Stonewall The Rewriting Of History

The “official” NYC Pride (I say official because they won the court battle over “NYC Pride”) has a webpage about the history of Stonewall…

1969
Stonewall

Early in the morning of June 28, the Stonewall Inn was raided by police, a then common occurrence at the Greenwich Village bar that had become a staple of New York City's underground gay community. But this time its members, tired of the ongoing raids, fought back, striking what would become known as The Stonewall Riots.

Gee, I seem to remember something about lesbians and drag queens. But it seems that the “official” NYC Pride has selective amnesia… Oh wait! I know… they mean gay in the broader sense. Funny how that works when someone questions the exclusions all of a sudden they say it means the “whole” LGBT movement. It is also all about marriage equality, nothing about Human Rights like being able to be fired at work or thrown out of your apartment or denied credit or… thrown out of a bar.

LGBT Civil Rights are many more things than marriage.

Early on in the LGBT Civil Rights movement trans-people were at the forefront, many times bars like the Stonewall were raided not so much because of same-sex couples holding hands or dancing together but to check if the “drag queen” had three items of male clothing on them.

In Leslie Feinberg interview of Sylvia Rivera, she said,

We were led out of the bar and they cattled us all up 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 barricaded 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 any more of this shit. We had done so much for other movements. It was time.

It was street gay people from the Village out front-homeless people who lived in the park in Sheridan Square outside the bar-and then drag queens behind them and everybody behind us. The Stonewall Inn telephone lines were cut and they were left in the dark.

We keep getting left out as the Gay rewrite history. When we complain about their selective amnesia we are called whiners. We were told not to attend the Pride marches in New York and in 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, they want only straight looking gays and lesbian.

In 1994 on the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising we were told again that we were not welcome at Pride, and it took the threat of protesting the march that the finally lifted on the ban.

When I went the 2009 Norwalk Pride they had posters commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising but nowhere on those posters did they have anything on trans-people, I wrote...

Yesterday, I went to the Fairfield county Pride. I was a little upset to put it mildly, the Pride itself was OK but they had signs that they put up around the area. The signs were of notable people and events in the LGBT history, the sign in front of our table was about the Stonewall Uprising.

The title of the sign was “Gays and Lesbian Riot at the Stonewall Inn,” a red flag went off when I read that. As I continued reading, the sign went on to say “the gays and lesbians” rioted against the police. By this time, my blood was boiling and I grabbed one of the Pride officials over to read the sign. I asked him to read the sign and as he read the sign, he immediately realized the omission and he sheepishly said that there was no mention of the trans-community’s involvement. He brought over the person who made the signs (his partner), who apologized for the omission and said he would correct it before the signs were hung in the community center.

Unfortunately that is all together common, we get lumped together with the gays and lesbians or the writers are lazy and do not do their homework. And as a friend wrote in the comments Stonewall has also been whitewashed. Latinos and people of color have also been written out of history, people like Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major and Sylvia Rivera.