In the present attempts to rewrite history because people value labels over Community, there has been too much demonizing of some of the people that first night of the Stonewall Rebellion and its aftermath in order to raise people up according to modern attitudes, desires, and needs, trying to force the past into the present mold. We are not evaluating the people that night according to their time but ours, and, in the process, falsely represent people individually and as a group.
The major self serving revision is that the Gay people, that would be cisgender, Gay men in the bar, ignored everyone else in the bar. They had then and continue now to ignore the contributions of all the other gender variants that were there that night.
The following list is of the most common gender related terms known to most people. It is not an extensive list as some gender variants are subcategories within the larger one under which they fall.
I offer this list because, in the modern revisions of the History, when it comes to Stonewall, too many are judging the people of 1969 as if they had the same knowledge we have today and are being blamed for erasure and white washing as they then and in the immediate following years did not refer to certain groups of people that were unknown in those days.
Too many choose to see this as a conscious decision to do so and claim they are reclaiming history while in actuality they are attempting to revise history by basic character assassination and employing the approach that gets more love and attention going to them by demonizing others.
But to do this one has to be uninformed or consciously rewriting history for an agenda.
The dates after the titles are the dates that the word entered common usage or were first defined by the person coining the term. Until those dates, few, if any, knew they existed and knowledge of the terms was not some intuitive thing where once the word was coined all Homosexuals instantly knew and understood the concept and science.
Pre-Stonewall terminology:
Homosexual 1869
Heterosexual 1890
Transvestite 1910
Transexual 1950
Drag Queen-indeterminate as it went back centuries.
Post terminology that those at Stonewall would not have known.
Nonbinary 1980
Gender Queer 1980
Pansexual 1990s
Polyamory 1990
Intersexed 1993
Genderfluid 1994
Cisgender 1994
Transgender 1990s
Gender dysphoria 2013 replacing Gender Identity Disorder.
Yet, somehow those at Stonewall, and in its immediate aftermath, are held responsible for ignoring those terms and ignoring those to whom they applied.
In spite of her being an icon for some, Marsha Johnson insisted, as late as 1987, that she was a man in a dress and did not refer to herself as Transgender and was known to contemporaries as Marsha or Malcom, depending on attire and presentation. In those days, that was a Drag Queen. That is now seen by too many as erasing her identity when the erasure would seem to be more because people ignore her own words to create what they would prefer. Whether or not you accept Marsha as the biggest hero of Stonewall, even she had no word for herself 18 years after the Riot but was declared Trans after her murder 5 years after that recorded interview when that term came into use.
But, somehow, all those people at Stonewall were supposed to somehow know something not widely known until some twenty-five years later.
In the time around Stonewall, because bars were safe places with protection coming by way of secrecy as Gay people could have their lives ruined by exposure, bar-names replaced real names and bar patrons judged people according to their presentation and absolutely not by requesting personal information that is not voluntarily offered.
We had just had the Lavender Scare years and the McCarthy Era.
Sue came into the bar every Saturday night wearing her trademark gardening straw hat, mumu, and hair cascading down her back. Even if you did not see her enter, you knew she was somewhere in the bar when she laughed the first time as it was her laugh at her volume. She called me “Boston” as my place of origin was easier to remember than another name, and I called her Sue both in conversation and when asking others if they had seen her, or Kiowa Sue if more specificity was needed to find her. After knowing her for years, I was in a store one day when a leather jacketed Harley Davidson looking stranger with a few days’ growth of stubble embraced me with a bear hug, and announced he was glad to see me in a place other than the bar finally after all these years and for the first time ever in the general public. When it became obvious that I had no idea who this person was, he took off his hat so his hair cascaded down his back and Sue’s voice came out of his mouth as he introduced his other Two Spirit side. I never saw this manifestation again, but on Saturday nights I always spent some time with Sue.
I have known Sue for over thirty years. I know Sue. That, obviously, is the only person I need to know.
The modern assumption is that everybody in the Gay bars of the old days knew all about each other, but in those days, if you were dressed like a woman but were known as a man, it was assumed you were a Drag Queen or if it was someone with whom you were interacting, however that person came across was who that person was. You didn’t ask a lot of intrusive questions. Often the need for secrecy protected one from an undercover police officer hoping to score an arrest and whatever you would face after arrest.
In those days, the people in the bar were the people in the bar and if you did not personally know someone you only learned about what they told you.
On the night of the rebellion some of the staff of the Village Voice newspaper, whose offices were just next door to the Inn, were working late to put the paper to bed when the sudden noise from the street below had them grab cameras and head to the street in the event something big was happening as this much noise was unusual for that area and that is why we have actual photographs of the action that night. These are not photos taken the following nights or those taken at follow up activities like parades, marches, and protests. They are the photos of the people that first night and left a visual record of the crowd, some who were both inside and outside the bar as events unfolded while others just outside the whole time.
I have included these pictures and would like people to identify the sexual orientation and gender identity of the people in them. If, because you do not know them and prefer not to judge and categorize people on just their looks because you do not really know them, how is it acceptable to claim any participants were rejected by the Gay men in the bar when they had as much information about the people in the pictures that we have now. I will caution those who may want to offer other pictures of the first night to make sure there are no daytime ones or ones with signs as the Rebellion began around closing time and left little time for people to run home and make signs.
I am familiar with one person in one of the pictures. He is a friend of a friend. He is in his 80s now and I am sure of his gender identity and can safely refer to it because of my familiarity with him. I have no idea who the person next to him is. I can only go by what I see and cannot be held to know that which I was not told.
The frenzy to rewrite history for various agendas depends on misrepresenting the patrons in bars back in the past and assigning them faults they could not have had. We hold them to have the knowledge the above included list shows clearly they did not. It is also insulting to who they were and what they actually did. They are not being held to reality but agendas and in this are being demonized by those who did not have to face the real demon.
Consider the reality of our growing knowledge of gender without judging the people of the past according to information they could not have had.
View Stonewall in its reality not ours.
And, as a side note, remember we got all the knowledge of the listed gender variants because of the work of those who had to live without them.
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