![]() Stormé “rarely dwelled on her actions that night,” according to the New York Times, perhaps because her activist work didn’t end there. While it’s viewed as canonized fact when others have self-reported their - or other people’s - involvement in Stonewall, Stormé’s confession is reported as hearsay. While Stormé didn’t seek being canonized as single-handedly inciting the Stonewall Rebellion, her contributions are usually ignored or tokenized at the end of the list. “The cop hit me, and I hit him back,” she said. She was bleeding from the head when she brazenly turned to the crowd and hollered “WHY DON’T YOU DO SOMETHING?”” Julia Robertson writes for the Huffington Post, “Stormé DeLarverie was hit on the head with a billy club and handcuffed. If anyone was responsible for starting the Stonewall Rebellion, then it was Stormé DeLarverie. We should remember it without warping the narrative to fit a biased agenda. In saying that, we should remember the Stonewall Rebellion. The idea that Stonewall single-handedly sparked a gay revolution, or that Edie Windsor could have achieved what she did (alongside others) without past efforts of gay and lesbian resistance - including the ASTRONOMICAL work that lesbians of color have contributed - is very misguided. DOB created the first lesbian periodical to be nationally distributed in the U.S.: The Ladder. They held dances – which were illegal between members of the same sex, and fostered conversations about lesbianism that all women could engage with. Of course this struck fear into lesbians all over the world, but once the world got tired of paranoid, McCarthyist persecutions, lesbians rebuilt in a variety of ways.ĭaughters of Bilitis (DOB), which was founded in 1955, amidst McCarthyist witch hunts and police harassment, was started by lesbian couple Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, who wanted to make some lesbian friends. Like today, our bars and community hotspots depleted into near nonexistence. Nazis seeked to destroy lesbian communities and detain us in concentration camps. Lesbians like Radclyffe Hall, who wrote The Well of Loneliness (1928), inspired a growing network of out-lesbians who could find each other in covert ways. Modernist lesbians migrated from their hometowns to become a part of flourishing communities in freedom-seeking cities like Paris, prior to the Second World War. It is impossible to pinpoint when work towards gay rights started, but it wasn’t with Stonewall. It’s symptomatic of a broader issue: minimizing the work of women, specifically lesbians, and especially lesbians of color. It’s one thing to pretend like the Stonewall Rebellion “gave” us gay rights, but it’s made worse by excluding Stormé DeLarverie from the narrative. The gay rights movement in the second half of the twentieth century is no exception. A revolution occurs after long-existing tension between the oppressor and the oppressed. I disagree with David Carter’s assertion that the “Stonewall Riots sparked the Gay Revolution” in the first place. I can’t remember hearing about Stormé’s death. Edie, “whose landmark case let the Supreme Court to grant same-sex married couples federal recognition for the first time and rights to a host of federal benefits,” according to the New York Times, died only three years after Stormé did. White lesbians like Edie Windsor, who was a heroic lesbian in her own right, died amidst widespread grief. Many lesbians don’t wish to rock the boat and assert our place in the gay rights historical canon because we don’t want to be ostracized for it. I love my gay comrades, but the Black Lesbian Heroine isn’t a popular or agreeable narrative among the rainbow community. The narrative that excludes Stormé from the event that took place at 1:20 am on June 28, 1969, is a matter of misogyny, lesbophobia, and racism. ![]() “It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience- it wasn’t no damn riot,” she said. Stonewall Contentionĭavid Carter, author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution - who has supposedly completed “extensive research” on the matter - “never found any evidence to support the contention that Stormé DeLarverie was a participant in that event.” However, Stormé actually spoke about her involvement. However, Stormé spent the later years of her life alone in a nursing home with few visitors. ![]() Not only did she confess to throwing the first punch at the Stonewall Rebellion - that was aimed at a police officer - she was a bouncer who volunteered to patrol gay and lesbian streets, to look after her “baby girls.” She did this work up until her 80s. Stormé DeLarverie is one of the most important lesbian activists of the second half of the twentieth century. ![]()
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