthday, but Marsha was born in August, not June. I also did not find one credible witness who saw her there on the first night.”
“My late uncle Bob Kohler was a Stonewall veteran; he could never actually place either Sylvia or Marsha at the bar.”
“The eyewitness accounts in RAT (July 1969) specifically credits “one guy” (not a lesbian or a queen) for precipitating a scuffle by refusing to be put into the paddy wagon…. At least two people credit Sylvia herself with provoking the riot…. But I’ve found no corroboration for either account[,] and Sylvia herself, with a keener regard for the historical record, denies the accuracy of both versions. She does remember “throwing bricks and rocks and things” after the mêlée began, but takes no credit for initiating the confrontation.“
“The Ambrosini photo does not show a single transvestite. Craig Rodwell told researcher Michael Scherker that “one of the myths about Stonewall is it was all drag queens. I mean, drag queens are part of what went on. Certainly one of the most courageous, but there were maybe twelve drag queens. In thousands of people.”
“Randy: Marsha’s the only one, she’s the only one everyone agrees was at the Stonewall riots. There were a lot of other people, but everyone agrees that Marsha was there, so…
Marsha: The way I winded up being at Stonewall that night, I was having a party uptown. And we were all out there and Miss Sylvia Rivera and them were over in the park having a cocktail.”
Please note how it says transvestites - transvestite is defined as:
“a person, especially a male, who assumes the dress and manner usually associated with the opposite sex.”
“Eric: Now you mentioned an organization that Marsha, you were involved with. What was the name?
Marsha: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with Miss Sylvia Rivera.
Eric: What was that group about? What was it for?
Marsha: Ah, it was a group for transvestites.
Randy: It was a bunch of…
Marsha: Men and women transvestites…”
Pay It No Mind: Marsha P. Johnson
Randy Wicker Interviews Sylvia Rivera on the Pier
Stonewall Veterans Talk About the Night That Changed The World - Stonewall: Profiles of Pride
3) The person who started the riots was a black butch lesbian drag king named Stormé DeLarverie.
“Stormé DeLarverie (December 24, 1920 – May 24, 2014) was a butch lesbian whose scuffle with police, according to Storme herself and many eyewitnesses, was the defining moment that incited the Stonewall riots, spurring the crowd to action. “It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience–it wasn’t no damn riot.”[1]”
“Fed up with constant police harassment and social discrimination, angry patrons and neighborhood residents hung around outside of the bar rather than disperse, becoming increasingly agitated as the events unfolded and people were aggressively manhandled. At one point, an officer hit a lesbian over the head as he forced her into the paddy wagon — she shouted to onlookers to act, inciting the crowd to begin throw pennies, bottles, cobble stones, and other objects at the police.”
“Several spectators agreed that it was the action of a cross-dressing lesbian – possibly Stormé DeLarverie – which would change everyone’s attitude forever. DeLarverie denied that she was the catalyst, but her own recollection matched others’ descriptions of the defining moment. “The cop hit me and I hit him back,” DeLarverie explained [in Kaiser’s own interview with her on 1995.12.09].”
Remembering Stormé - The Woman Of Color Who Incited The Stonewall Revolution
However, there are some disagreements on this:
“Charles Kaiser suggested to the author that Stormé DeLarverie (see The Gay Metropolis: 1940–1996 [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997], p. 198) was this woman, but she could not have been. To cite only a few of the problems with this thesis, DeLarverie’s story is one of escaping the police, not of being taken into custody by them, and she has claimed that on that night she was outside the bar, “quiet, I didn’t say a word to anybody, I was just trying to see what was happening,” when a policeman, without provocation, hit her in the eye (“Stonewall 1969: A Symposium,” June 20, 1997, New York City). DeLarverie is also an African-American woman, and all the witnesses interviewed by the author describe the woman as Caucasian.”
4) You know that before Stonewall, there were LGB movements, right?
https://www.out.com/entertainment/popnography/2010/03/homo-history-emma-goldman.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LGBT_actions_in_the_United_States_prior_to_the_Stonewall_riots
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_on_Religion_and_the_Homosexual
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Clock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Human_Rights
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattachine_Society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Bilitis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Kameny
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Gittings
Just a few examples for you.
5) You should also recognize that Stonewall didn’t affect people outside America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific-Humanitarian_Committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterans_Benevolent_Association
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Federation_for_Lesbian,_Gay,_Bisexual_and_Transgender_Rights
You can deny history all you’d like, but it doesn’t change it.
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