An unidentified group of young people celebrate outside the boarded-up Stonewall Inn
after riots over the weekend of June 27, 1969
Was Anne Frank “bisexual?” Keen to claim her as one of
their own, some queer
activists are citing previously overlooked passages from the
complete and unabridged second edition of Frank’s diary as evidence that the
world’s most famous Holocaust victim swung both ways. “I remember that once
when I slept with a girl friend I had a strong desire to kiss her, and that I
did do so,” Frank wrote about a sleepover with her best friend. Disregard, if
you can, the strange fixation with the sexuality of a hormonal adolescent girl;
seizing upon the private musings of a 14-year-old about her school crush as
prima-facie evidence of bisexuality does little to illuminate, and much to
occlude, the reason she and her family were hiding in the attic, which is that
they were Jews. It is of a piece with other, modish forms of historical
revisionism driven by contemporary political demands, like the claim that
Muslims are “the new Jews,”
that Syrian refugees are the modern-day
equivalent of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, or that detention centers
holding individuals who voluntarily cross the internationally recognized border
of a democratic country are akin to “concentration camps” where people—based
upon their ethnicity—were forcibly herded prior to their mass
extermination at the hands of a ruthlessly efficient totalitarian state.
A similar process of historical obfuscation is under
way with regard to the Stonewall Uprising, which transpired 50 years ago last
month when the patrons at a Greenwich Village gay bar fought back against the
police harassment that intruded so heavily upon gay life at the time.
According to the revisionist narrative, it was not gay people who sparked the
rebellion, but “trans women
of color.” Writing to commemorate the rebellion in The New
York Times, the director of policy and programs at the Transgender Law
Center describes Stonewall
as the place “where trans women of color led the resistance that started the
national L.G.B.T.Q.-rights movement.” In a symposium for Harper’s magazine,
a transgender author named T Cooper declares, “If it were not for us, Stonewall
might not have happened.” The National Center for Transgender Equality contends that,
“Although the exact identity of the person who started the riots is lost to
history, we know that trans women, especially trans women of color, played a
central role in the resistance.”
Topping a recent New York Times list of
“LGBTQ Pioneers” deserving of statues in their honor is the late
Marsha P. Johnson, who variously identified herself as a gay man and a
drag queen, and whom the paper credits with “spearheading the rebellion at
Stonewall as a transgender African-American woman.” Two weeks later, New York
City Mayor Bill de Blasio heeded the call by announcing that Johnson and Sylvia
Rivera, another transgender activist often credited as leading the
insurrection, would be honored with a statue in the vicinity of the old
Stonewall Inn. “Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are undeniably two of the
most important foremothers of the modern LGBTQ rights movement, yet their
stories have been erased from a history they helped create,” declared New York
City’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, in a
statement lauding the pair’s “leading role at Stonewall.”
Stonewall revisionism has even reached the upper
echelons of the gay mainstream establishment, with the Human Rights Campaign,
the country’s leading LGBT advocacy group, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the first
serious openly gay presidential candidate, mouthing its mantras. “Harassed
by local police simply for congregating, Stonewall’s LGBTQ patrons—most of whom
were trans women of color—decided to take a stand and fight back against the
brutal intimidation they regularly faced at the hands of police,” asserts
an article on the website of HRC. Buttigieg, no doubt smarting from accusations
that he’s not gay enough, last month tweeted
that “#Pride celebrates a movement that traces back to the courage of trans
women of color 50 years ago this weekend.”
The release three years ago of the coming-of-age
docudrama Stonewall, which placed a blond, cisgender, white
gay man at the center of events, gave a significant, if inadvertent, boost to
those who falsely assert that “trans women of color” started the uprising, only
to have their leading role erased by a Hollywood whitewash. That it was most
likely a blond,
cisgender, white gay man, Jackie Hormona, who threw the first punch
at a cop did nothing to quash the fake news. “By many accounts, the rebellion
was led by drag queens and gay street people,” wrote
a film critic for The New York Times, arguing that the movie’s
“invention of a generic white knight who prompted the riots by hurling the
first brick into a window is tantamount to stealing history from the people who
made it.”
The narrative that “trans women of color” led the
Stonewall riot rests largely upon the purported participation of just two
individuals: Johnson (who was black) and Rivera (who was Hispanic.) One popular
story, recently
repeated by transgender actress Laverne Cox in the ABC documentary
series 1969, has it that Johnson was celebrating her 25th birthday at
the bar when police raided the joint. In an article published three years after
the uprising, Rivera maintained that “the first stone was cast by a
transvestite half sister. … Remember we started that whole movement the
twenty-seventh day of June of the year 1969!”
***
Contemporaneous press accounts and the most credible
scholarship both confirm that the crowd which partook in the Stonewall uprising
was primarily not trans, female, and of color, but gay, male, and white.
“Hundreds of young men went on a rampage in Greenwich Village,” the Times
reported
the day after the uprising began, using “young men” repeatedly to describe the
rioters. A story
in the next day’s paper again referred to “large crowds of young men” engaged
in fisticuffs with police. The Village Voice reported
that, of the 200 people ejected from the Stonewall Inn the first night of the
riots, only five people dressed as women were arrested.
“My research for this history demonstrates that if we
wish to name the group most responsible for the success of the riots, it is the
young, homeless homosexuals, and, contrary to the usual characterizations of
those on the rebellion’s front lines, most were Caucasian; few were Latino;
almost none were transvestites or transsexuals,” concludes David Carter in Stonewall,
the definitive account of the uprising, for which he conducted hundreds of
interviews. Carter quotes one of the bar’s owners stating that its clientele
was “98 percent male.” As for the presence of transgender people, the Stonewall
was “not a generally welcoming place for drag queens,” Eric Marcus, editor of
an oral history of the gay rights movement, wrote in 1999.
“The majority of the hundreds of people who crowded onto Christopher Street and
jammed Sheridan Square were young gay men.” In his 1996 book American Gay,
the sociologist and anthropologist Stephen O. Murray writes
that “men familiar with the milieu then insist that the Stonewall clientele was
middle-class white men and that very few drag queens or dykes or nonwhites were
ever allowed admittance.” Sylvia Rivera herself once
told an interviewer that “The Stonewall wasn’t a bar for drag
queens. … If you were a drag queen, you could get into the Stonewall if they
knew you. And only a certain number of drag queens were allowed into the
Stonewall at that time.”
Put aside the question of whether the people described
as “draq queens” 50 years ago would today identify as transgender (some might,
many would still identify as drag queens, that is, gay men impersonating
women)—by most accounts they were relatively few in number. “There were maybe
twelve drag queens,” one participant, Craig Rodwell, recalled
in an interview years after the uprising, “… in thousands of people.” Speaking
in a New York Times video essay
about the disputed legacy of Stonewall, another participant, Robert Bryan,
states that “There were some individual people of color but it was not a group
of trans people of color who started the rioting.”
As for Johnson and Rivera, their role in Stonewall has
been greatly exaggerated. Often credited with having thrown the
first brick (or shot glass,
pick your legend), Johnson’s own accounts contradict the narrative that others
have propagated in the decades following her 1992 death. By her own admission,
Johnson wasn’t even at the Stonewall until well after the rioting began (and
her birthday was in August, not June). Johnson told
Eric Marcus: “I was uptown and didn’t get downtown until about two o’clock.
When I got downtown, the place was already on fire, and there was a raid
already. The riots had already started.” As for Rivera, who died in 2002, there
is “not one credible witness who saw her there on the first night,” according to the historian Carter. One
of Carter’s sources who was present when the fighting broke out told him
that Johnson herself later said that “Sylvia was not at the Stonewall Inn at
the outbreak of the riots as she had fallen asleep in Bryant Park after taking
heroin.” The historian Martin Duberman, author of another book about Stonewall,
calls Rivera
“wildly unreliable.”
Transgendering Stonewall serves a contemporary
political agenda, one that asserts a proportional relationship between
marginalization and virtue. As America has essentially come to accept gay
equality, the intersectional left—perpetually in need of an
adversarial posture against society, and for whom “trans women
of color” is now a
slogan—has settled on radical gender ideology as its next front in
the culture war. Stonewall loses its cachet as an inspiration for contemporary
“resistance” if it retains its actual gay character, as that renders it
achingly bourgeois, and so the event has been distorted into a transgender
story, thereby making it more subversive. (And even that isn’t enough for some
people: According to one historian, Stonewall wasn’t just led by trans women of
color, it was “a Race Riot
against the police started by hustling transwomen of color.”)
Witness Julian Castro’s expressed
commitment at last month’s Democratic presidential debate to providing
federally funded abortions for a “trans female.” Despite being an
anatomical impossibility, it was one of the night’s most raucous applause lines.
As political strategy, it’s understandable that some
transgender activists would want to conflate their cause as much as possible
with that of the gay movement, which has achieved more social change more
rapidly than any other in American history. The transgendering of Stonewall
stems from an entirely understandable impatience with the evolution of public
attitudes on the subject of gender identity, and an expectation that Americans
should accept the claims of the transgender movement as readily and as fully as
they did those of the gay one. But this desire to imitate the successes of the
gay movement lacks an appreciation for its long-term strategy and tactics. It
took five decades from the first gay
rights picket outside the White House in 1965 to the national
legalization of same-sex marriage. In the intervening years there were numerous
victories and setbacks: The removal of homosexuality from the American
Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders was followed by Anita
Bryant’s “Save Our
Children” campaign; the unexpected defeat of a
California ballot initiative prohibiting gays from teaching in public schools
was overshadowed weeks later by the assassination of Harvey Milk; the AIDS
epidemic, the 1986 Supreme Court
decision Bowers v. Hardwick upholding state bans on gay sex,
and the imposition of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” on the military did as much to
stigmatize gay people as Angels in America, Ellen, and Will &
Grace did to humanize them. Whatever dignity gays have earned in the eyes
of their fellow citizens has come about through a painstaking, decades-long
process of individual gay people coming out and explaining themselves to the
American public, a process that is ongoing.
The transgender movement has been visible for a far
shorter period of time, and presents a far more conceptually challenging
predicament to society, than that posed by homosexuality. And yet many of its
most vocal advocates expect Americans to accept unhesitatingly its claims,
yesterday, and deems those who do not Nazis.
Rewriting the history of Stonewall as a primarily transgender event is to avoid
all the hard work required of any successful social movement.
Gay people have been lied about for millennia—by
organized religion, by the medical
establishment, by the media, by governments. Much of our history
remains in the closet, hidden by generations of enforced secrecy and private
shame. That this latest bit of deceit comes from another constituent in the
LGBT acronym doesn’t make it any more acceptable. “If people start telling
stories not as they were but as they would like them to be, that procedure can
be used by anybody for any purpose,” Robert Bryan, the Stonewall veteran, told
the Times—words that those who perpetually bemoan our truthfully
challenged president would be especially well advised to heed.
What might have been a laudable effort to highlight
the role of transgender people alongside gay people in a major
historical event has been corrupted by an effort to expunge gay people, and gay
men in particular, from that story. After the AIDS epidemic nearly destroyed a
generation of gay men, the stealing of Stonewall amounts to a second erasure.
James Kirchick (tabletmag.com)
