In a Stonewall State of Mind
The “Holy Trinity of Stonewall–Marsha P. Johnson, Stormé DeLarverie, and Sylvia Rivera!” stonewall yesterday
By: ben power*
H
istory is but storytelling. Who tells our queer and trans stories? Let it be we and let our stories be true. Ever in my memory is an incident in the late 1960s in Chicago when I was in my teens. I started going to lesbian, gay, leather, and drag bars before I could legally drink, searching for someone–anyone–who was like me: a semi-homeless, working-class transgender boy completely alone with no words yet for who I was. This bar, the Lost & Found, had opened on Chicago’s north side in 1965, just after I turned 15. It was a blue-collar, heavily wood-paneled dyke bar but gender non-conforming stones like me from the poor class, gay men, drag queens and kings all sought community there. The windows on the place were dark so no one could see inside. The locked and heavy wooden door had a small, circular window out of which the bouncer checked before letting you inside. No one who looked straight got in–and no cops, either. Behind the door of the Lost & Found was the entire queer world, to me. It existed only within the confines of that space and did not exist anywhere in society outside of it. The minute the door opened and I stepped inside that smoked-filled bar, I crossed over into the world of my people. If only for a fleeting couple of hours, I left Planet Cis Heterosexual behind. It may be hard for young people to imagine today, but a queer bar was the only place we
could see each other back then. We had a blast there, meeting others like ourselves for the first time or dancing with friends or lovers, but it was fraught with fear and danger, too–secretive clubs were a collective closet. A lesbian owned the Lost & Found, but the Mafia working with the Chicago PD shall we say, regularly “managed” the place. There were state laws against crossdressing. Stones who came in wearing front-zippered pants had to take them off and put them on in reverse, with the zipper in the back, if trouble arose. Under the law, a person must wear at least three articles of clothing that matched their gender assigned at birth. It was illegal to “conceal one’s sex in public.” Police harassed lesbians and gay men just for dancing with each other, but patrons of the bar whose skin was dark or whose clothing was gender nonnormative were the biggest targets. Not until 1973 was the anti-crossdressing law in Illinois struck down. What I remember at the Lost & Found was a large brick crashing through the front window. This was the Mafia intimidating the bar owner into paying up–or else. The “or else” was the cops responding to the shattered glass, and thus ensued a raid where patrons were terrorized, busted for gender non-conforming attire see state of mind on page 32
10 • TheRainbowTimesMass.com • The Rainbow Times • New England Pride Guide 2019
