Who Really Started the Stonewall Riots? The Continuing Mystery of Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera
Last month, we once again honored the seminal moment in LGBT history, the Stonewall riots and associated protests of 1969. Despite the subdued virtual tone of this year’s Pride Celebrations due to COVID-19, there was significant discussion of the historical events at Stonewall and their relevance to the modern day. Unfortunately, in recent years, there has been an effort to re-write this history to promote certain elements of the LGBT and downplay the contributions of others. Sadly, this comes at a time when LGBT gains are under constant attack from the Religious Right and President Trump and this effort does very little to promote LGBT unity.
In recent years, a growing acceptance of transgender people has led to an increased voice for this historically marginalized element of society. They have loudly advocated for the rightful inclusion of drag queen and transvestites in the history of Stonewall and the corresponding expansion of the political movement for LGBT rights. It is only fair, after all, that folx like Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera get their due for their involvement in the nascent LGBT political movement in NYC in the late ’60s and on into the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. And it is true that both Johnson and Rivera were influential activists, for better or worse, in the movements that sprung up after Stonewall.
However, these modern activists are simply going too far when they claim that “Sylvia and Marsha created the Stonewall movement” or that “Sylvia and Marsha started the riots” or “Don’t forget… Stonewall was a TRANS riot!”
These claims are simply not true. They are a form of historical revisionism.
“Historical Revisionism” is a charge usually labeled at the Far Right and their negation of the Holocaust or the Neo-Confederates and their whitewashing of the slavery era. However, Revisionism is no stranger to the LEFT as well, as we have seen with Stalinism and other totalitarian movements. People of all political stripes often find it in their best interests to not only frame the cultural perspective on current events, but to rewrite the past to fit their modern agenda.
Mayor Bill DeBlasio of NYC has even allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a monument to Rivera and Johnson. In addition, there is currently a petition with 75,000 signatures to remove a statue of Christopher Columbus in Marsha’s hometown of Elizabeth, NJ and replace it with one of Marsha Johnson. Ironically, even before I knew that detail, I had planned on comparing some of the revisionism around Marsha and Sylvia to that surrounding Columbus!
When people are unquestioningly heralded, despite having problematic personal histories, that legacy can be very hard to unravel. In the case of Columbus, it has taken over 500 years. This is not to compare the deeds of Columbus with the actions of Rivera and Johnson, they are not on the same scale. Italians have thousands of years of history to draw heroes from and celebrate. Why they choose Columbus is not for me to say. However, I would hope that the LGBT does not make a similar mistake and that we allow the light of truth and reality to show our heroes in the most realistic light possible. We owe it both to history and to LGBT of the future. Let’s make sure that those who get statues to represent and observe the struggle of the LGBT actually deserve such commemoration.
The current popular version of Stonewall that dominates both LGBT social media culture AND traditional media goes as follows:
“Stonewall has been whitewashed into being a largely white, gay male riot and white gay males have systematically excluded trans POC, who were the dominant element in the riots, from the narrative. In reality, this was a transgender riot started by POC trans women Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who showed those soft white gay men how to fight in the streets! Stonewall was mostly a hangout for trans women, who weren’t allowed in other NYC gay bars, and it was raided by transphobic policemen because of this. And they WEREN’T really “drag queens”, they were transgender, but that term didn’t exist yet so people called them drag queens!”
What is wrong with my paragraph above? How about literally EVERYTHING?
Stonewall, as we shall see with photo evidence in the next segment, was a largely gay white male riot. Certainly, drag queens/transvestites and POC were welcome and a few of them seemed to have participated in both the riot and protests that happened later.
Perhaps one of the greatest myths of Stonewall is the notion that NYPD targeted the Inn out of their homophobia and determination to break up the burgeoning LGB counterculture in NYC. However, even this is untrue!
What actually happened: The NYPD received a tip that the Genovese mafia family (one of the New York Five Families of organized crime) were stealing European bonds at Wall St. firms. The thefts were being committed by gay workers who were being blackmailed by the Genovese who threatened exposure of their LGB status if they didn’t comply with the criminals. The Stonewall Inn, a mob-owned bar, was the nexus of the compromise of these employees.
Stonewall was also violating its’ liquor license and often allowed underage drinking as well. The NYPD stations in the neighborhood were so infiltrated with officers on the take from the Genovese that the raid was kept a secret and officers were brought in from other areas of NYC to conduct it! I am sure that there were some homophobic NYPD officers who were happy to be arresting gay patrons of the Stonewall, but I have yet to see any evidence that these attitudes were the cause of the raid.
In addition, contrary to the now-popular myth that Stonewall was a “haven for drag queens”, Stonewall was not known for being particularly friendly to drag queens. Only a select few, like Marsha Johnson were tolerated and felt comfortable there at all.
Before we move on to some visual and written evidence of the realities of Stonewall, let’s address one final myth. The notion that “transgender” was not a concept or term in use in 1969 is also false. The earliest usage of the term that I could find was from 1965 and was made by psychiatrist John F Olivan who used the term “transgenderism” in his medical textbook Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, which was described as “an urge for gender (‘sex) change.” In addition, neither Sylvia Rivera or Marsha Johnson, the two people most identified (incorrectly) as “starting the Stonewall Riots”, identified as transgender or expressed any interest in sexual reassignment surgery of which I am aware. While they used women’s names as part of their drag personas, Sylvia identified as a “gay drag queen” and Marsha identified as “a gay man, a drag queen, and a transvestite”. This is deeply ironic in the political environment of 2020, where many radical trans rights activists loathe drag queens and view them as “coopting their struggle” or see their very existence as “ mocking trans women”.
How have radical trans rights activists worked around this seeming conflict between the negativity of the modern trans movement towards drag queens and transvestites and the fact that perhaps the two most iconic heroes, deserved or not, of Stonewall were, in fact, drag queens and transvestites?
Simple! They have retroactively converted their heroes to be something more to their liking in the current year. Sylvia and Marsha were magically turned into “transgender” in the past decade as trans visibility has increased due to social media. This is not something limited just to LGBT press outlets, but is perceptible even in mainstream articles from the likes of MSN or Time Magazine.
“Transgender” was a known term prior to Stonewall, yet it is not an identity that Marsha and Sylvia were claiming at the time of the riots and protests.
Here we have video of Marsha, out of their drag persona, exclaiming “I’m a boy!”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdUEFtPFJLo
Rather than citing homophobic or transphobic writers who are trying to tear down the LGBT or Pro-LGBT writers who simply don’t assume the current trans rights narrative on Stonewall (a small group, sadly) and have criticized the “transcentric” version of Stonewall, we will do something much more simple: go to pictures of the events and look at the words of Marsha and Sylvia themselves!
They say a “picture is worth a thousand words” and I think that the photos of Stonewall and the nights that followed speak loudly. Many of these are stock pictures from Getty Images. There is only one verified photo from the actual first night of the riots, but there are more from the protests that followed. This was a different era, decades before cell phones, let alone cell phone cameras.
However, some photos do survive, and while they do show a few African-Americans and Latinx and a smattering of drag queens, for the most part the participants seem like gay white males! If anybody is familiar with these individuals and I am assuming incorrectly, please correct me in the comments below.
This first one is from the first night of riots. There appear to be a few POC in an otherwise gay white male crowd.
Here’s some pictures from activism in the days following the riots of the first night.
Here is a photo from the protests. This is often cited to claim “Sylvia and Marsha started the riots”. But it was from the days AFTER the riot, not during. Sylvia and Marsha are there on far left. Note that the signs are all about the LGB, with no mention of T issues.
Next pic has a slightly androgynous Puerto Rican man, but mostly white gays. The Puerto Rican certainly claimed “gay” rather than “trans” judging by his sign.
Next pic has a few African-Americans and Latinx, and maybe a drag queen in front. Not positive. No crowd of trans people, though, as far as I can tell.
Here’s a sign from the early days of activism after the riots. Note that it says “we homosexuals”, not “we transgender”.
We will begin our analysis of Johnson and Rivera’s participation in Stonewall by looking at the words of Marsha Johnson.
Marsha was a transvestite sex worker who was arrested, in her own words, over 100 times. She was also a violent alcoholic with a volatile temper who wound up banned from most NYC gay bars, not for being a drag queen, but for being a DRAMA queen. Her personality was widely described, even by her political allies, as “difficult”.
The narrative of her at Stonewall has multiple versions, ranging from her starting the riot by throwing a rock at the cops in the streets to her starting the riot by throwing a shot glass at the wall inside the bar. Neither of those versions are true. There is a consensus among historians and witnesses of the era that she did climb on a traffic pole on the SECOND night of the uprising and dropped a brick on a cop car windshield.
However, it simply isn’t possible that she “started the riot” because she didn’t even show up until AFTER the riot had started! This is an excellent and informative podcast that includes an interview with Johnson and longtime LGBT activist Randy Wicker, her close friend and roommate. Take note of Johnson’s mention of Sylvia having a “cocktail” in the park, we will get back to that later…
https://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/episode-11-johnson-wicker/
“The way I winded up being at Stonewall that night, I was having a party uptown. And we were all out there and Miss Sylvia Rivera and them were over in the park having a cocktail.
I was uptown and I didn’t get downtown until about two o’clock, because when I got downtown the place was already on fire. And it was a raid already. The riots had already started. And they said the police went in there and set the place on fire.
Additionally, Marsha gives us some insight into what the actual scene at Stonewall was like in regards to drag queens. Remember: part of the current popular version of Stonewall is that it was “historically a trans bar”. Let’s see what Marsha had to say about that…
“Eric: Who went to the Stonewall?
Marsha: Well, uh, at first it was just a gay men’s bar. And they didn’t allow no, uh, women in. And then they started allowing women in. And then they let the drag queens in. I was one of the first drag queens to go to that place. ’Cause when we first heard about this… and then they had these drag queens workin’ there. “
Stonewall was historically a gay men’s bar that only recently had started to allow drag queens, and was, according to many accounts, very selective in terms of which drag queens were considered acceptable.
Returning to the interview, we get some strong opinions from Wicker on Johnson’s personal behavior and some of the issues with STAR, the activist group that Johnson is generally credited for founding and which is often mentioned prominently in biographies of her.
“Randy: No, no, I met Marsha, Marsha moved in here about eight years ago. I had met Marsha in 1973 as an Advocate reporter. The GAA people had freed her. It was, they locked up our gay sister, Marsha Johnson, but they went into the mental hospital and they snuck her out in an elevator and they ran out the door. Now the reason they…she was in the mental hospital is she took LSD and was sitting in the middle of either Houston Street or…
Marsha: There was no LSD…
Randy: …pulling the sun…
Marsha: What do you call that, umm?
Randy and Eric: Mescaline?
Marsha: No, what’s that other fierce stuff?
Randy: Bella donna?
Marsha: Uh, uh. Purple… purple passion or something?
Randy: But, anyway she was sitting in the middle and pulling the sun to the earth, but fortunately before the world ended and the sun hit the earth the paddy wagon from Bellevue came and took Marsha away to the mental ward and that’s how she ended up getting on SSI as a mental case, because they obviously saw, you know, she had a history of prostitution going back to ’62. And I had met Marsha.
Eric: Now you mentioned an organization that Marsha, you were involved with. What was the name?
Marsha: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with Miss Sylvia Rivera.
Randy: STAR.
Eric: What was that group about? What was it for?
Marsha: Ah, it was a group for transvestites.
Randy: It was a bunch of…
Marsha: Men and women transvestites.
Randy: It was a bunch of flakey, fucked up transvestites living in a hovel and a slum somewhere calling themselves revolutionaries. That’s what it was in my opinion. Now Marsha has a different idea.
Eric: What’s your opinion?
Marsha: Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries started out as a very good group. It was after Stonewall, they started, they started at GAA. Mama Jean DeVente, who used to be the marshal for all the parades. She was the one that talked Sylvia Rivera into leaving GAA, ’cause Sylvia Rivera who was the president of STAR was a member of GAA, and start a group of her own. And so she started Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. And she asked me would I come be the vice president of that organization.
Randy: They had an apartment, they didn’t have the money to keep up the rent and they began fighting over who was using drugs or who was paying rent or who was taking whose makeup. And, I mean, it got to be pretty low life and pretty ugly…
Marsha: No, the building was owned by Michael Umbers, who was in jail. And didn’t Michael Umbers, when he went to jail, the city took over the building and they had everybody thrown out. But originally the rent was paid to Michael Umbers who went to jail, and Bubbles Rose Lee, Bubbles Rose Lee, who was secretary to STAR, she had all kinds of things [?] around the building and stuff, you know. So the city just came and closed the building down.
Sylvia Rivera, like Marsha, is also credited by modern Trans Rights Activists with “starting the Stonewall Riots”. At least Marsha showed up a few hours after the riots started. Sylvia wasn’t even there… at all!
According to widely respected gay historian David Carter, who wrote a famous book on Stonewall and interviewed Marsha P. Johnson and Randy Wicker, Sylvia was not “having a cocktail in the park” as mentioned in Johnson’s version of events above. She was actually passed out in the park on heroin! Rivera, unfortunately, like Johnson, lived a rough life and was a child prostitute on the streets by age 11.
However, while Marsha, despite her own struggles, was generally liked by the LGBT community and could often be a kind individual, Sylvia was widely considered a dangerous and unreliable individual who caused more division within the LGBT than she healed.
http://gaytoday.com/interview/070104in.asp
“Paul D. Cain: Where’s Sylvia Rivera? Duberman’s Stonewall placed her at the bar on the first night of the riots, yet your book makes absolutely no mention of her (although you do mention her buddy, Marsha P. Johnson). Do you think that, like so many others, she fabricated her remarks about being there?
David Carter: Yes, I am afraid that I could only conclude that Sylvia’s account of her being there on the first night was a fabrication. Randy Wicker told me that Marsha P. Johnson, his roommate, told him that Sylvia was not at the Stonewall Inn at the outbreak of the riots as she had fallen asleep in Bryant Park after taking heroin. (Marsha had gone up to Bryant Park, found her asleep, and woke her up to tell her about the riots.) Playwright and early gay activist Doric Wilson also independently told me that Marsha Johnson had told him that Sylvia was not at the Stonewall Riots.
Sylvia also showed a real inconsistency in her accounts of the Stonewall Riots. In one account she claimed that the night the riots broke out was the first time that she had ever been at the Stonewall Inn; in another account she said that she had been there many times. In one account she said that she was there in drag; in another account she says that she was not in drag. She told Martin Duberman that she went to the Stonewall Inn the night the riots began to celebrate Marsha Johnson’s birthday, but Marsha was born in August, not June. I also did not find one credible witness who saw her there on the first night.”
Sylvia’s main modern significance is that her name is attached to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, which is ostensibly to help trans people navigate the legal system, obviously an admirable goal. However, that Project itself is highly problematic! At one point they made headlines for running interfence for Luis Morales, a gang member who raped and murdered a 13 year old girl named Ebony Williams, then lit her dead body on fire and threw her in the trash. Morales, aka Synthia China Blast, later became trans in prison. They downplayed her crimes to elicit sympathy for her treatment in the legal system.
This can’t be blamed on Rivera, but I think it is an indicator of the quality of people who have been left behind to carry on her “legacy”. They were in the news a few years back when Laverne Cox got in trouble for endorsing the org and its defense of Morales, though the Rivera Center claims Cox didn’t know the nature of Morales’ crimes. Either way, this “rebuttal” reeks of defensiveness and it clearly does not address what actually happened to Ebony Williams. Note the line about “troubling for people”. This seems to have only become an issue when it became a problem for Laverne Cox! There is no effort to apologize for supporting Morales.
“Consequently, when SRLP asked Laverne Cox to read a letter from Synthia China Blast, we did not have, and therefore did not share details with her about Synthia’s conviction. In the wake of the video’s publication, articles about the murder of 13-year old Ebony Nicole Williams are being shared. We understand that these articles are troubling for people, including Laverne Cox. Out of respect for concerns raised, we are removing the video.
SRLP will continue to pursue our End Solitary campaign as solitary confinement is torture. SRLP will continue to support Synthia’s removal from isolation and her access to educational programming inside prison. More broadly, SRLP will continue to push for policies that reduce the violence experienced by our incarcerated community members because we do not believe that any of our community members’ lives are disposable. Further, we do not believe that exiling community members who inflict harm will do anything to keep our communities safer. We do hope this process pushes forward conversations about transformative justice that do not decide who is deserving and undeserving of gender self-determination and safety.”
We will conclude with this largely positive piece from leftwing Z Magazine, which discusses some of the harsh realities of Sylvia Rivera’s life. This is not included to condemn Sylvia, as she was the victim of systemic racism and homophobia, and lived an unfathomably harsh life on the streets of Times Square. However, I do find it odd that, with the hundreds of trans POC and other LGBT activists out there fighting the good fight and doing amazing things in activism, family life, and the professional world, the LGBT have chosen Rivera and Johnson as the main icons of our fight for justice in this world.
Even if you admire Sylvia and Marsha for their years of trans activism AFTER Stonewall, you can still recognize this basic fact of the start of the Stonewall Riots: Marsha and Sylvia weren’t even there! I think we can “Do Better” in our selection of heroes to be memorialized in statues and monuments.
https://web.archive.org/web/20051113203206/http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/april02bronski.htm
…The obituaries that were published after her death were glowing. But it would be a mistake to completely romanticize Sylvia’s life. The daily horrors of racism, queer-hatred, and living hand-to- hand took their toll and often made Sylvia a difficult person to deal with. She also had a severe alcohol and substance abuse problem. Sylvia drunk or on drugs could be abusive, nasty, divisive, vicious, and vindictive. Much of this was born of frustration, self-protection, and an understandable bitterness for years of abuse
… Sylvia returned to Manhattan in the 1990s and lived on the Hudson piers as she grappled again with bouts of substance abuse. Still advocating for marginalized queer people she was banned, sometime in the mid-1990s, from the New York City’s Gay and Lesbian Community Center after she, on a frigid winter night, aggressively demanded that the Center take care of poor and homeless queer youth. The ban was lifted in 2000.
NOTE: This article uses the terms “she” and “her” to describe both Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. While neither of them claimed to be trans gender, and were not consistent in pronoun use, Sylvia did on occasion use “she/her” pronouns. I also would hope that some trans people will read this, and I wanted to be sensitive to the modern trans admirers of both of them and not misgender them. In addition to not misgendering, I will also not deadname them. They are so widely known as Marsha and Sylvia that using their real names would mean nobody knows who I am writing about.
