The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [88]
LIBERATING THE RAINBOW
We were led out of the bar and they cattled us all against the police vans. The cops pushed us up against the grates and the fences. People started throwing pennies, nickels, and quarters at the cops, and then the bottles started. And then we finally had the Morals Squad bamcaded in the Stonewall building because they were actually afraid of us at that time. They didn’t know we were going to react that way. We were not taking anymore of this shit.
Sylvia Rivera, in Trans Liberation,
by Leslie Feinberg, New York City, 1969
Liberation. Revolution. In the summer of 1969, those were more than just words. As the song by Thunderclap Newman put it, “Call out the instigators / because there’s something in the air / We’ve got to get together sooner or later / Because the revolution’s here, and you know it’s right.” For gay men, lesbians, drag queens, and other gender outlaws, the revolution arrived on a hot night in June when, as so often happened, cops attempted to arrest the patrons of a gay bar—possibly because the owners were late in making their biweekly payoff to the Police Department. The Stonewall Inn, in Greenwich Village in New York City, was to become on that night, and the days that followed, ground zero for gay liberation, the rock thrown into the stagnant pond of social mores. The ripple effects of Stonewall are still being felt today as a steadily increasing number of cities and the states ban housing and employment discrimination based on sexual orientation; as gay men become the stars of a hit television show; as at least one state permits gay couples to marry while another approves civil unions— and as the medical diagnosis of homosexuality as mental illness fades into history. This transformation in cultural attitudes was interrupted by a backlash in 2004, with eleven states passsing ordinances banning gay marriage, and gay rights itself becoming a major wedge issue in the presidential campaign. Yet the backlash itself (like a similar backlash against feminism in the 1990s) points to the success of the movement, not its failure.
What happened on the night of June 23, 1969? Why have the Stonewall riots transcended history to become myth? For many people, Stonewall crystallized the moment when homosexuals and gender-variant people as a group stopped being ashamed, stopped being afraid, and began to fight back—against police harassment, against bigotry, against anyone who would deny them their human rights. Many point to Stonewall as the day that pride was born—pride in being gay, pride in being different. But like a couple whose future conflicts could be predicted from their first date, Stonewall and its immediate aftermath presaged difficulties and divisions that would haunt the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) movement to this day.
Numerous accounts of the Stonewall riots have been published, but Martin Duberman’s book Stonewall is probably the best-known and the most respected. One of the activists whose story Duberman follows throughout the book is Sylvia Rivera, who was a nineteen-year-old drag queen in 1969. Rivera had lived on the streets since age eleven. Like Patricia Morgan, she had worked first as a boy prostitute and later in drag. In most accounts, Sylvia Rivera and the other street queens who hung around outside the bar played a crucial role in the riots. Some say that Rivera or one of the other queens threw the first rock at the cops who were attempting to hustle the Stonewall’s patrons into a paddy wagon, thus igniting the three days of intermittent rioting that followed. Others deny this—and in the debate over that single fact, thirty years of mistrust and suspicion are constellated. Who started Stonewall, and by extension GLBT liberation? Was it the queens or the gays? The gay men (and they were mostly men) being herded into the paddy wagon, or the crowd of drag queens who began to heckle the cops and eventually to pelt them with coins, stones, bottles, high-heeled shoes—and later to overturn cars and pull up parking meters? “Hand out the arms and