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As we enter the Pride month I for one hope the community takes a moment to reflect back on all the effort put forth by gay men and women in the past to secure the freedom and acceptance we currently enjoy today. Fighting during a period in time where it was hazardous to one’s physical health to be on the forefront. Stonewall was not simply an activist protest where they went home afterwards and partied. They were beaten and dragged away to jail by the police. It was a time when fag bashing was an accepted method of controlling homos and keeping them out of the neighborhood. There were no drag queens there at all. It was gay human beings simply standing up for being who they were. Making a stand even though they fully knew the dangers of doing so. That’s true courage no different than that on a battlefield.
–Joseph DaBrow, Metroline (Late May, 2008, Connecticut, USA)
Some of the “broad us” at Stonewall were drag queens; some of the “broad us” at Stonewall were transgender and/or transsexual people (even if those words weren’t terms used to describe gender variant people at the time); and some of the “broad us” at Stonewall didn’t publicly identify as gay women, but as lesbians. It’s been well documented that the “broad us” of Stonewall protestors included a broad swath of LGBT people.
Joseph DaBrow’s commentary on Pride Month is an objectionable to those of us who are proud that it wasn’t only gay human beings simply standing up for being who they were, but instead know it was LGBT people standing up for who they were and who we are. 
As a term, gay isn’t always seen as inclusive of us all, and in this case gay isn’t an adequate descriptor of who was there at Stonewall.
So in this case, my peers a number of my Connecticut based peers and I are also making a stand: we will not stand by to be quietly homogenized away from the civil rights and social justice implications of Stonewall; we don’t accept being hidden behind a non-inclusive use of the term gay.
Frankly, it’s not in the best interest of those of us whose civil rights may depend on the language of gender identity and expression being included in civil rights legislation to accept when our members’ contributions to our broad community’s history are being in any way minimized or erased.
~~~~~
H/t: Connecticut TransAdvocacy Coalition
48 Comments
No drag queens?Of course there were drag queens. Why would this writer feel the need to specifically deny reality?
Sloppy journalism? Ineptitude?
Americans don’t know history, why should gay Americanm be different?
Stonewall Innforgot to add this link:
http://stonewall-place.com/
Stupid cissexist GLBs…Hey, the author of that is the managing editor of the paper!
His email is on the homepage btw. ^.~
This really makes me upset as Silvia Rivera has been one of my sheroes since I first read about her in the book Stonewall back in high school. I’m even hoping to change my middle name to Rivera in honor of her and her work. I hate it when cissexual GLBs try to erase the trans* communities’ from our own history; didn’t John Aravawhosis try to do that when we told him that we’d been a part of the “gay community” since the beginning?
And What About …You make an excellent point.
And let’s never forget the Compton Cafeteria Riot of San Francisco that happened long before Stonewall. Here the gender variant and transexuals and lesbians and gays stood up for their rights against police brutality on the West Coast and went to jail. And it was the transexuals that fought the hardest and led the way!
The Glade Memorial Methodist Church organized the political power that led to the Compton Cafeteria Riot. It is funny to think of that Methodist Church organizing among the powerless transexual prostitutes of San Francisco then and the General Conference passing initiatives of hatred now. but I never forget that before Stonewall, the transexuals of San Francisco were rioting against police power at the Compton Cafeteria Riot.
During the ENDA debatea major revisionist push seemed to appear. Writing tg’s out of Stonewall denied them their cliam upon the LGBT community at a time when many G/L’s were advocating dropping the T, holding thT’s responsible for United ENDA and ignoring the fact that many of those of us who are not T at all still supported an inclusive form.
No Sylvia Rivera, no legend of the “One True Shoe”(or molotiv) thrown to being the LGBT rights uprising
Just as the original mattachines condemned the uprising altogether, the neo-mattachine descendants now claim the uprising for themselves.
who are the two peopleyou have there in the b & w pics?
Marcia P Johnson and her partner, Sylvia Rivera.
I met Rivera’s later partner through a mutual friend a few years ago, a friend who worked with Rivera on a Street Trans activism project…
Just hover your mouse over themThe woman on the right is Silvia Rivera and the one on the left is her good friend Marsha P. Johnson.
maybe I should have been more specific:WHY are they pictured? What did they do? WHat were they about? WHat was their role at Stonewall? etc. etc.
Good Message LostHad the writer said, “there were no drag queens at Stonewall, no trannies, no fags, no dykes, no queers, no fruits – there were just people standing up for their right to exist, to be themselves” it would have been a really moving message. What a sadly missed opportunity.
The other problem with focusing so much on Stonewall, although it was clearly the very big straw that finally broke the camel’s back of discrimination for LGBT people, is that you end up ignoring the contributions of so many in the years before. Not just other times when we fought back, but events like the drag ball in the mid-60s in SF, when straight ministers and their wives got a chance to experience police opression of LGBT people and became some of the first real straight allies.
The A-Gays stayed home in 1969…and 1970…The people present at that dingy bar were working class stiffs, street queens, and the likes – people already ostracized, with less to risk. The people who made the first anniversary march were young idealistic types, often middle class, who had not accumulated enough to lose. It took a long time to get the A-gays involved – maybe 15 years – it took the AIDS crisis to move them.
Queerest of the QueerAs a 17-year-old cross-dresser was being led into the paddy wagon and got a shove from a cop, she fought back. “[She] hit the cop and was so stoned, she didn’t know what she was doing-or didn’t care,” one of her friends later told Martin Duberman, author of the history of Stonewall.
http://www.thestonewallinnnyc….
The debate rages, was it a cross dresser( I prefer the term cross burro) or a transgender or maybe a person wearing the only clean garment left in the house. One things for sure. It was a queer. And we want to raise the bar and say she was one of us, a transgender person(proudly waving our colors) the queerest of the queer!
One more thing is certain. HRC has employed a agenda to take our heritage and our current identity from us. That is why it is so very important to be proud of our past, our name and our future.
Rivera was in the barand either took the action that started the uprising or was one of two or three simultaneous actions that started the uprising.
She stuck a cocktail napkin into a bottle of Jack Daniels, lit it and threw it at the police who were attemting to beat the queer patrons into a paddy wagon.
A variant, charming but alas mythological version has her throwing a size 9 stilhetto pump to start the uprising, the “One True Shoe” whoch, like the One True Cross, has been sought after ever since as it may have magical powers.
Rivera was for some time the symbol of Gay Rights til more conservatile elements co-opted the movement in NYC and sidelined the T’s as a embarrassment and basically silenced the Lesbians.
Decades later and the politics remain the same…
The A-Gays condemned the uprisingThere were press releases fromt the Mattachines denouncing the uprising and distancing themselves from it.
Sylvia in her own words“I’m not missing a minute of this, it’s the revolution.”
Sylvia on Stonewall
“One of our main goals now is to destroy the Human Rights Campaign, because I’m tired of sitting on the back of the bumper. It’s not even the back of the bus anymore – it’s the back of the bumper. The bitch on wheels is back”
Sylvia on the HRC
“When things started getting more mainstream, it was like, ‘We don’t need you no more’.”
Sylvia on Post-Stonewall Activism…
And This Year’s Beren DeMotier Award Goes To…“There were no drag queens there at all.”
Whatever moron wrote that.
There’s a lot of room for historical analysis and debate about the nature/degree of trans participation at Stonewall – but not for conclusions that the facts conclusively negate.
Metroline?
More like Metrowhine.
Kat
The T-Girls danced, taunted the cops and chanted:We are the Stonewall Girls
We wear our hair in curls
We wear no underwear
We show our pubic hair
We wear our dungarees
Above our nelly knees
Not that much of a stretch…Transgender people escaped unscathed at the general Conference, but not for lack of effort by those who wished us harm. They just could not find enough biblical justification to do it. I am sure they will be back.
I have become closely associated with the Methodist group, Reconciling Ministries which is GLBT and allied people seeking to make the church whole. They are fighting the good fight. It would be right for transgender people to stand with the greater LGB community and stand up and be counted.
The Methodist struggle to be inclusive is Strong, alive and very real.
http://www.rmnetwork.org/
I usually put links on pics……So for this picture of Sylvia Rivera, if you select her it you’ll go to a page that talks about her part in the Stonewall riots. If you select this picture above of Marsha P. Johnson, you’ll go to her Remembering Project page, where you’ll learn that she was at Stonewall, and you’ll learn that she was later murdered — her murder going unsolved.
yepSilvia started or helped several queer and trans* activist groups, everything from the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) to the Gay Liberation Front.
Silvia is in incredibly important figure in trans* and queer history and an awesome role model.
It’s excellent Autumn, but…please use the term Stonewall Uprising , if you will. This was an uprising of an oppressed people, people who held the streets for five nights against a tactical team trained and equiped to disperse anti-war rioters.
The radicals, those who the conserva-queers of the era did not even acknowledge as their own, rose up and cried out with one voice “no more” to officially endorsed physical oppression by a government. Rioters usually vent anger, the participants in the Stonewall Uprising were defying the authority of a government to oppress them.
Most of the A-gays were in the closet and didn’t even participate in Mattachine, let alone Stonewall or following events.
We have a big problem Dallas Voice on the conference
http://www.dallasvoice.com/art…
Sometimes I feel remiss in not saying enough about this stuggle. It humbles me. It makes me value my friendships and my church.
Sounds like:John Aravosis, Joe Solmonese, Barney Frank and Bill O’Reilly… Why Bill-O? Because he also lacked the guts to actually fight but now claims he’s a combat veteran. These four are all cut from the same cloth and molded into the same twisted shape.
Got it.Will remember “uprising” for future posts
In California, we had the Compton Cafeteria Riot, so I’m always thinking in terms of “riot.” My apologies.
No problem, AutumnI just think that we need to keep the significance of an uprising by all of out LGBT people against official oppression by a government highlighted.
I sent him this e-mail
Hopefully,If he replies could you give a summary of what he says?
I’d never thought of that…They all are the gay version of neo-con chickenhawks! Wow!
Certainly I’ll share……but I encourage you (and any other reader-you) to write your own letters, too. It will especially help if gays, lesbians and bisexuals also call him to task; not only and exclusively the gender variant.
letter from a lebeezunhere’s what i wrote to mr. debrow.
Abercrozombie Bitches…trying to deracinate and suburbanise the entire gay community away from the ‘freaks’.
More of the same…I’m not sure whether going mainstream encouraged the assimilationist “gay-rights” groups to become “middle-class white conservative-to-centrist cis-gendered gender-conformist white gay males’-rights” groups or whether the sexism/racism/classism/genderism allowed those groups to go mainstream in the first place…but either way, I’m consistently disappointed.
Forty Years and Nothing Has ChangedOn the web-site “Queers Without Borders” they have a film clip from KQED series titled “The Question of Equality” showing Sylvia Rivera on stage at NYC Pride 1973.
http://queerswithoutborders.co…
Excellent letterLurleen–will you post his reply, if you get one?
I wanted to write to this guy yesterday, Oh fellow Blenderites, but we had lost power after a mammoth thunder storm on Saturday and were just getting it back yesterday.
It has always been there..but I have never seen it so prevalent as it is right now. Many blogs I used to enjoy have been taken over by it. I blame the recent popularity on a confluence of Frank’s ENDA, the MSM, and white myopic ghettoized writers/editors who have thrived on a post-gay trend in gay media; they have theirs and don’t want to know if anyone else is suffering.
And when they hear about the suffering of others, it makes them embarrassed and angry because they want to forget. And the anger gets directed at other LGBT victims. They discover that they love the novelty of feeling “normal”, and now that it is more possible than ever to create that illusion of complete acceptance around themselves, (by selling out T-folk, denying the feminine in themselves and their brothers, and overlooking/accepting/contributing to the dominant media trend that rewards and flatters 18-35yo straight white men with endless “isms” for them to laugh at in cynical pseudo-libertarian recognition of their wrongness–while still bathing in the stereotypes,) they are only too willing to comply with a moderate and ignorant semi-closet at the feet of the DNC in order to get it.
“I don’t care about all this gay rights crap, I’m concerned about the same things as everyone else; lower gas prices!” (Can’t you do both? Or are you too busy proving what a normal guy you are? Or is it cowardice, because it is no longer “cool” to recognize that you are oppressed, regardless of whether or not you choose to have a victim mentality?)
They feel that anyone who can’t achieve their level of acceptance must be doing something wrong and deserves scorn. It is very tempting to equate it with “Uncle Tom” behavior.
And yes, as a 30-something white gay man who has always snickered at the “A-gay” set, (I hate that term, it is validating,) it is profoundly disappointing.
I realize we all have to move beyond the rote clichés and epigrams of our youth, (which the right has currently retooled as “liberal fascism”, which these gays buy into wholesale,) but that isn’t an acceptable excuse for throwing out the positive values behind them in favor of divisiveness and (self)hatred.
When I was young, there was nothing worse you could be than an assimilationist. While that sentiment is naturally going to decline (along with many other old gay-culture habits,) as acceptance (legal and otherwise) grows, it is so sad to see so many selling out so quickly when we aren’t even half-way there yet. And not just selling out, but overnight co-opting the violent rejection of the dominant culture towards those they once stood right next to.
StonewallDo they still serve $3 Frozen Cosmos? YUM! I miss my hometown
Anyway, if it wasn’t for the Trans community I think the Stonewall “Riot” would have had a very different outcome/history. Sadly, organizations like HRC and others keep throwing them under the bus. It ain’t right. It’s extremely selfish too.
Quotes of The Clueless“I strongly believe he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program.”
- George Dumb-Ya Bush
“My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” -Vice President Dick Cheney
“There were no drag queens there at all. It was gay human beings simply standing up for being who they were.”
- Joseph DaBrow
Mr. DaBrow, you’re an Idiot!
Uprising!My first editor at St. Martin’s Press, the famed Michael Denneny, always said that Boys in the Band was a pre-revolutionary film, just at the boiling point, and Stonewall was the beginning of the revolution. If you watch BITB again, you’ll see what he meant.
Mainstreaming gaysWe’ve seen something similar for years as gays complain either about leather dudes in pride parades or “overly queeny” types. If only they weren’t so whatever they are, we would be more accepted. But it wouldn’t matter if they all stopped parading, because the issues are societal and psychological. Our discomfort is our own shame directed outward onto somebody gay we can feel superior to and blame for whatever seems to be wrong. We’ve internalized that shame to our detriment.
And while I got married and support marriage as a revolutionary act (ain’t that a kick in the head?), the big danger is that as it becomes more widespread, it might encourage some gays to look down at those who aren’t, or are and have open marriages or in some way don’t fit the “model.”
I mentioned Boys in the Band above; when you watch it now, forty years later, it’s hard not to see the flamboyant Emory at one level as a revolutionary, incredibly in-your-face and intransigent about being himself no matter what the cost.
DaBrow Was Not AloneTake a peek at this bit from another item from that same issue ( http://www.metroline-online.co… )entitled “…and What Doesn’t Make Us Proud”:
To be fair, the author of this item, Matt Surface (no comment on my part), does also slam corporate sponsorship/co-opting of Pride. Kudos for that, but…
VERY EMBARRASSEDAs a 45 year old gay man, I am very embarrassed that OUR community has tried to push Transgendered people out and say that you are not one of us. As victims of the repression this world tries to throw at us, transgendered are the most frequented targets of hate. For our own community leaders (if that’s what you call groups like HRC)to try and lesson your role or your signifigance on our community is just shameful. For all us gay men and lesbians out here that feel the same way I do, let me say I am sorry. I am one of those that would rather not have protections enacted by congress that do not include all my brothers and sisters!!!
Keep fightng and keep speaking up!!!
Let’s all repeat the non-conformist’s oath.The push to conform irritates me. And I’ve seen both extremes. There are some people that believe we shouldn’t be fighting for marriage equality because it is just conforming to a heterosexist system. But the more prominent side is the group that cries, “I’m a straight-laced normal guy next door, just like you! Those freaks? Oh, I don’t know them, they are not part of OUR group. Can we have equal rights now?”
I find the whole thing counter productive to the message of treat every one with equal respect and dignity for who they are. At one Pride event I actually heard someone say “You know, we’d be a lot further along in our rights if it weren’t for those drag queens, they make us look bad.” And the person beside him pointed out, “If it weren’t for ‘those drag queens’ we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
I don’t know if it is our own shame, or if it is something else, but it is disheartening to see someone removing an element, and to me an improtant one, from the history of the LGBT rights movement in the same manner that the history lessons I got in school was sanitized to remove LGBT people.
Thanks! I know not all gay men are represented by the likes of the trans phobes listed above. I submit that they are working counter to their own best interests. I am far, FAR less likely to support their right to wed when they actively work to marginalize and (in Aravosis’ case), silence me. Fortunately one of us is a bigger person than that. I just wish that when we do acheive equality we could exempt a few of these mouth warriors….
Of course it’s shameWe are riven by it. Still. Despite the endless Pride Parades (and think of it–why stage one in the first place?):
http://www.amazon.com/Coming-O…
I remember hearing some so-called pro-gay advocate saying, Well if gay people make commitments to monogamous marriages, and I’ve heard gay people mouth this, too. As if that’s a requirement for marriage? As if all straight people are monogamous for every day of every year of their marriages?
While I still marvel at how getting married if you’re gay can be an act of defiance, I think the “we’re just like you” cry is overdone. We’re not. We’re a minority. We have different viewpoints based on our minority experience, and we’re also not monolithic.
You just don’t realize who all… are trying to pump money out of me and I'm not on a Pension with medical benefits or Medicare or Medicaid and I don’t have insurance! Some of us don't have a steady job after being fired for transitioning on the job and losing a 53,000 dollar job they had been on for two years, licensed by the Homeland Security. Mayby this would help some to understand my bitterness of those who claim transgender but yet they still live in the closet and with male priveledge and male income to boot. And in a whisper:(they want to use the womens restroom right next to me, a full time transsexual, and the 12 year old girl that just walked in.)
And they won’t support you on the job, because someone might call them a queer, so they look the other way, and hide, all the while watching you take shit on a daily basis. Will they stand up for you? No, they won’t cause they don’t want to be called a faggot and they don’t care if you lose your job, as long as they don’t lose theirs. And this goes for the closeted gay males too. At least they should have balls enough.
By the way, there were no transgenders at either Compton or Stonewall. The term didn’t exist at the time. It originated with Virginia Prince, who is loved and loathed. She’s the one who split the “T”, not I.
G’day
Homogenizing Transsexuals that HRC and the GLB have done to transfolks, Virginia Prince, teh transgenderists have done to the transsexual, marginalized us, homogenized us into a Transgender movement and defination, which is an oxymoron, and blurred our existence completly. So turn your finger around and point it at yourselves, transgenders, for you are guilty of the same, Homogenizing Transsexuals.
Not all of usare erasing the trans community, Drakyn.
This feminist Lesbian is a T supporter…