The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [89]
Karla Jay’s Tales of the Lavender Menace provides a vivid and compelling account of those early days, when everything seemed possible. Fueled by youth, idealism, and the sense that theirs was a righteous cause, the founders of the movement came together to plot the course of their revolution. Some came from the homophile movement, organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, founded in the fifties to try to improve the status of gays. Others came from the Left (both New and Old)—Marxists, Communists, and student radicals who carried the weapons of ideology and intellectual dissent. “Hopeful (but not certain) that something was going to happen after the Stonewall riots had subsided, I went to my first GLF [Gay Liberation Front] meeting at the end of July, which was probably the group’s second meeting,” Jay writes. “I had seen an ad for it in the East Village Other or RAT. At first I didn’t know what to make of this colorful, boisterous group. The chairs were pulled into a loose circle in which everything seemed to be spinning out of control. Everyone was shouting about what needed to be done without listening to what others had to say.” Karla Jay points out that the bulk of these gay revolutionaries were “young, white and unemployed. Most were students or recent college graduates like myself. But some of the participants were simply what radicals referred to as ‘street people’—generally lower- or lower-middle-class women and men without any prior political experiences, who came because they were incensed about the Stonewall riots or because they knew someone who had participated in them.”
Jay writes that she became close to two of the “transvestites” (her word) she met at Gay Liberation Front (GLF) meetings in the heady days after Stonewall—Sylvia Rivera and Rivera’s best friend, Marsha P. Johnson. “Sylvia Rivera, a Latina street queen, would hold forth at GLF meetings, gesticulating wildly and puncturing her own comments with Dietrich’s guttural laugh as she presented her views in forceful, if ungrammatical, New Yorkese. Her friend Marsha (sometimes Marcia) P. Johnson was a sassy and funny Black transvestite. Martin Duberman wrote in Stonewall that she once told a judge after she had been busted that the P stood for ‘Pay it no mind.’ The laughing judge demanded no bail.” Rivera and Johnson occupy prominent positions in transgender history and lore. Together they founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), in August 1969, providing shelter for homeless transgendered kids working as prostitutes. Rivera and, to a lesser extent, Johnson organized and fought ferociously for the rights of their sisters—a group that made fellow revolutionaries uncomfortable. “I had never met a real drag queen before,” Karla Jay admits in Tales of the Lavender Menace. “Redstockings and other feminist groups strongly believed that such men were an offensive parody of’real’ women—that is, those of us who were genetically female and sentenced to a life of oppression because of our gender. Such men could simply discard women’s clothing and reclaim male privilege. Feminists believed that transvestites caricatured the very worst kind of femininity by donning pounds of makeup and by wearing the very kind of clothing we were fighting to free ourselves from, especially short, tight, revealing skirts or dresses and stiletto heels.”
In Stonewall, Duberman quotes Arthur Bell, a founder, in December 1969, of the Gender Activists Alliance, about the response to Sylvia and other queens. “The general membership is frightened of Sylvia and thinks she’s a troublemaker. They’re