What happened on the night of June 23, 1969? Why have the Stonewall riots transcended history to become myth? For many people, Stonewall crystallized the moment when homosexuals and gender-variant people as a group stopped being ashamed, stopped being afraid, and began to fight back—against police harassment, against bigotry, against anyone who would deny them their human rights. Many point to Stonewall as the day that pride was born—pride in being gay, pride in being different. But like a couple whose future conflicts could be predicted from their first date, Stonewall and its immediate aftermath presaged difficulties and divisions that would haunt the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) movement to this day.
Numerous accounts of the Stonewall riots have been published, but Martin Duberman’s book Stonewall is probably the best-known and the most respected. One of the activists whose story Duberman follows throughout the book is Sylvia Rivera, who was a nineteen-year-old drag queen in 1969. Rivera had lived on the streets since age eleven. Like Patricia Morgan, she had worked first as a boy prostitute and later in drag. In most accounts, Sylvia Rivera and the other street queens who hung around outside the bar played a crucial role in the riots. Some say that Rivera or one of the other queens threw the first rock at the cops who were attempting to hustle the Stonewall’s patrons into a paddy wagon, thus igniting the three days of intermittent rioting that followed. Others deny this—and in the debate over that single fact, thirty years of mistrust and suspicion are constellated. Who started Stonewall, and by extension GLBT liberation? Was it the queens or the gays? The gay men (and they were mostly men) being herded into the paddy wagon, or the crowd of drag queens who began to heckle the cops and eventually to pelt them with coins, stones, bottles, high-heeled shoes—and later to overturn cars and pull up parking meters? “Hand out the arms and ammo / We ‘re going to blast our way through here / We’ve got to get together sooner or later / Because the revolution’s here, and you know it’s right.” In the end, it may not matter who cast the first stone, only that the stone was cast and that it led first to an uprising and then to a movement. For a time, gays (male and female), drag queens, transsexuals, and other gender-variant people did indeed “come together” to ignite the revolution.
Karla Jay’s Tales of the Lavender Menace provides a vivid and compelling account of those early days, when everything seemed possible. Fueled by youth, idealism, and the sense that theirs was a righteous cause, the founders of the movement came together to plot the course of their revolution. Some came from the homophile movement, organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, founded in the fifties to try to improve the status of gays. Others came from the Left (both New and Old)—Marxists, Communists, and student radicals who carried the weapons of ideology and intellectual dissent. “Hopeful (but not certain) that something was going to happen after the Stonewall riots had subsided, I went to my first GLF [Gay Liberation Front] meeting at the end of July, which was probably the group’s second meeting,” Jay writes. “I had seen an ad for it in the East Village Other or RAT. At first I didn’t know what to make of this colorful, boisterous group. The chairs were pulled into a loose circle in which everything seemed to be spinning out of control. Everyone was shouting about what needed to be done without listening to what others had to say.” Karla Jay points out that the bulk of these gay revolutionaries were “young, white and unemployed. Most were students or recent college graduates like myself. But some of the participants were simply what radicals referred to as ‘street people’—generally lower- or lower-middle-class women and men without any prior political experiences, who came because they were incensed about the Stonewall riots or because they knew someone who had participated in them.”
Jay writes that she became close to two of the “transvestites” (her word) she met at Gay Liberation Front (GLF) meetings in the heady days after Stonewall—Sylvia Rivera and Rivera’s best friend, Marsha P. Johnson. “Sylvia Rivera, a Latina street queen, would hold forth at GLF meetings, gesticulating wildly and puncturing her own comments with Dietrich’s guttural laugh as she presented her views in forceful, if ungrammatical, New Yorkese. Her friend Marsha (sometimes Marcia) P. Johnson was a sassy and funny Black transvestite. Martin Duberman wrote in Stonewall that she once told a judge after she had been busted that the P stood for ‘Pay it no mind.’ The laughing judge demanded no bail.” Rivera and Johnson occupy prominent positions in transgender history and lore. Together they founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), in August 1969, providing shelter for homeless transgendered kids working as prostitutes. Rivera and, to a lesser extent, Johnson organized and fought ferociously for the rights of their sisters—a group that made fellow revolutionaries uncomfortable. “I had never met a real drag queen before,” Karla Jay admits in Tales of the Lavender Menace. “Redstockings and other feminist groups strongly believed that such men were an offensive parody of’real’ women—that is, those of us who were genetically female and sentenced to a life of oppression because of our gender. Such men could simply discard women’s clothing and reclaim male privilege. Feminists believed that transvestites caricatured the very worst kind of femininity by donning pounds of makeup and by wearing the very kind of clothing we were fighting to free ourselves from, especially short, tight, revealing skirts or dresses and stiletto heels.”
In Stonewall, Duberman quotes Arthur Bell, a founder, in December 1969, of the Gender Activists Alliance, about the response to Sylvia and other queens. “The general membership is frightened of Sylvia and thinks she’s a troublemaker. They’re frightened of street people.” Duberman attributes the fear and occasional hostility aroused by Rivera and the other street queens to their being on the “wrong side” of a number of ideological markers: “Sylvia was from the wrong ethnic group, from the wrong side of the tracks, wearing the wrong clothes—managing single-handedly and simultaneously to embody several frightening, overlapping categories of otherness. By her mere presence, she was likely to trespass against some encoded middle-class white script, and could count on being constantly patronized when not being summarily excluded.”