Stonewall 50: The Forgotten Heroine Behind It

History 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.

Queer and trans historians have for decades noted that a black stone butch lesbian, cross-dressed in a man’s leather jacket and pants, was at the center of the uprising. After a long time of speculation about the identity of this person, today we know that this was Stormé DeLarverie.

Quite a few friends, eyewitnesses, and historians over the years have identified DeLarverie as the tough cross-dressing dyke handcuffed and clubbed by the NYPD, which evoked enough outrage to spur the crowd to action. Charles Kaiser identified DeLarverie as the Stonewall Lesbian in his book, The Gay Metropolis.