Stonewall: The Legacy

Today’s the day, everyone! Fifty years since the first night of the Stonewall uprising! Deciding what to write today was difficult, but I finally decided…. this is a pretty momentous occasion, especially for a queer history web site. So I’m going to talk about what sets Stonewall apart, and what lessons we learned 50 years ago that we can still be carrying with us today.

People always like to say that Stonewall was the start of the gay rights movement but if you’ve been following us for a while, you know that’s not strictly true. There had been organizations like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis fighting for gay rights for decades. We’d already had riots like Compton’s Cafeteria, the Black Cat Riot, and Cooper’s Do-nuts, we’d already had protests like the Annual Reminders and the Dewey’s Sit-In. The gay rights movement was pretty well in effect by 1969.

So what made Stonewall so important? Why is that the moment that changed everything? Because that’s the first time we stood up against the people oppressing us together. The LGBTQIA+ community, even now, is rife with division and it was then too. The divisions were different, but they were there. The community was broken up into the “butch” gays — the “respectable” straight-passing men who could blend into mainstream society; the queens — basically any more effeminate gay men could fit into this group which was also divided up by drag queens, transvestites (who, now, we’d mostly call transgender women), street queens, and “scare queens.” There were similar divisions between lesbians — butch and femme, passing or not. And in all of those groups, of course, there was a division between the white people and the people of color.

But on June 28, 1969 none of those divisions in the queer community mattered. The divisions were still there, but it didn’t matter. We had each other’s back. Stonewall was mostly full of butch gays — and mostly white gays at that, and the police were letting most people who weren’t in the “wrong clothes for their sex” go free — but they didn’t leave, they stayed outside and watched and drew in a crowd. The street queens weren’t in the bar at all, they would have been fine — but they were the ones who started fighting back. Because — for maybe the first time ever — it wasn’t only about self-preservation. And for five nights of rioting, we all had each other’s backs. That’s what changed — that’s why we’re able to look at Stonewall as the beginning of something.

To me, that’s why Stonewall was so powerful and important. It showed that, as long as we are looking out for each other and working together, that there’s nothing we can’t accomplish.

We’re not yet at the bright future every single one of the heroes of Stonewall we’ve talked about this month — and all of the ones we haven’t talked about yet — had envisioned for us. But I can promise, that is how we’ll get there. Working together, as a community.

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I know this was like hokey and sappy or whatever, but it’s over now. Go celebrate!

Heroes of Stonewall: Marsha P. Johnson

Although she regularly said her middle initial stood for “Pay it no mind”, Marsha P. Johnson proved to be a difficult person not to notice. Though Johnson is commonly referred to using female pronouns (she/her/hers) — and I’ll be doing that here — her actual gender identity is a bit of a mystery. She variously described herself as gay, a transvestite, and as a (drag) queen — though words like “transgender” really weren’t being widely used yet during her lifetime. My personal opinion is that she would probably identify as gender non-conforming or non-binary, but make your own judgments.

Johnson was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey on August 24, 1945 — one of seven children — and was named Malcolm Michaels Jr by her parents, Malcolm Michaels Sr and Alberta Claiborne. They were not, from all accounts, a particularly open-minded family and Claiborne was said to believe that being a homosexual was like being “lower than dog.” Johnson was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and remained a devout, practicing Christian for her entire life.

At the age of five, Johnson began to wear dresses — but stopped because she was harassed and teased by neighborhood boys. Some time during this period, Johnson was sexually assaulted by a boy who was roughly the age of 13. In 1963, Johnson graduated from Edison High School and promptly moved to New York City with $15 and a bag of clothing. By 1966, she was waiting tables, engaging in sex work, and living on the streets of the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan.

She also began to perform as a drag queen — initially going by the name “Black Marsha” before settling on Marsha P. Johnson. She was often recognizable for having flowers in her hair — something she began doing after sleeping under flower sorting tables in Manhattan’s Flower District. She usually had on bright colored wigs, shiny dresses, and long flowing robes. Marsha was known to be peaceful and fun, but there was a violent and short-tempered side to her personality (which her friends commonly called “Malcolm”) — leading some to suspect that she suffered from schizophrenia. Between her sex work and her occasional violent outbursts, Johnson claimed to have been arrested more than a hundred times.

When the Stonewall Inn began to permit women and drag queens inside, Johnson was one of the first to begin regularly visiting the bar. Some witnesses have even credited her with starting off the riots in 1969. Although this claim has certainly gained traction and become the popular version of events, she likely was not the woman who sparked off the Stonewall Riots by throwing the legendary “first brick” — this was also rumored, and was perhaps more likely to be Jackie Hormona or Zazu Nova by eyewitnesses — Johnson did have one particularly iconic, though unconfirmed, moment in the riots. She is said to have shouted “I got my civil rights!” and thrown a shot glass at a mirror. ( Some said this — the “shot glass heard round the world” — was the moment that started the riots, but Johnson herself disputed this. According to Johnson, word of the riots reached her and she immediately went to collect her friend Sylvia Rivera so they could join in — but Rivera was sleeping on a bench. According to Johnson, she arrived at about 2:00 am, forty minutes after the riots began. (I guess word traveled fast!) There are many reports that on the second night of rioting, Johnson climbed up a street lamp with a purse that was loaded down with a brick — which she dropped through the windshield of a police car. Though there’s a lot of stories about those riots, and a lot of confusion about the details it is very clear that Johnson was there and made a noticeable impact.

Although she’d been an activist before, Johnson became a real leader in the LGBT movements that followed the riots. In 1970, she and Sylvia Rivera founded the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR) — an organization that provided community support for transgender youth. She also joined the Gay Liberation Front and participated in the Christopher Street Liberation Pride rally that commemorated the first anniversary of Stonewall (and was, essentially, the creation of the Pride festivals we celebrate.) At one rally in the early 70’s, Johnson was asked by a member of the press what they were protesting for –Johnson shouted into the reporter’s microphone “Darling, I want my gay rights now!”

Johnson once said, “I was no one, nobody, from Nowheresville until I became a drag queen. That’s what made me in New York, that’s what made me in New Jersey, that’s what made me in the world.” In 1972, she began to perform periodically with the international drag troupe Hot Peaches. She was also continuing to work as a sex worker, taking the money she (and Rivera) earned from that business to help pay the rent for the housing for transgender youth that STAR had established that year. Johnson also took on an active role mentoring all of the youth in their care, becoming a “drag mother” even to those who were not performers. Although STAR declined and closed in 1973, it was a groundbreaking organization and the shelter that it provided queer youth was truly revolutionary.

In 1973, Johnson also performed with the Angels of Light drag troupe — taking on the role of “The Gypsy Queen” in their production of “The Enchanted Miracle”. That same year both Johnson and Rivera were banned from participating in New York’s gay pride parade — the committee organizing the parade felt that drag queens and transvestites brought negative attention and gave the cause “a bad name.” In response, Rivera and Johnson marched ahead of the beginning of the parade.

In 1975, Andy Warhol took pictures of Johnson for his “Ladies and Gentlemen” series. Johnson’s success as an activist and a performer, as well as her regular appearances throughout the decade, earned her the nickname “Mayor of Christopher Street.”

By 1979, Johnson’s mental health was beginning to decline quite severely. Her aggressive side was coming out more often, and a Village Voice article called “The Drag of Politics” listed all of the Manhattan gay bars from which Johnson had been banned. In 1980, a friend named Randy Wicker invited Johnson to stay with him for a particularly cold night and the two remained roommates for the rest of Johnson’s life. This was — as far as I can tell — the first time Johnson had a permanent address since moving to New York in 1963.

In the 1980’s, Johnson began to work with ACT UP as an organizer and marshal, and was a prolific AIDS activist. She made this her primary focus for the last few years of her life. On July 6, 1992 — just after that years New York Pride festivities — she was found dead in the Hudson River with a large wound in the back of her head. The police ruled her death a suicide — despite pressure from the community and the fact that she had a wound in the back of her head. One witness had spoken of Johnson’s fragile mental health to the police — which was all the police, who had no interest in investigating a black queer person’s death, needed despite witness testimonies also describing Johnson being harassed by a gang. Another witness claimed to have heard a man brag about killing a drag queen named Marsha. The police did allow Seventh Avenue to be closed so that Johnson’s friends could spread her ashes out over the river.

In 2012, an activist named Mariah Lopez was finally successful in convincing the police to re-open Johnson’s case and investigate it as a homicide. That was also the year that the first documentary about Johnson was released: Pay It No Mind — The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson. This documentary included footage from an interview that had been filmed only ten days before Johnson’s death. Fictionalized versions of Johnson also appeared in the films Stonewall (released in 2015) and Happy Birthday Marsha! (released in 2016.) In 2017, another documentary was released — The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson — which followed the Anti-Violence Project’s Victoria Cruz investigating Johnson’s death on her own. Despite all of these tributes, it wasn’t until 2018 that the New York Times published an obituary for her.

Johnson — with her friend Sylvia Rivera — will be honored with a monument in Greenwich Village, near Stonewall. This is perhaps most fitting for Johnson, since she was quite insistent about moving the Stonewall monument from Ohio to Christopher Street in New York City in 1992 — famously saying “How many people have died for these two little statues to be put in the park to recognize gay people? How many years does it take for people to see that we’re all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race? I mean how many years does it take for people to see that we’re all in this rat race together?”

Johnson may not have “thrown the first brick” at Stonewall, but she led the fight for LGBTQ+ equality in every other way. Randy Wicker said of Johnson that she “rose above being a man or a woman, rose above being black or white, rose above being straight or gay”, while Rupaul described her as “the true Drag Mother.”

So, while we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, let’s all pay plenty of mind to Marsha P. Johnson — and to the other heroes who stood up that day and said “Darling, I want my gay rights now!”

Upstairs Lounge Fire

June 24 marks a very somber day in the history of LGBTQ+ Americans — it is the anniversary of the Upstairs Lounge fire, an arson attack that occurred in 1973 and which was the deadliest attack on a U.S. gay bar until 2016.

The Upstairs Lounge was on the second floor of the three story building at 141 Chartres Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It was the final night of Pride weekend and, at the time of the attack, some 60 people were still inside the Upstairs Lounge listening to the piano music of David Gary at an event hosted by the Metropolitan Community Church.

At 7:56 pm, the buzzer on the front door went off. Luther Boggs went to answer the door, only to find the front stairwell completely aflame. Buddy Ramussen, an Air Force veteran and the bartender there that night, led twenty people out the back exit to the roof of a neighboring building where they could escape. However, somehow, their escape route locked behind them trapping everyone else inside. A handful tried to escape by squeezing out of the barred windows. MCC Reverend Bill Larson died clinging to those bars, and his body was visible from the street below for hours afterwards. The MCC’s assistant pastor Duane George “Mitch” Mitchell had escaped, but returned to try to rescue his boyfriend Louis Horace Broussard — they died holding onto each other.

Firefighters had difficulty reaching the scene because of pedestrians and car traffic. One fire truck crashed into a taxi. Once they arrived, they quickly brought the fire under control quickly. 28 people died in the fire, one died enroute to the hospital, and three more died later due to injuries sustained in the blaze. Fifteen were injured but survived.

The only suspect in the arson attack was a man named Rodger Dale Nunez, who had been kicked out of the bar earlier in the night for fighting with a customer. A witness claimed to have seen him in the area of the bar twenty minutes before the fire, but police determined that the witness was unreliable. Nunez also suffered from mental illness, and was placed in psychiatric custody after his arrest. He escaped, however, and was never picked up by police again despite being quite visible in the French Quarter. A friend later told investigators that Nunez confessed to the arson at least four times, before taking his own life in November of 1974.

Despite the magnitude of the attack, it was all but ignored. The media made no mention of the LGBT status of the victims, and neither the city nor state government ever made a statement on the attack — despite having declared days of mourning for smaller tragedies. Worse still, the victims — and many of the survivors — had been outed. Churches refused to have funerals, some of the survivors lost their jobs. Some of the victims’ families refused to claim the bodies. On June 25, Father Bill Richardson of St. George’s Episcopal Church held a small, private prayer service for the victims — he was the only member of the city’s clergy who was willing to do so.  80 people attended the service, and he received over 100 complaints about it from parishioners and was officially rebuked by his superior in the church.

On July 1, MCC founder Troy Perry — who flew from L.A. — held a memorial service for the victims. Reporters waited outside, eager to expose the grieving and mostly closeted members LGBTQ+ community of New Orleans to the public. Although a side exit was offered, none took that option. Every person who attended the service exited together in a show of solidarity. In 2003, the city of New Orleans installed a (small) plaque in the sidewalk at the location of the fire to memorialize the victims.

Three of those victims — white males — were never identified. The burial costs of these three were paid for anonymously, and they were buried along with Ferris LeBlanc in a mass grave in a cemetery reserved for the poor. LeBlanc’s immediate family only learned of his death in 2015. The cemetery he is buried in is massive and unkept and there is not a map, so his family has yet to see his grave.

(Adapted from this Facebook post.)

1st Rhode Island Pride

As I’ve mentioned before, being from Rhode Island the local LGBTQ+ history here is something I’m particularly passionate about. It’s amazing to see firsthand where this journey’s taken us and get to be a part of where this journey is going at the same time. Of all the Prides that I’ve gone to, Rhode Island Pride is my clear favorite, bar none. Maybe I’m biased because it’s my home and it’s my fabulously queer chosen family celebrating. But to be fair, we’ve been called one of the best Prides in the world too. (That was a shameless plug and I’m not even sorry about it.)

These days, Rhode Island is pretty supportive of its LGBTQ+ community — Providence City Hall proudly announces the start of Pride season for the state of Rhode Island, and political leaders like Mayor Jorge Elorza speak at the event each year. But to get to the point (and the history), we have had to come a long way since our first Pride in 1976.

Nowhere in the country was particularly welcoming to LGBTQ+ people by 1976, and Rhode Island was not an exception. Sodomy was still against the law Federally and in the state — let alone any other rights that we’ve fought for since. And yet, the LGBTQ+ community of the state of Rhode Island wanted to march to recognize their contributions to the state in the previous 200 years. Other communities, like the Portuguese community, had arranged parades for the bicentennial. Reverend Joe Gilbert of the Metropolitan Community Church saw no reason the LGBT community could not also participate in these celebrations.

However, Mayor Buddy Cianci (also the Public Safety Commissioner at the time) and police chief Col. Walter McQueeney opposed the idea of the parade. (McQueeney, for his part, later explained that it was just because it would have been a parade promoting an illegal behavior.) And so, the Rhode Island ACLU went to Federal court — and Judge Raymond J. Pettine hastily ruled in favor of granting the parade permit. Subsequently, roughly 70 (or 75, I’ve heard it both ways) marchers (including Belle A Pellegrino who is still a vibrant part of our community and part of the Imperial Court of Rhode Island) wearing bright clothing and wielding kazoos held their parade from Kennedy Plaza on June 26, 1976. The parade, named “Toward a Gayer Bicentennial” was described in the Providence Journal in an article entitled “City tolerates first homosexual parade”. 

Walter McQueeney, despite his opposition to the march, worked to control the crowd who came out to see and threaten the marchers. He told reporters “This is the first time they marched and I hope it’s the last.” It wouldn’t be the last. 2018 will mark our 42nd year of marching, and celebrating.

(Adapted from this Facebook post.)

Annual Reminders

I want to talk a bit about the Annual Reminders — partially because they were born out of a protest in Washington DC in 1965 and partially because, without them, we would almost assuredly not have Pride happening each June.

On April 17 and 18 of that year, a multitude of gay rights organizations (or “homophile organizations” as they were called) from across the East Coast gathered in Washington D.C. to protest the US and Cuba’s policies on homosexuality. Cuba, at the time, was forcing homosexual men into labor camps. This protest was the combined effort of the DC and NYC chapters of the Mattachine Society, Philadelphia’s Janus Society, and the NYC chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis. These groups decided to band together, forming the East Coast Homophile Organizations (or ECHO). Only 40 activists were present, but it was — at the time — the largest demonstration for LGBT+ rights in world history.

Following the protest in DC, Craig Rodwell decided that there was enough issues facing LGBT+ people in the US that they shouldn’t disappear into the woodwork when there wasn’t a crisis. Other members of ECHO, including pioneers of the gay rights movement such as Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny, and Kay Tobin agreed. And so, the Annual Reminders were born.

On July 4 from 1965 to 1969, ECHO gathered outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia to protest. Independence Hall was chosen very specifically, not only because it was where the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were written but because in 1965, it was the home of the Liberty Bell. The Liberty Bell had been a powerful symbol for women’s suffrage and for the abolition of slavery. ECHO was making a concerted effort to tie the struggle of LGBT+ Americans to civil rights efforts of the past.

Frank Kameny had insisted on a very strict dress code for the Annual Reminders. Men were to wear suit jackets and ties, women were to wear dresses. The Annual Reminder ran from 3:30 pm to 5 pm. The press mostly ignored them, although they were described in an article entitled “Homos on the March” published in Confidential magazine’s October 1965 issue.

The final Annual Reminder occurred less than a week after the Stonewall Riots. The organizers received death threats, but Frank Kameny arranged for police protection and chartered a bus from New York City to Philadelphia to help activists arrive safely. There were 150 participants in the final Annual Reminder — more than triple the number of participants in the “world’s largest LGBT+ rights demonstration” of just a few years prior.

The Stonewall Riots changed everything for ECHO, which reorganized itself as the Eastern Regional Conference of Homphile Organizations (ERCHO), and decided that instead of having an Annual Reminder in 1970, they should have a non-political parade to commemorate the Stonewall Riots. They named this the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade but it was, in fact, the first Pride Parade. The proposal for this change was drafted by a number of leader in the gay rights movement, including Craig Rodwell — the man who had originally conceived of the Annual Reminders.

In 2005, a Pennsylvania State Historical Marker was placed at Chestnut and 6th Streets in Philadelphia to commemorate the Annual Reminders. The city also held a 50th Anniversary celebration in 2015, which included a recreation of the first reminder on July 4th.

(Adapted from this Facebook post.)