The present internal debate as to whether a Drag Queen or a Trans person threw whatever the first thing that was never actually thrown to start the rebellion that actually began on the street with Storme Leveray, a Drag King, who often sat outside the Stonewall to watch out for “her boys”, Screamed at the crowd to do something when the bar doors were closed with the police and patrons inside and things became obviously serious.
With Christine Jorgenson as the only popularly known Transgender individual and Drag Queens being commonly known through movies like Some Like It Hot, celebrities like Bugs Bunny, Milton Berle and others who would occasionally perform in Drag, and with bars specifically featuring Drag shows in large metropolitan areas like Jaques in Boston, Transgender people were largely an unknown even in the Gay Community and, this might seem odd, even among many people who assumed they were Drag Queens as that helped fulfill them as people, but in reality were Transgender people as uninformed about the whole thing as the general population because there was no way to get the information.
Men who dressed as women were Drag Queens or Straight men who were into transvestiture which, while known to their wives, was not known in public. They did not perform. They simply dressed up and went out with other Transvestites, or in the company of wives looking like two ladies out on the town.
In a binary world, anything gender was either male or female.
Transexual, Transvestite, and what would eventually be recognized as Transgender were at the time the same thing, men wearing dresses, so they were all Drag Queens in the common eye.
In today’s more open world this lack of knowledge may seem odd, but we are not dealing with these times but then.
The T is a relatively recent addition to GLBT. It was not always there, and TERFs still object to it.
Like the majority of society, the Gay Community was binary. Straights had males and females and so did the Gay Community in its Gay men and Lesbians. What else was there?
Modern understanding of gender throws confusion on the make-up of the Stonewall crowd and analyzing the event and participants decades later can further confuse things if the assumption is that the people were aware then of what we can be aware of now. Things before 1969 and for some time after are not those of today.
Knowing they could not justify arresting targeted groups without a real reason too often, and really having no real basis for a ban on Drag other than it is an assault on a weak concept of one’s own masculinity, if they couldn’t outlaw it, cities could at least pass ordinances to make it more difficult to do Drag and would force Drag Queens to go elsewhere other than the Gay Ghettos in the cities they were forced into by the society who found fault with their living in them, or get arrested.
In some places by law, a Drag Queen, no matter how glamorously dressed or for what occasion, had to wear three articles of male clothing that could be inspected if during a bar raid the ID handed over to the police did not match the look of the person who handed it over. For obvious reasons, those transitioning or those who lived their true lives without the benefit of an income to make re-alignment a possibility would wear those three articles as they would be indistinguishable from Drag Queens.
According to a friend who was in the Stonewall Inn that fateful night, the drill there and in other bars was for the men, the obvious ones, to line up on one side of the bar and Drag Queens, Transfolk, and cisgender females on the other, and ID and further, sometimes more intrusive, inspections would take place. One could assume the first area for bodily inspection if the police officer chose to go further than just seeing the required three articles of clothing.
Thus, being in Drag was not the offense, not having the three articles was, and that was a stronger excuse for arrest.
It was also a constant silent form of harassment because, while going out and having a good time without having an encounter with the police, they were in your head as you had to be aware it could happen, deciding your evening according to where it most likely it might that evening.
Since the Stonewall, Drag Queens have often been the leaders in the struggle for Gay rights right up front, and sometimes the quiet worker bees who might be unaware that everytime they go from their car into the bar to perform in a show and then go back pout to the car, even in an assumed to be safe Gay area, it is a brave act and that of a role-model, not necessarily for Drag, but being true to self.
That is why, with red state legislatures passing bills as if there were a problem beyond one dreamed up for political purposes, young people will no longer
In my day we did not have the rights and had to fight to get them. As bad as that was, it was positive in that we were making progress and could see the fruits of our labor.
However, now, those same people who, like a pitbull holding onto your butt with its vice grip, just as with a woman’s right to choose, the far religio-political right will not let go of its resentment that we Gay people were slowly getting the inalienable rights with which we were already endowed with by our creator, who they name God, and will not be happy until they can take them away. They did pretty well taking back voting rights and desegregation.
Like the granddaughters of the women who were finally allowed their right to choose what was best for their own bodies have had that existing right, one that had always been theirs taken away, as it hurts those who fought for and now see their daughters losing what they had gotten for them, older Gay people are seeing how our lives became better from our hard work and how that is being reversed so our spiritual progeny will be where we had been but had escaped.
In both cases the legacy of one generation to another is erased by the kids in the class who always reminded the teacher there was supposed to be a quiz.
When the younger generation asks about the past and its attitudes, how we survived it, and what were the homophobes thinking, we older folk can inform them that if they and their friends and daily just sit by, they are about to find out experientially.
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