The 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion has come and gone, and those who have benefited from the progress it sparked have been engaging ever since in doing what many oppressed groups have done as they move away from the oppression.
Along with celebrating progress, many are involved in self-evaluating that progress through the lens of internalized guilt for having made that progress, or, having benefited from the work of others, looking for any reason to limit it.
Seemingly unable to move away from not being allowed to celebrate ourselves and accept the history warts and all, there are those who cannot accept that the progress was made as circumstances presented themselves during the process and not according to how things should have been, or according to how things could be done now.
But it was uncharted ground in an oppressive world where before making gains toward equality, activists had to educate people to change their misconceptions of those who were seeking it. The battle had to be waged on two fronts. We did not begin the climb up the ladder on the first rung, but had to take many steps to get to the ladder.
Seeing the times, the events, and the strategies through the eyes and in the minds of those looking back after the progress, history is being rewritten in hind sight to bolster specific needs of specific groups who may have names now, but did not then.
The “riot” at the Stonewall was a spontaneous explosion of rebellion to conditions that existed at the time, and it involved people who were then living as they did within an existing society, and not with the terminology in use and the support available now.
On the night the event happened, it was a coincidence that someone was still in the offices of the Village Voice that was just down the block from the bar, and this person grabbed a camera in case what he heard going on outside would add up to something. Besides the word of eye witnesses, the photos taken are part of the record of events that night.
But in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, those who want a different narrative are writing it by adding shot glasses, bricks, and Molotov Cocktails thrown by someone to start the action with whom they can identify, while ignoring those things that people actually did, those who actually did them, and that what is now believed to have been thrown to start things wasn’t actually thrown until the “riot” was in full swing.
It has even gone so far as to insert as a major figure a person who was not there that night, but later claimed to have been even as that person’s narrative kept changing, and she eventually asked an author to state in his book that she had been there after acknowledging she had not been.
The author chose not to honor that request.
The pictures show who as there that night, but they do not necessarily reflect who people these days want to have been there. They have also frozen people in time as young people, which they were, but are no longer.
And this has resulted in favoring the new narrative and what has been relied on to create it with little, if any, consulting with the veterans of the event.
As Craig Rodwell, an American Gay Rights activist and founder of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first bookstore devoted to Gay and Lesbian authors, explained,
“There was just … a flash of group—of mass—anger.”
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At the World Pride event in New York City, those who had been at the Stonewall were told they were welcomed to March, but who they were would not be emphasized, and rather than the honored position at the front of the parade, they would be mixed in with the corporate contingents who will now move on, go all Fourth of July to sell product through patriotism, and continue to donate funds to anti-GLBT politicians and PACs.
The Veterans chose to join a second, less commercial parade that emphasized the real reason for any Pride Parade.
As people fight over who did what and which of the letters of the ever growing Alphabet that has replaced the single word “Gay” should be singled out in a spontaneous communal reaction to oppression, in so doing, not only ignore an erasing of the actual facts, but are expunging the marvelous fact that it was a unified community, while further ignoring the very people who were there, many representing the groups the revisionists claim have been ignored.
How’s that for irony.
As in any bar, especially ones whose clientele lives with oppression, people gravitate toward those with whom they feel most comfortable, and the Stonewall was no exception as the Drag Queens, in all the applications of the term at the time, claimed one area, Whites another, with Blacks and Puerto Ricans claiming an area in the back. These were not assigned areas but claimed one.
So when people say certain groups are written out of the Stonewall story by not emphasizing a particular group that is a form of rewriting as no one group was the star.
If people took the time to learn that the people in the bar were multi-racial and multi-cultural, they would realize that by saying “they rose up”, they include everyone, while by claiming the action was that of one group or one individual, they erase the others not in that group.
In those days today’s common terms like “Non-Binary”, “Gender Fluid”, and “Transgender” did not exist in general use, and Christine Jorgenson, complete with the media coverage presenting her experience in known terms totally misrepresenting what her transition actually was and meant, was, in the minds of those who grew up before 1969, a newsworthy one of a kind.
At the time, any man known to be one, or who had self-presented as a man, who put on a dress was simply a Drag Queen. In retrospect, and with a bit of desire, we now look back and decide they were Transgender, a term that was not used until 20 years after Stonewall and even then applied to all gender nonconforming individuals, and doing that denies the identity of the Drag Queens. Claiming Transgender people are being, or have been rewritten out of the history of Stonewall in 1969 is to apply modern terminology, behavior, and knowledge to the past and holding those in the past to present and evolved vocabulary.
Two people popularly credited in recent years as the instigators of the “Riot” were not, by their own accounts, in the Village that night until after events had been well underway, while a person who was there, Stormé DeLarverie, a bi-racial “Butch Lesbian” who had scuffled with police outside the bar while the raid was happening inside, and spurred the crowd in the street to action, is ignored.
The guilt for minority erasure is shared by those who decry it.
She is not helpful to the new narrative.
And now, it seems, neither are the ones who were there that night, the multi-racial letters in our Alphabet who are no longer the kids in the 50 year old pictures who don’t match the way people wish the story was, but can tell what they know to be true through their experience.
It was not “me and mine” who exploded that night, but “We and Ours”.