Myths are how we organize our world and understand our place within it. What we think we know about Stonewall might be, at least in part, a myth. Unlike earlier important LGBTQ riots, such as the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot of 1966, in which only smaller segments of the community were involved, Stonewall gained world-historical significance because it was the first time we all fought back shoulder to shoulder. The real lesson of Stonewall is that it took a racially diverse group of street queens, butch drag kings, and gay men to rise up against systemic persecution together. The Stonewall Riots-or, as most veterans prefer to call them, the Stonewall Rebellion-were crucial precisely because they did not consist of one isolated person fighting back against police violence. These contemporary identity battles risk obscuring the more fundamental importance of Stonewall. In Honor of the People Who Have Bled for Our Desire Stonewall has become, in the words of preeminent LGBTQ historian Susan Styker, an arena in which “different identity groups go at each other, often quite vehemently, making historical claims that are ultimately objectively unverifiable, to wage contemporary struggles.” Related Article The conflicting accounts from Stonewall veterans, dismissive early media coverage, and the cultural outpouring (books, films) over the last 50 years, has led to significant LGBTQ infighting over ownership of the rebellion. Contemporary newspaper accounts-including The New York Times, The Village Voice, and the New York Daily News, were written with such sneering contempt that they are of little use in sifting fact from fiction. This heavy object may well be the only brick found in any of the early accounts of Stonewall, as street-based sex workers at the time often carried them inside their bags as a defense against violent clients.īoth individual and collective memory changes over time, and without photography or videos of the first night of the Stonewall Riots, it’s difficult to pin down surefire facts about the night gay power fought back against the police. Early rumors had it that when the police started rounding people up, Johnson yelled, “I got my civil rights,” and threw a shot glass into a mirror, shattering it-the now-iconic shot glass “heard ’round the world.” Another account has Marsha outside the bar, hanging off a street lamp, from where she dropped a handbag containing a heavy object onto the hood of a cop car. What we can say with some certainty is that black trans street queen Marsha P. Justice Ameer Gaines and Chrysanthemum Tran How Do You Create Community Out of a Rainbow of Difference? She may not have personally thrown the fabled first brick, but her hard work in the years immediately following Stonewall helped cement its place in history. Though she may not have been at the bar the night it all kicked off, Stonewall, as her friends Bebe Scarpianto and Rusty Moore wrote in her 2002 obituary in Transgender Tapestry magazine, “became the determining event of her life.” Rivera was a founding member of the activist groups that sprung up in the wake of the riots, including Gay Liberation Front, its splinter group Gay Activist Alliance, and her own group the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, through whom she worked with the Young Lords Party and got the approval of Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party. Cohen, author of The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York (2008), interviewed Rivera’s close friend of 30 years and fellow Stonewall veteran Bob Kohler who told him that Rivera had privately admitted to not having been involved in the riots. Johnson had no memory of Rivera being there that night. In fact, he learned through her close friend and employer Randy Wicker that Rivera’s best friend Marsha P. David Carter, author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (2004), could not find a single credible source that could verify Rivera’s involvement. Sylvia Rivera’s association with the police resistance at Stonewall could hardly be stronger in the public imagination, but recent scholarship suggests that she probably wasn’t there, at least not on the first night. Sometimes she claimed Molotov cocktails and bricks were thrown at police. Johnson’s birthday, though Johnson’s actual birthday was in August, not June. In another, she was already at the bar celebrating Marsha P. In one version, she was sleeping in a park when someone woke her up to tell her things were getting heated at Stonewall. And what of Sylvia Rivera? Rivera was notorious for embellishing her accounts of Stonewall, her story changing often dramatically between tellings.
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