#it was a black trans woman who threw the first brick at stonewall after all | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

grubloved · 2 years

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Lily Alexandre is speaking to the camera, mouth close to the microphone, tone even and measured:

LILY A: "We turn movements into logos. We turn real people into icons, and erase their human-ness in the process.

No one has been more thoroughly mythologized than Marsha P Johnson and Silvia Riviera, leaders of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) and participants in the Stonewall uprising -- especially Marsha, whose image has taken on an almost messianic weight in the years since her death. An invocation of everything holy.

A widely spread account presents Marsha as the heroic black trans woman who threw the first brick at Stonewall, igniting the gay liberation movement. The truth is more complicated, as truths often are.

Marsha never identified as a trans woman, she showed up to the riot hours after it started, and it's unclear whether anyone threw a brick. Outside her activism, Marsha was also a whole person, and a fascinating one. She was a performer, and deeply religious. She was a caregiver to a man dying of AIDs complications while herself HIV positive. The myth of Marsha is an all-timer, and we can learn from it, but the full story offers so much more insight.

If anything, I think that's actually why younger white queers avoid engaging with it, and avoid engaging with our history in general. With her life history fleshed out, Marsha doesn't seem so far away anymore. These details that were peripheral to the myth become impossible to ignore. How she was a sex worker. How she was described as mentally ill and prone to lashing out at people. How she was intermittently homeless.

Suddenly, Marsha and Silvia remind easily scandalized white queers of people we know and treat poorly. Transfemmes of color. Sex workers. Homeless addicts. Heavily traumatized people. People who speak out and don't take shit, even when it would be polite to."

[ Clip of Silvia Riviera, a mic clutched in one hand, bent forward slightly, shouting into the mic with all her energy, "I have been thrown in jail, I have lost my job, I have lost my apartment -- for gay liberation! And you all treat me this way?!" She jabs a finger at the crowd with her free hand. "What the fuck's WRONG with you all?!" Her audio fades out as she straightens, tosses her hair.]

LILY A: And Marsha and Silvia's detractors, those who marginalized them, jeered at them -- suddenly they remind us of ourselves.

[Silvia switches hands, has gathered herself upright, one hip cocked. She gestures again. "You're all very brave now," she says. She turns away, lowers the mic for a moment, as the crowd erupts in boos, hisses, and yells.]

LILY A: "The space between past and present collapses. It becomes obvious that when we villainize traumatized members of our community, we're also villanizing our trailblazers. That complaints about drag queens and the male-assigned among us are complaints about Silvia and Marsha, whether or not they mean to be. That the queer internet's puritanical, optics-above-all moral code would condemn these militants as a "threat to children", and ban them from any Pride events we have a say in.

Lily Alexandre, "Why is Queer Discourse So Toxic?", June 30, 2022 <- click for link

#scraps book #queer #reading #thanks the few people who corrected me on the clip transcription 😭 im not good at faces and got mixed up

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keplercryptids · 4 years

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god, the pride/stonewall discourse is already starting. what’s incredibly frustrating is that there is misinformation being spread on both sides because the internet (and especially places like tumblr/twitter) have no sense of nuance. but multiple things can be true, y’all! and it’s especially important not to let TERFs appear to be the voices of reason who are sharing “the full picture.” the full picture is nuanced!

it’s important to note that there are MANY different accounts of what happened during the stonewall uprising. this makes sense. you’re talking about witness accounts from (likely drunk) people at a bar during an adrenalized, violent, chaotic event. of course people have different memories of what happened.

to the best of what we know, marsha p. johnson did not “throw the first brick.” she was at the stonewall inn the first night of the riots, but arrived there a few hours after they began (and honestly, if you think her contribution to the riots is less because she got there 2 hours later, you’re probably a TERF). marsha reported the timeline of this night repeatedly and as far as i can tell, never claimed to have been there when it started. the fact that some witnesses remember her being there from the start just goes to show what a prominent figure she was in her community and how important her presence was during the riots.

sylvia rivera may or may not have been present any night of the riots. however, her activism and overall contribution to the movement, as well as marsha’s, cannot be understated. they were champions for homeless trans youth. they made sure the LGBT movement never dropped off the T and got away with it. they pushed back against assimilationist LGB gatekeepers at every turn and they should be remembered and honored for that and more.

by multiple accounts including her own, stormé delarverie was the first one to start fighting with police that set off the events that followed. she yelled to the crowd, “why don’t y’all do something?” as she was being thrown, bleeding, into the back of a police van. she was also a gender nonconforming black woman, a lesbian, and a drag king. after stonewall, she was known to check in at lesbian bars and put a stop to any harassment or bullying she saw. she also regularly put on benefits for women and children’s shelters. she deserves to be remembered for the protector and powerful activist that she was.

the language for transgender people that we have today didn’t always exist, so we don’t really know how marsha or sylvia would identify today. we know they were gender nonconforming. we know they were queens. sylvia, based on her own statements, seems to have been gender fluid, adopting many gender identities over the course of her lifetime, sometimes simultaneously, and never seeing these identities as contradictions of each other. marsha, sylvia and stormé were gender nonconforming people of color, highly active in the LGBT+ community, and their contributions to the movement and their community cannot and should not be ignored.

who threw the actual, literal first punch is honestly besides the point. these people were critical to the spirit of the riots and the activism that followed. we can hold all these truths and honor these heroes as they deserve to be honored.

happy june. black lives matter. any TERF bullshit on this post will be deleted immediately.

#pride 2020 #pride #stonewall #lgbtq #lgbtq history #queer history #marsha p johnson #sylvia rivera #storme delarverie

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repost-this-image · 3 years

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Where we came from; where we’re going

(Cross-posted to Dreamwidth here.)

Stonewall Pride's 2021 theme is "Out of the darkness, into the light." It's gotten me thinking, and I feel that I have to say this. Forward it on, or don't. Think on it, or don't. I just need to get these words out of me and on the virtual page. For much of the modern era, what we are was a crime. Sodomy laws in most of the world, mostly made and enforced by Europeans as they colonized as much of the globe as they could, made same-sex relations punishable by death. There were a few transgender people, but they mostly stayed under the radar, as it was assumed that you couldn't change your sex by most people. When Hitler rounded up people into death camps, there were special symbols for Jewish people, Romani, political prisoners--and homosexuals, who were given the pink triangle. In 1945 the Allies liberated the residents of the camps, except for those with pink triangles, who were sent right back into prison. Because we were a crime. Alan Turing, who broke the Enigma code, was gay. When this was discovered, and he was about to stand trial, he committed suicide rather than suffer the indignity of being sentenced to death for being himself. In 1969, the gay nightclub Stonewall, a known scene for drag queens, gay men, and trans women, was raided by the police. Marsha P. Johnson, a black trans woman and sex worker, threw the first brick of the Stonewall riot. That was the first Pride. Our parades began as riots. We took the pink triangle and adopted it for our own. We took slurs like "gay," "lesbian," and "queer" and wore them as badges of honor. As someone more eloquent than I once said, "We took the bricks that were thrown at us and built houses out of them." And in all that confusion, I, as a teen in Alabama at the turn of the century, had to find my way without elder queers to help. When I was a teenager, I was homophobic. So of course, the idea that I liked girls was ridiculous to me. Because I liked boys. Because "I only appreciate the aesthetics of a pretty girl; everyone does." Because I was Catholic. At age 17, I was watching late-night TV, specifically TechTV's Wired For Sex episode about intersex people. One intersex person's journey was described with her finally deciding to live as a lesbian woman. At the time I was confused. "If she gets to choose what she is, why would she pick the one that's harder? Why not just be a straight man?" Gets to choose. As if gender were a prison that I was stuck inside of, but that she had been fortunate enough to escape. At age 21, I realized that I actually was sexually attracted to women as much as I was to men. I knew I could never tell my parents. My father had made no secret of the fact that if his child said "Dad, I'm gay," they'd be sleeping on the streets that night. When the fight for same-sex marriage became national news, I was on the right side of the fight. Because I'd realized that everyone who wants to get married deserves that right. That civil unions, while better than nothing, weren't the same as an outright marriage. At age 30, I watched two friends get married on the first Valentine's Day after same-sex marriage finally became legal throughout the United States. I felt nothing but joy at seeing their love finally recognized after years. At age 34, I finally discovered that I was genderfluid. My husband still denies it. He has never had reason to question his identity, has never had to hide an important part of himself from his own family. As a straight man, he's never had to think about it. Some states are trying to pass laws to prevent same-sex couples from adopting children, to shut trans people out of public restrooms, to shut trans children out of school sports, to force us all back into the closet where they never have to see us or think about us. The "gay panic" defense for the murder of trans women is still legal in more states than not. And queer folks still have to fight for even the basic right of survival in some countries. This Pride, let's celebrate those who have come through the other side of AIDS and COVID pandemics, through bigotry and suffering, to be here today; and honor those who didn't make it. Let's celebrate how far we've come, while looking forward at how much farther we have to go. Let's be people that Marsha P. Johnson would be proud to view as family.

#long post #LGBT history #queer history #LGBT #Pride #cw: homophobia #cw: transphobia

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michael-radi-the-glamorous-life · 5 years

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There Must Be More

“…than this Provincial life!”

Sorry, I just needed to have my Belle moment. That’s totally not what this post is about. I just adore that score.

Onward!

Over the past week I saw 3 shows - 2 Broadway and 1 Off-Broadway.

These shows were (in the order I saw them):

Scotland, PA

The Inheritance Part 1

Tootsie

Now, regardless of how I felt about each of these shows, or how much I did or did not enjoy them individually, they all had something in common per my experience in watching them.

At one point (at least) in every one of these shows I had the thought: “…But must we? This again? Isn’t there more out there? There must be more.”

Allow me to explain.

Enjoyment vs Analysis

Just a quick side note before I dive in.

I think it’s important here to know that I do not think that enjoyment and criticism are mutually exclusive. In fact, I personally believe they go hand in hand.

When someone asks why you didn’t enjoy something, most people are ready with their criticisms handy to defend their positions. But when someone asks me why I did enjoy something, I feel the same way. I like to know why I enjoyed it and be able to explain that to people.

And nothing is perfect. Nor is it a requirement to explain your likes and dislikes. But for me, enjoying something - or even loving something - does not mean that I find it to be perfect or above criticism.

I adore Back To The Future. One of my favorites growing up. But the movie’s got issues, both artistically and socially issues (ie soooo, we’re saying a white man invented rock’n’roll???).

Anywho. Onward!

Blindingly White

Okay. I know. I’m aware.

Most of the writing spaces and head artistic positions for Broadway and Off-Broadway shows are occupied by men. Generally white men. Generally cis, white men. Often even straight, cis, white men.

But in the world we are living in today, does that fact need to translate directly into the stories being told on the stage? At the very least, does it need to feature as prominently across the shows listed in the back of the Playbill as it currently does?

All three shows I just saw focused on cis, white men. And for two of them it was straight, cis, white men.

Now, is this necessarily a problem? No, not necessaaaaarily. But it says something. Actually, it says a lot of things.

Especially considering that the 2 shows featuring straight men were specifically about under-achieving straight, cis, white men who learned relatively shallow lessons and didn’t really end up changing - a genre that has filled our canons of literature, theatre, film, and TV for a very very long time.

Let’s be more specific.

Scotland, PA

A musical parody adapted from a movie parody of Macbeth.

Main character - Straight, cis, white man.

The guy is an under-achiever according to his wife, even though he’s happy with the life they have and it’s also clear he has aspirations for more, if the opportunity were to present itself.

The wife is played by a black woman and, similar to the Shakespeare play, she exists mostly to prop up the ambitions (or lack thereof) of her husband - even though she is the one who actually wants more and has the stomach to chase after it.

And then she’s scapegoated.

And goes insane. And regrets everything, but isn’t given the capacity to fulfill that character arc. So she must die instead. Of course.

“Classic women, am I right?!”

No. You are not.

So, as this man rises and takes more we are meant to root for him, even though we know he’s doing terrible things. But why? Why this story? Why this story again? Why this story again now without some sizable changes for more relevance? Is it really that interesting today?

It’s not a bad story - it wouldn’t endure otherwise - but there must be more.

The Inheritance Part 1

Full disclaimer: I loved it. I wept. I think it’s doing great work for this generation.

Main characters - All gay, cis, white men. And there are up to 6 main characters in this first part, depending on how you classify the term main character, and all of them fall into this category.

Now, this show is really about interpersonal struggles and relationships, and how that echoes across generations - particularly for the marginalized group that is gay men. It’s also a story about growth, change, hardship, and love. I really do think this play is doing beautiful work.

The remainder of the non-main character cast is mostly non-white, which is really awesome to see. However, so far in this play, the conversation amongst all of these people and characters is about the lives, stories, and struggles of the gay community as seen through white gay male eyes and experiences.

There are black and Latino characters on that stage, but we aren’t even touching their extra layers of struggle and experience. Meanwhile, the play is discussing the future of gay men and where they are potentially headed, as a group with its own vibrant culture. A culture that they even acknowledge to come from appropriations from the drag community, which appropriated from the ballroom community, which consists almost entirely of queer men of color.

This seems like a pretty sizable issue.

The play is focused on worries of continued and intensified marginalization, but it simultaneously has left out a gigantic piece of the conversation about marginalization by leaving out the additional layers of struggle for non-white gay men.

And this is not even to mention that - although other letter of the LGBTQ+ world are mentioned - the focus is entirely on gay men. What about the rest of the community? Isn’t it all the same history? The same inheritance?

Gay men can claim Stonewall all they want (and they do), but transwomen of color threw those bricks.

Gay men can claim the AIDS epidemic, but the affects of that disease were highly striated amongst sub-groups and especially men of color.

I loved this play. I cannot wait for Part 2. But I just kept thinking, “there’s more here.”

There must be more.

Tootsie

Okay, let’s do it. Let’s talk Tootsie.

I’m not going to go too in-depth here, mostly because there is a lot about this show that is well-crafted and plenty of people are enjoying it. And perhaps, for some people in these audiences, this show really does push the envelop in their minds. But we do have to say it…

This show probably should not exist. Not today, anyway.

Main character - Straight, cis, white man who pretends to be a straight, cis, white woman to book a job.

This man is apparently (objectively) talented too, which means he has many a leg-up in the world in comparison to the majority of people around him.

So, what’s keeping him from getting work?

He’s an angry and uncontrolled human who acts out and gets fired, which means he doesn’t retain contacts from his jobs since he burns bridges. And…

He’s getting older. (Like, 40? Is this one really a problem for men in the business? I remain unconvinced.)

Now, here are some merits about this story (stick with me):

A story of a straight, cis, white man who ruins his own chances at a steady and productive life because of his anger…this is relevant. This is extremely relevant. And if the show were about that particular person, their growth, and their personal journey to leave that toxicity behind, well, then we might have a good story here that is relevant to today.

His alter ego - for she does seem to be a character unto herself and completely disassociated from her male counterpart - Dorothy is actually quite a badass woman. She fights against sexism and ageism in a world rampant with it. And if this were a story about an actual woman fighting for these things in this world, this would be an excellent and relevant story.

But alas, this show is ultimately neither of these things.

Here’s what it actually contains:

The man learns lessons - but not enough.

He changes - but does he?

His alter ego is wonderful - but she doesn’t exist.

There’s a fight for and positive messages for women and feminism - but it’s led entirely by a man in a dress.

There’s a fight against ageism - but led by a man, and men don’t seem affected by this in the capacity that women are.

And not to mention the fact that there are some really cringy moments in this show that parade as feminism, ageism, and trans-positive moments, which really aren’t any of those things. Instead, they are part of a plot for this out-of-work man to get - and then retain - his job.

Is this show moving us backward? I don’t think it is. It could have become that, but it didn’t. And for that fact - adapting from a source material “of a different time” - I will tip my hat.

But is it moving us forward? Nope. Not at all. Not in the least.

So, I again ask: “Why this story? Why now? Is there really not more???”

There must be more.

There Is More

Okay, there is. So much more.

But it’s not being put out there into the commercial consciousness. And when it is, it’s not happening fast enough or as prevalently as it needs to.

And I don’t mean to rail against these particular shows - they had the bad luck of being the 3 newer shows that I happened to see within the same 4 days.

There are plenty of positives for them as well:

Scotland, PA had some awesome music.

The Inheritance Part 1 is beautiful and saying some very important things.

Tootsie made me laugh more than most musicals ever do.

But there is still more.

And we need to find it and put it out there. We need to continue moving forward and stop treading water. Let’s celebrate more people - other people.

There are countless good stories to tell, so let’s find them and tell them to the world with the prevalence that has been given to white men. We can, we should, and we will.

#glamorous life blog #glamorous life #theatre #theater #theatre artist #more #Broadway #Off-Broadway #Scotland PA #The Inheritance #Tootsie #cis white men #straight #gay #criticism

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only-embers-remain · 6 years

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For those of you who don’t know, June is Pride Month. A supposed celebration of everything Queer. And maybe it was that once. Yet I sit here as the month dawns wondering where I fit in a world where such huge things as the Pride Parades exist in every major city in the US. Once it was an act of Defiance against a world that did everything in its power to erase us. To kill us. To ruin us. And for that day that walk in the sun we were invincible for not matter what the world did we still were. No one could take the memories of us away even as they took our lives away.

Now don’t mistake me I know things are better than they once were. I am not going to get arrested today for wearing women’s clothes. I an reasonably expect to not be beat by those more privilege than I well at least in broad daylight. I can tell someone that I am trans and not have them look at me like I just spoke Russian. So in many ways we have much to be proud of. It makes sense in a twisted way that Pride month has become instead of a riot a celebration. That hey look world we are here still. Nice try though. Yet that isn’t the picture. For one month a year I am allowed to be me with out question. I get to be proud of my existence for one month a year. I can expect in more progressive stores and cities things sold catering to my particular demographic or well at least those of us who like rainbows. There isn’t any sign of the pink blue and white flags that represent my specific queerness. Yes let us not go to far after all. For one month of the year I can see books about my people or well those of us who are queer but have little else that hinders them from receiving all the privilege the world is willing to give. Sure you see lesbians, though only ever white ones, and gay couples. You might get to see the lone trans woman and glory in how courageous she is that she wears a dress. Oh my so courageous. It strikes me that Cis People don’t know the meaning of Courageous. They probably don’t after all when have they been so very beaten like we are.

So in this month of pride it is the month to remind me that it is only really this month in which I get to be seen. Though only as a courage piece. As a story for others to consume. Never for my own being. I still will struggle to get my medication that keeps me from ending it all. I will still never be able to find clothes designed to fit a woman who has had the horrific experience of having a testosterone based puberty. I will still get misgendered by even the people who have known me for a year. As if they can’t for some reason see me as the woman I am and not the man that society still tells them I should be. I still have to put in the performance of womanhood to be taken seriously though to be fair so do cis women but at least they only have their credibility on the line not their womanhood. Oh and let us not forget that for this month I get to see how the only way I am allowed to be is if I am white, well to do, preferably male, neurotypical, and quiet about my non-Christian ways. Sure all of those qualifications are specific to the United States but that is really only an addition to shut up the nay sayers. There is one book at the book store that is about non-white experience of queerness, none by those of us on the autistic spectrum, surely no look into how so many of us have PTSD especially in the trans community, no look to how wealth greatly effects this all. I when I say Trans woman there are probably only two names that come to your mind, Caitlyn Jenner, and Laverne Cox. I am proud that a black woman gets to be up there but can you name a single trans man who is famous. I didn’t think so. So yeah let us rename pride for what it really is. Gay White Pride, where the only queer that matters is homosexuals of the cis variety with a sprinkling of trans and crossdressers to add that little spadazzle that makes it feel like a real pride parade. Because crossdressers are totally the same thing as a trans woman, if not better because they make a show of it, make it fun and nothing like reality of the pain of our lives. No of course not. Why aren’t you smiling? You should be smiling.

And you may ask well isn’t any representation good but I want to tell you something, only just. Yes look at all the pretty queers how they sparkle so filled with hot air as to almost be nonexistent. No let us look at what my life is like and why I don’t feel like smiling anymore. Why I want to go back to the riot that was Pride before. See I live in the conflux of a number of underprivileged identifies. Thank god I am white or this would be all the harder. I am homeless and have to deal with the fact that because of my inability to be productive by societal standards I am unwelcome at the calm coffee shops of Seattle. I have to always be tethered to the places that give out low quality food to the teeming masses of us homeless. I haven’t eaten a properly cooked vegetable in over a year. No just carbs and protein for those starving homeless. Moving on from there let us remember that I am a few swayed votes away from loosing my insurance. With it would go my medications, of which I take five different ones on a daily basis. I have over a thousand dollars in pills needed a month to keep me sane. And by sane I mean keep me from cutting up my skin with the knife I have or popping all the pills I can get my hands on in the vain hope that I can go to sleep and never wake up. Depression is not pretty. Oh let us not forget that I also take pills that help me feel human, that let me feel right in my own mind. I run on estrogen and yet my body doesn’t produce it in quantities high enough to be at all functional. Imagine watching a video of some stranger that you have never known and yet they are doing things that you do and things you remember yet they aren’t you. But everything says they should be you. The peep next to you says hey look at this memory of you and I. But it isn’t you and it really never was. Never could be. I really can’t explain dissociation to those who have never felt it and as it effects everyone differently I don’t think there is a close approximation to be had. But remember to smile and be proud. Yeah I feel so accomplished this month in which society tells me oh don’t you worry everything is great now isn’t it. Oh and give us your nonexistent money. Thank you very little.

Yes let us be proud this month. Not outraged that in forty nine states the Trans Panic defense will get you off with murdering a trans woman. All you have to do is say she, or well lets be honest you will say he, didn’t tell you. That you were just so revolted that you had no control over your actions and had to kill her. To beat her. Into a bloody pulp. Oh yeah and that is legal in my state of Washington. It happened this year already in Texas. So yeah. Be proud and happy. Or that I live in one of the ‘gayest’ cities in the US that has a wonderfully gay neighborhood that comes with rainbow crosswalks. So gay. Yeah a neighborhood where trans women can’t be out after dark for fear of being beaten to death. I personally know of six incidents in the first five months of twenty eighteen. All on people I know and I wouldn’t hear of them otherwise. Let’s not look into the violence against trans people of all stripes on the quote gayest neighborhood in the gayest of cities. That is when the violence isn’t being done by the police of course. Not that that happens. Never. Remember smile and be proud. It is our month to exist. But only when we smile of course. Can you see the cracks yet?

Let us not forget history. Every moment of queer liberation has come at the sweat and blood of trans women, often women of color. Stonewall that great moment of rioting. Oh oops I forgot we leave off the riot part. Or that the police were rounding up everyone no mater what they had done. We can make movies of it. Just not with the trans woman who threw the first brick. Who kept the fight going long after the streets had been cleaned and the windows fixed. Yes Marsha P. Johnson is not needed in our gay history. Or of the countless queer people of color who showed up to those first pride parades which were little more than an excuse to pick a fight with the system that hated us. Let us not forget what time we celebrate and why. To honor that first riot, well first recored riot. Same month and to many same day or close to it. Or how trans people have been pushing for every legal reform. Who pushed the 2003 case that got to the supreme court and denounces sodomy laws in all states. Oh little one here several states still have those laws on the books. Oops. Or of Marriage equality. Fuck that we don’t have that. We have federal recognition of a piece of paper. Are our children protected from being torn from us? No. Are we allowed the same medical rights to our loved ones as a straight couple? No. Sure some states are better than others. But not till all are on the same page should we celebrate. I remember being told we had won the fight after that. Ha. By a Drag Queen at a pride parade. A crossdresser who does so for show. I bet you won’t misgender her when she is in costume. Of course not? But what are my pronouns? Yeah I know. So hard to remember. But that fight isn’t over and there are others more important. Conversation therapy. As if you can abuse away the queer. And Abuse it is. Legal in over three quarters of the states. Despite the fact that it tends to kill those it seeks to ‘cure’. But remember we are smiling. Oh and buying. Let us not forget that.

See Pride in Seattle has a long line. Where are the trans people? The fighters of justice? The youth who are our future? At the back behind the likes of Amazon’s wonderful float filled with cis Drag Queens, half of whom are straight while we are at it. Then comes Target, and Microsoft. What the fuck has Microsoft ever done for queer rights? Nothing. Not a damn thing. But they get to be up front so they can advertise, I mean smile and be proud. Sure at least target protects their queer employees. Has desegregated its toy section. Oh my gosh a toy is a toy not specific to gender. What ever will we do? Right. Smile and be proud. For we come after profits. After payments. After the straights. After the pretty shiny ones. Funny isn’t this a queer parade or is it?

So in this month of pride is it any wonder I am left wondering if I should be proud at all. That I wonder why instead of making me want to smile it just brings up more pain and tears. But obviously Pride month has never been for me. Maybe it is for the cis white gay men. Maybe. But I am still here and I will still fight. I won’t be squished by that ever present society. Or well at least I try not to be. There are cracks in the mask and maybe that is where you might find pride. Where the germs gather. Because we aren’t pretty. We aren’t white. We aren’t smiling. But we our proud.

#queer #lgbtq #pride #seattle #In which I rant #Oh no so serious #Anger

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transgenderlies · 7 years

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Countering transgender lies about Stonewall

Transgenders consistently lie about what happened at the Stonewall Inn in 1969. Their lie holds that the Stonewall riot was variously spurred by or chiefly carried out by transgenders, specifically “transwomen of colour” and even more specifically an “instigator” named Ray “Sylvia” Rivera. If you’d like all Stonewall-related transgender lies collected in one place, I would refer you to the so-called Transadvocate.

Of course this isn’t what happened. It was illegal to appear in public in the attire of the opposite sex in New York in 1969. You couldn’t just sashay down to the Stonewall of a Friday night for a watered-down drink served in a dirty glass, at least not without expecting hassles from cops. The Stonewall Inn was not an early Woody’s with weekly drag shows. The primary clientele was gay males, with some lesbians, and they were dressed like men and women, respectively, in most cases. Whatever “transgenders” frequented the Stonewall were actually drag queens, though that is a distinction without a difference here.

The facts are well established, except to lying transgenders. We have not merely the eyewitness accounts of gay men who were at the Stonewall that night (or the next two nights, or some combination), as in PBS’s Stonewall Uprising. We further have the direct statements from Sylvia Rivera herself, as recorded by recognized historians.

Eric Marcus, Making Gay History

Actually, it was the first time I had been to the friggin’ Stonewall. The Stonewall wasn’t a bar for drag queens. Everybody keeps saying it was. The drag queen spot was the Washington Square Bar, at Third St. and Broadway. This is where I get into arguments with people. They say, “Oh, no, it was a drag-queen bar, it was a black bar.” No. Washington Square Bar was the drag-queen bar.

If you were a drag queen, you could get into the Stonewall if they knew you. And only a certain number of drag queens were allowed into the Stonewall at that time. [...]

That first year after Stonewall, we were petitioning for a gay-rights bill for New York City, and I got arrested for petitioning on 42nd St. I was asking people to sign the petition.

I was dressed casually that day – makeup, hair, and whatnot. The cops came up to me and said, “You can’t do this.” I said, “My Constitution says that I can do anything that I want.” “No, you can’t do this. Either you leave or we’re going to arrest you.” I said, “Fine, arrest me.” They very nicely picked me up and threw me in a police car and took me to jail.

Martin Duberman, Stonewall

Washington Square was Sylvia’s special favo[u]rite. It opened at three in the morning and catered primarily (rather than incidentally as was the case with Stonewall) to transvestites[.] [...]

If she was going out at all... she would go to Washington Square. She had never been crazy about Stonewall, she reminded Tammy: Men in makeup were tolerated there, but not exactly cherished. [...]

If the raid went according to the usual pattern, the only people who would be arrested would be those without IDs, those dressed in the clothes of the opposite gender, and some or all of the employees. Everyone else would be let go with a few shoves and a few contemptuous words. The bar would soon reopen and they would all be back dancing. It was annoying to have one’s Friday night screwed up, but hardly unprecedented.

Note 39:

Section 887(7) of the New York State Criminal Code was the one traditionally invoked by the police against transvestites. The law was supposedly ignored on Halloween, though the police-department handbook specified that even then, someone dressed in costume had to be wearing a certain number of garments “appropriate” to their sex.

Note 40:

The eyewitness accounts in RAT (July 1969) specifically credits “one guy” (not a lesbian or a queen) for precipitating a scuffle by refusing to be put into the paddy wagon.... At least two people credit Sylvia herself with provoking the riot.... But I’ve found no corroboration for either account[,] and Sylvia herself, with a keener regard for the historical record, denies the accuracy of both versions. She does remember “throwing bricks and rocks and things” after the mêlée began, but takes no credit for initiating the confrontation.

David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution

pp. 261–2:

The question of who gets credit for starting the riots is one that deserves consideration. The question, however, contains a premise: that an individual or group of individuals can be singled out as the prime mover in a complex process that many person s collectively created. This is important for two reasons. First, as John O’Brien pointed out, there was a continuum of resistance ranging from silent persons who ignored the police orders to move to those who threw objects at the police. O’Brien maintains that it was because of those person standing around and blocking the streets and sidewalks and keeping the police from being able to operate efficiently that he and others were able to engage in their tactics as effectively as they did: if there had been only about fifteen youths lobbing objects at the police the young men would have been quickly caught or chased away.

Second, I wrote the account of the first night to reflect my understanding of what happened, namely, that until the definitive outbreak of rioting when the police retreated inside the Stonewall Inn, there was throughout the evening both a gradual buildup of anger and, correspondingly, a gradual escalation in the release of that anger. In the course of that buildup there were numerous turning points, some more critical than others. With these qualifications noted, I think it is clear that special credit must be given to gay homeless youths, to transgendered men, and to the lesbian who fought the police.¹⁰

Footnote 10 from above:

Charles Kaiser suggested to the author that Stormé DeLarverie (see The Gay Metropolis: 1940–1996 [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997], p. 198) was this woman, but she could not have been. To cite only a few of the problems with this thesis, DeLarverie’s story is one of escaping the police, not of being taken into custody by them, and she has claimed that on that night she was outside the bar, “quiet, I didn’t say a word to anybody, I was just trying to see what was happening,” when a policeman, without provocation, hit her in the eye (“Stonewall 1969: A Symposium,” June 20, 1997, New York City). DeLarverie is also an African-American woman, and all the witnesses interviewed by the author describe the woman as Caucasian.

And here’s what The Gay Metropolis actually says:

Several spectators agreed that it was the action of a cross-dressing lesbian – possibly Stormé DeLarverie – which would change everyone’s attitude forever. DeLarverie denied that she was the catalyst, but her own recollection matched others’ descriptions of the defining moment. “The cop hit me and I hit him back,” DeLarverie explained [in Kaiser’s own interview with her on 1995.12.09].

Continuing:

Among these, we can name three individuals known to have been in the vanguard: Jackie Hormona, Marsha Johnson, and Zazu Nova.

A common theme links those who resisted first and fought the hardest, and that is gender transgression. While we do not know how the lesbian who fought the police saw herself, we do know that her clothing was masculine, in keeping with her general demeano[u]r. We know from Pine’s testimony that the first significant resistance that he encountered inside the bar came from transvestites, and Joel S. places them among the first outside the bar to resist. Marsha Johnson and Zazu Nova were both transvestites, and, as the reader has seen, the street youth were, generally speaking, effeminate men. All available evidence leads us to conclude that the Stonewall Riots were instigated and led by the most despised and marginal elements of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered community. My research for this history demonstrates that if we wish to name the group most responsible for the success of the riots, it is the young, homeless homosexuals, and, contrary to the usual characterizations of those on the rebellion’s front lines, most were Caucasian; few were Latino; almost none were transvestites or transsexuals; most were effeminate; and a fair number came from middle-class families.

Footnote 11 from that same chapter:

It is remarkable – and no doubt inevitable given human psychology – that in the popular imagination the number of transvestites at the riots is always exaggerated. Readers will note that in the [Fred] McDarrah photos of the riots there is one transgendered person[,] and none of the persons I interviewed, some of whom knew her, ever saw her actively involved in the riots. (Note that the McDarrah photographs, which do feature the street youths, were taken late on Saturday night during one of the lulls in rioting, when nothing in particular was happening....) The Ambrosini photo does not show a single transvestite. Craig Rodwell told researcher Michael Scherker that “one of the myths about Stonewall is it was all drag queens. I mean, drag queens are part of what went on. Certainly one of the most courageous, but there were maybe twelve drag queens. In thousands of people.”

Transgenders lie about Stonewall in part because they are fundamentally dishonest (about themselves and about human anatomy, to give two examples), but they do it here to establish primacy over the legitimately constituted lesbian and gay community. The way they tell it, we owe them because they bravely instigated the Stonewall Riots that led to actual gay and lesbian liberation. (Even that last part isn’t true just in the U.S. context, as veterans of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis will attest.) As far as they’re concerned, transgender is the supercategory and we gays and lesbians are mere variations of trans. And Stonewall proves it.

Well, all of that is untrue, honey, and nobody’s buying what you’re selling, literally or figuratively.

(Original post)

#Gay #Stonewall #TransgenderLies #Transgender #StonewallRebellion #StonewallUprising #Trans

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facts-about-bisexuality · 7 years

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Fact: The first Pride was a riot. On June 28, 1969, the police were raiding a gay bar in New York called the Stonewall Inn. They were harassing people, arresting them, humiliating them and invading their space to be a community. They raided gay bars and made arrests regularly. But June 28 was different.

People were gathering outside to watch the arrests. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman, was at the Stonewall Inn celebrating her birthday. And I guess she must have had enough, because when they came for her, she said, “I got my civil rights!” and threw a shot glass against the mirror. Others joined her. They shouted, they threw bottles and bricks, and they drove the harassing cops out. They rioted for six days and the police failed to stop them. There were drag queens, QPOC, butch lesbians, sex workers, feminine gay men, queer people and gender nonconforming people of every description. All unified in a wider community of people who were marginalized by straight and cis society, people who were resisting those who kept them down.

And the next year, activists organized a remembrance on the one year anniversary. They came back together again and again, year after year. Forty-eight years later we are still coming back together. It is a celebration of what we have fought for and accomplished, both individually and collectively. But it is also a reminder of the diverse community we belong to, the people we must uplift and support and fight alongside all year long.

#pride #activism #queer history #lgbtq #lgbtqiap #lgbtqiap+#pride month #intersectionality

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doctor-ciel · 4 years

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I’ve seen a lot of posts on here talking about the Stonewall Riots. And that’s good! But so far all the one’s I’ve seen have been giving the credit of starting them to Marsha P. Johnson, and while she was an amazing lady who absolutely was a huge figure in the gay rights movement before her death, and it’s important to recognize black leaders in the movement especially now, I just wanted to make sure people knew that she herself actually said that she wasn’t the one who started the riots, and in fact she didn’t get to the inn the first night until the building was already on fire. It is important to know about both her and the woman who most likely did start the riots, Stormé DeLarverie, so I’ll give information on them here.

I’m also going to preface this by saying that my only credentials for writing this is that I’ve recently written a thesis paper on the Stonewall Riots, so I’ve done my fair share of research on it. Apart from that, I’m not an expert in this. I’m also just going to use wikipedia for research and links because the information there is legit and I’m not pulling out all the sources I used on my paper.

This post has been edited to use Stormé’s proper pronouns.

Who did start the riots, you ask? Most likely, it was Stormé DeLarverie. (Tumblr’s not allowing me to add a link in the text to his wikipedia page, so here is the link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormé_DeLarverie) He, as well as many other people, say that it was his scuffle with police that were trying to arrest him, and him asking the crowd “why don’t you guys do something?”, that started the riots. And while its less certain whether he was the butch who threw the first punch, all accounts agree that he was one of the butches who was fighting the police during the riots.

Stormé was a butch lesbian with a black mother and white father. He was well known for being the “guardian of lesbians in the Village” and was also known as “the Rosa Parks of the gay community.” He was an MC, singer, bouncer, bodyguard and volunteer street patrol worker. After the riots, he was a bouncer for several lesbian bars in NYC, was a member of the Stonewall Veterans' Association, and was a volunteer street patrol worker. This is a quote from his obituary in The New York Times:

“Tall, androgynous and armed – [he] held a state gun permit – Ms. DeLarverie roamed lower Seventh and Eighth Avenues and points between into [his] 80s, patrolling the sidewalks and checking in at lesbian bars. [He] was on the lookout for what [he] called "ugliness": any form of intolerance, bullying or abuse of [his] "baby girls." ... "[He] literally walked the streets of downtown Manhattan like a gay superhero. ... [He] was not to be messed with by any stretch of the imagination.”

Aside from LGBTQ activism, he also organized and performed at benefits for battered women and children. When asked why he did this, he said "Somebody has to care. People say, 'Why do you still do that?' I said, 'It's very simple. If people didn't care about me when I was growing up, with my mother being black, raised in the south.' I said, 'I wouldn't be here.'"

This isn’t to say that Marsha P. Johnson wasn’t an important figure in the riots or the gay rights movement. While she didn’t throw the first brick, she did climb up a lamppost on the second night of the riots and drop a bag, which had a brick in it, on the windshield of a cop car. She also did lots of important work after the riots. She joined the Gay Liberation Front and participated in the first Christopher Street Liberation Pride rally(aka the first pride parade). In 1970 she staged a sit-in protest at Weinstein Hall at New York University alongside fellow GLF members after administrators canceled a dance when they found out it was sponsored by gay organizations. Her and Sylvia Rivera also co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) organization and the STAR House, a shelter for gay and trans street kids.

The two of them also attended many gay liberation marches and other radical political actions. In 1973 they were banned from participating in the gay pride parade by the gay and lesbian committee who were administering the event stating they "weren't gonna allow drag queens" at their marches, claiming they were "giving them a bad name". Their response was to march defiantly ahead of the parade. One quote of hers you might be familiar with is from a gay rights rally at New York City Hall. When asked by a reporter why the group was demonstrating, she shouted "Darling, I want my gay rights now!"

In the 1980s, she was a respected organizer and marshal with ACT UP. When George Segal's Stonewall memorial was moved to Christopher Street to recognize the gay liberation movement, Marsha said “How many people have died for these two little statues to be put in the park to recognize gay people? How many years does it take for people to see that we're all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race? I mean how many years does it take for people to see that we're all in this rat race together."

So just in summary, while it wasn’t Marsha P. Johnson who started the riots but most likely Stormé DeLarverie, it’s important to know about both of them and the work they did after the riots because they both were important figures in the gay rights movement. But when you are talking about the riots, please do remember that Marsha wasn’t the one who started them, and that this is a fact she’s stated herself. I’m seeing a lot of great posts going around that give credit for this to her, and I can’t reblog them because of the misinformation. Happy pride, everyone! And don’t forget that the first pride was a riot.

#lgbtq #stonewall riots #marsha p johnson #sylvia rivera #stormé delarverie #pride month

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uno-utero · 7 years

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@skwhy you dense troll

http://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/episode-1-1/ "It was always the effeminate male or the butch woman, that’s what society always looked at. We are the ones that went out there and we didn’t take no shit from them. We didn’t have nothing to lose. Actually, you know, at that point in time, you know, I understand the ones that held their heads down low, because they probably had very nice jobs and they had a family to go to. I was born to be an effeminate child. My grandmother used to come home and find me all dressed up. Just like… I’d get my ass whipped, of course, you know. “Well we don’t do this. You’re one of the boys. I want you to be a mechanic.” I said, no, but I want to be a hairdresser. I want to do this. And I want to wear these clothes." Sylvia Rivera Sylvia: Because, straight society always looks, “Oh, well a faggot always dresses in drag or he’s too effeminate.” You’ve got to be who you are. Passing is like saying a light skin black woman or black male passing for white. And I refuse to pass. Eric: You couldn’t have passed. Sylvia: No, I couldn’t pass. Eric: Not in this lifetime. Sylvia: No, not in this lifetime. I just like being myself. It’s fun being… It’s fun being Sylvia. It’s fun playing the game. •••••••••• https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/takingnote/2015/08/26/who-threw-the-first-brick-at-stonewall/?referer= We know nothing conclusively. Besides, it’s wrongheaded to be overly concerned with pinning one clear-cut act on one identifiable person, in a misguided attempt to make say that so-and-so rather than so-and-so “started” Stonewall, and that therefore history teaches us that X rather than Y is true. A heterogeneous street crowd started the resistance at Stonewall, not a particular person. Are there reliable accounts and historical records from that night? The most we are ever likely to be able to say about the origin of the riot is that, according to newspaper reports and eyewitnesses, there were a couple of hundred patrons inside the bar when police raided it, and as police attempted to make arrests and load people into the transport vehicles, an agitated, resistive crowd of several hundred more formed on the street. At some point members of the crowd began to hurl bricks, bottles, coins and garbage at the police, and the situation escalated from there. ••••• http://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/episode-11-johnson-wicker/ 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. They didn’t never arrested anybody at the Stonewall. All they did was line us up and tell us to get out. •••• https://www.quora.com/Psychology-Whats-the-difference-between-drag-queens-cross-dressers-and-transvestites This question is an important one, because there are many reasons a person may dress or act in a manner associated with their "opposite" gender, and in the case of transexual children societal understanding can save lives. Be aware most of the terms we are discussing are vernacular labels, and to a degree reflect stereotypes which are not in real life so simple, as gender expression and identity can be very nuanced and complex. Cross Dressing A "Cross dresser" is a general term for any person who routinely wears clothing typical of another gender, regardless of their reasons for doing so. Transvestites A "transvestite" is typically a male, often heterosexual, who regularly wears female clothing as a sexual fetish or as an act of expression of social defiance etc. A fictional example of a transvestite might be the character "Klinger" from the TV series M.A.S.H. who feels compelled to cross dress as a form of protest as well as a form of defiance and self expression. For some, the term transvestite is a perjorative. Transexualism A "transexual" is an individual withgender dysphoria, who deeply feels their mind and spirit is of different gender than the body they were born in. Many transexuals never cross dress at all, or do so only during a phase where they transition to the gender they wish to live or are discovering their transexuality. The distress they feel is often profound and has a major impact on their lives. Suicide rates for untreated transexuals are in excess of 30 percent, and account for a significant number of childhood and teen suicides as young transexuals reach puberty and experience their body and societal expectations inexorably changing in a manner which for them is entirely wrong. These extremely profound feelings of being in the wrong kind of body are not temporary, most transexuals report a disconnect between their body gender and their mind from their earliest memories. A popularized expression of transexualism would be the phrase "a woman trapped in a man's body." Transexualism is a gender condition distinct from sexuality. A transexual may be heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual and studies suggest they reflect the rest of society in regards to the percentage of those who identify as homosexual etc if you consider their declared gender as "correct." The accepted treatment for gender disphoria is, on confirmation/recognition of the diagnosis, often sex change. The degree of sex change may be as simple as full time cross dressing to allow an external expression of the "true" gender or one which involves hormone therapy and/or surgical reconstruction. Remarkably, suicide rates for treated transexuals drops to below 2 percent. A transexual who fully transitions gender does so at great pain and expense, including sacrificing their ability to become a parent and going through a series of excruciating major surgeries. When considered along with the extraordinarily high rate of suicide if left untreated, this should indicate the remarkable degree of distress a transexual individual can feel when their body does not match their actual gender. Gender is a central aspect of identity, with great impact on an individual developmentally as well as in all aspects of interpersonal relationships and societal role. Gender disphoria is remarkable as one of the few psychological disorders which is regularly and succesfully treated through surgical intervention, and it seems likely that in the future the biological root causes may become known. In the future newborn babies may be assigned gender not only as a result of cursory visual examination but in conjunction with brain scan and DNA analysis. Our relatively new understanding of transsexualism very strongly suggests that society should consider adopting measures to detect and assist transexual children prior to puberty instead of simply condemning them as "freaks" or "perverts." Most transexuals desire nothing more than to live a "normal" life where their gender is simply accepted and as unremarkable as anyone else's. "Drag" A "Drag Queen" is a campy and sometimes perjorative term for a person, typically a male, who cross-dresses as a form of performance art or theatre. Often this involves exaggeration or parody of gender differences through dress and behavior as a means of provoking audience reaction. Contrasts The psychology of these different forms of transgenderism is very different in nature. For example: A biologically male drag queen might crossdress in a way which is exaggeratedly "effeminate," and seek attention. Cross dressing would only be for the sake of audience reaction and be entirely public. However a born-male transexual would be more likely to cross dress in a way as to pass as unremarkably "feminine" and typically seeks to pass unnoticed. This transexual would likely argue that they are in fact female, and that their body is what is inappropriate to their true gender, and any cross dressing they engage in would be as likely to be for comfort while at home, in other words an "audience reaction" or public notice is about the last thing they would want. While a male transvestite might relate a story of wearing a female relative or friends clothing and becoming sexually excited when young. Clothing while cross dressing might be highly sexualized and any public cross dressing is typically intended to spark a reaction. In short, while the public may lump anyone who cross dresses together under a typically perjorative stereotype, these forms of trans-gender behavior are completely distinct. ••••••• https://igfculturewatch.com/2015/08/11/the-stonewall-myth/ Back in 1999 IGF posted Stonewall Revisitedby historian Eric Marcus, who noted, “The story of what really happened at Stonewall has yet to be distorted and embellished beyond the point of recognition, but it’s well on its way.” And in 2002, we ran The Myth of the Transsexual Stonewall by Dale Carpenter, who wrote: “It is wrong to characterize the Stonewall Inn as having been a sanctuary for genderqueers (unless that term encompasses non-transgendered gay men).” Eric Marcus wrote: The Stonewall Inn attracted an eclectic crowd, from teenage college students like Morty Manford to conservatively dressed young men who stopped in with their dates after the theater or opera. “It was a different mind-set then,” recalled Dawn Hampton. “On weekends, men dressed up. A lot of them were dating and they would dress in coat and tie.” … The Stonewall Inn was not a generally welcoming place for drag queens, although as Martin Duberman notes, “…a few favored full-time transvestites, like Tiffany, Spanola Jerry, a hairdresser from Sheepshead Bay, and Tammy Novak… were allowed to enter Stonewall in drag…”

#skwhy #transsexual #stonewall #LGBT #radical feminism #radfem #feminism

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cds-arts · 7 years

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Marsha P. Johnson // trailblazers

Marsha P. Johnson was the black, trans*woman who threw the first brick during the Stonewall Riots – the “shot heard round the world” for the LGBT rights movement. As a trans*woman and later AIDS activist, Marsha’s story is one that had mostly been erased from history. These stories are, after all, not ones that the people in power are often comfortable with. But with an increase in awareness about Stonewall – Barack Obama mentioned the event in his inaugural speech and the location was just recently designated as a National Monument– Marsha and the other trans*women of color who led that fight are finally starting to get their due. When I first started this project, I made a decision to leave these drawings faceless. I could probably try to give you some lofty reason for that, but honestly I’m just not that good at them. Looking at pictures of Marsha, though, I knew I had to include that big, beautiful smile. It’s her most striking feature and I think it makes her look hopeful.

#trailblazers #feminism #lgbt #transwomen #marsha p johnson #history #black history #artists on tumblr #women

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biofunmy · 5 years

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When Resistance Became Too Loud to Ignore

At times the fight for civil rights is a straight road pocked with speed bumps; at other times a maddening spiral of detours. It was a battlefield in the early hours of June 28, 1969, when a small group of gay, lesbian and transgender people, herded by police out of a Greenwich Village bar called the Stonewall Inn, just said no: shoved back; threw bricks, bottles, punches. As the police defensively barricaded themselves inside the bar, the fight — since variously termed a riot, an uprising, a rebellion — spread through the Village, then through the country, then through history.

It’s still spreading, expanding the way the term “gay” has expanded to include lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and other categories of identity. And for this summer’s half-century Stonewall anniversary, substantial displays of art produced in the long wake of the uprising are filling some New York City museums and public spaces.

The largest of them is the two-part “Art After Stonewall, 1969-1989” shared by Grey Art Gallery, New York University, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum in Soho. A trio of small archival shows at the New-York Historical Society adds background depth to the story. And at the Brooklyn Museum, “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall,” 28 young queer and transgender artists, most born after 1980, carry the buzz of resistance into the present.

Grey Art Gallery and Leslie-Lohman Museum

‘Art After Stonewall, 1969-1989’

This survey, organized by the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, where it will later appear, is split into two rough chunks defined by decades, with material from the ’70s mostly at Leslie-Lohman and from the ’80s at Grey. Unsurprisingly, the Leslie-Lohman half is livelier. A lot of what’s in it was hot off the political burner when made, responsive to crisis conditions. The modest scale of the gallery spaces makes the hanging feel tight and combustible. And as a time of many “firsts,” the early years had a built-in excitement.

There was, of course, the thrill of the uprising itself, captured by the Village Voice beat photographer Fred W. McDarrah in an on-the-spot nighttime shot of protesters grinning and vamping outside the Stonewall. (One of them, the mixed-media artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt has sparkling, tabletop-size sculptures in both sections of the show.) Activist groups quickly formed, and a way of life that had once been discreetly underground pushed out into the open.

The Gay Liberation Front, aligning itself with antiwar and international human rights struggles, coalesced within days after Stonewall, soon followed by the Gay Activists Alliance, which focused specifically on gay and lesbian issues. It was clear pretty fast that both were predominantly male, white and middle class — misogyny, racism and classism have plagued L.G.B.T. politics from the start — and further groups splintered off: Radicalesbians, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), and later, the Salsa Soul Sisters. All the energy produced, among other things, the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March (now the NYC Pride March).

Many of the Stonewall-era trailblazers, like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera — one black, the other Latinx, both self-identified drag queens — were longtime veterans of the West Village gay scene. But for many other people the event prompted a first full public coming out, which was no light matter.

In 1969, even mild affectional acts between same-sex couples were illegal in much of the United States, as was cross-dressing. An arrest — and there were many — could instantly end a career, destroy a family, shut down a future. Bullying gay men was considered normal; violence was acceptable.

As a gay person, you went through the world watching your movements, monitoring your speech, worrying about how much of yourself, just by being yourself, you were giving away. This could make for a lonely life. If, for some reason, you were heedless, or incapable, of acting straight, good luck to you.

So when safety arrived in the form of an army of out-and-proud lovers and protesters, the relief was tremendous. And you can feel the rush of at Leslie-Lohman, in photographs of the first marches in New York and Los Angeles taken by participants like Cathy Cade, Leonard Fink, Diana Davies, Kay Tobin Lahusen (who, in a wall label, is credited as being the first openly gay American woman photojournalist).

Particularly strong among these images is Bettye Lane’s shot of a raging Sylvia Rivera confronting a jeering gay crowd — they had just been applauding an anti-trans speech by the lesbian feminist leader Jean O’Leary — at the 1973 New York march. But no picture can compare in gut-level impact with the short glitchy surviving video of Rivera in action that day. (You can find it on YouTube. I urge you to watch it.)

Women and transgender people are the heart of the Leslie-Lohman half of the show, not only in its documentary components but in the art chosen by the curator Jonathan Weinberg, working with Tyler Cann of the Columbus Museum of Art and Drew Sawyer of the Brooklyn Museum.

Standouts include a Tee A. Corinne-designed coloring book consisting of exquisite line drawings of vulvae; Harmony Hammond’s sculpture of two clothbound ladderlike forms leaning protectively together; and Louise Fishman’s 1973 “Angry Paintings,” acts of controlled gestural chaos that name heroic lesbian names (the critic Jill Johnston, the anthropologist Esther Newton, Ms. Fishman’s partner at the time) and speak of emotions once suppressed, now released.

The Grey Gallery half of the show, which brings us into the 1980s, makes a quieter impression. Partly this is because of a more spacious installation spread over two floors, and to the more polished-and-framed look of much of the work. Political content is, with vivid exceptions, subtle, indirect, which is not in itself a bad thing, though an earlier charge of communal energy is diminished. We’re basically now in a different, more market-conscious, canon-shaping art world, one closer to the museum than to the street.

And though we’re in the era of AIDS, the sense of urgency that absolutely defined that time is missing. This is not to say there’s a shortage of good work. The show would be valuable if it did nothing more than showcase artists like Laura Aguilar, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Jerome Caja, Lenore Chinn, Maxine Fine, Luis Frangella and Marc Lida, all seldom, if ever, seen in New York now.

Here again photography opens a window on cultural histories that would otherwise be lost to memory. Dona Ann McAdams’ shots of performances at the lesbian-feminist W.O.W. (Women’s One World) Café, and other East Village clubs, are reminders of the radical talents — John Bernd, Karen Finley, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller — that this brief time and vanished environment nurtured.

In the end, though, it was two text-pieces, familiar but reverberant, that stayed in my mind. One, a 1989 print by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, was originally enlarged to billboard size and installed on Christopher Street, near where the Stonewall Inn still stands. It’s plain black field is empty except for two unpunctuated lines of small white type read, as if floating up from delirium: “People With AIDS Coalition 1985 Police Harassment 1969 Oscar Wilde 1895 Supreme Court 1986 Harvey Milk 1977 March on Washington 1987 Stonewall Rebellion 1969.”

The other piece is a 1988 poster designed by the AIDS activist collective Gran Fury. In large letters it commands us to “Take Collective Direct Action to End the AIDS crisis.” In smaller type it acknowledges that, “With 42,000 dead, art is not enough.”

In an ethically pressurized political present, it’s a message I find myself carrying away from a lot of recent contemporary shows.

New York University Bobst Library

‘Violet Holdings: LGBTQ+ Highlights From the N.Y.U. Special Collections’

With the Stonewall Inn — now a national monument (and a bar again; it was a bagel shop in the 1980s) — in its neighborhood, New York University has scheduled several additional events around the anniversary, among them a homegrown archival exhibition called “Violet Holdings: LGBTQ+ Highlights from the N.Y.U. Special Collections,” on view at Bobst Library, across the park from Grey Art Gallery.

Organized by Hugh Ryan, it tracks the history of queer identity back to the 19th century with documents related to Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952), an American actor, suffragist and friend of Virginia Woolf, forward with material on pathbreaking organizations like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, and close to the present in the form of ephemera associated with the musician and drag king Johnny Science (1955-2007), and the D.J. Larry Levan (1954-1992), who, in the 1980s, presided godlike at the gay disco called the Paradise Garage, then a short walk from the N.Y.U. campus.

New-York Historical Society

‘Stonewall 50’

The Paradise Garage, or “Gay-rage,” has high visibility in “Letting Loose and Fighting Back: LGBTQ Nightlife Before and After Stonewall,” one of a cluster of dense micro-show at New-York Historical Society. The club’s metal street sign is here, along with some theme-dance fliers, and a mash-note drawing of Levan by Keith Haring. A matchbook from working-class lesbian bar called the Sea Colony, is a souvenir of 50s butch-femme culture in New York. A key fob and a flip-top lighter are relics of gay male sex clubs, like the Anvil and the Ramrod, that sizzled in the ’70s. So plentiful were such pleasure emporia that some activists feared they were sapping the strength of goal-oriented gay politics.

Yet activism is the essence of a second show, “By the Force of Our Presence: Highlights from the Lesbian Herstory Archives,” which documents the founding in 1974 — by Joan Nestle, Deborah Edel, Sahli Cavallaro, Pamela Olin, and Julia Stanley — of a compendious and still-growing register of lesbian history. The items on view represent a small part of the whole but still suggest the arc of a larger story driven by charismatic personalities.

And personality-plus is what you get in a set of separate solo homages to such out-and-proud imperishables as Stormé DeLarverie (1920-2014); Mother Flawless Sabrina/Jack Doroshow (1939-2017); and Rollerena Fairy Godmother (born 1948). All three, for decades and in different ways, served the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, as guardian angels (Ms. DeLarverie, a biracial male impersonator, worked as a bouncer at lesbian bars); style models (Ms. Flawless was impresaria of countless drag pageants); and cheerleaders (who could forget the delight, in the ’70s, of seeing Rollerena, purse in hand, whizz by?).

Brooklyn Museum

‘Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall’

As it happens, Ms. DeLarverie is stage center in this notably youthful and history-conscious — and history-correcting — survey at the Brooklyn Museum. The museum commissioned the artist L.J. Roberts, self-identified as genderqueer, to create a Stonewall monument for the occasion. Ms. DeLarverie is the subject the artist chose to honor, both as a power of example and as a figure whose role at Stonewall — some accounts have her landing the first punch on intruding police — has been obscured. In the sculpture, a construction of light boxes on bricks, her image appears repeatedly, along with those of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. (A monument commemorating both will be placed in the vicinity of the Stonewall Inn.)

Rivera, who died of cancer at 50 in 2002, and Johnson, who was found dead in the Hudson River in 1992 (her death, ruled suicide at the time, is still under investigation), are further saluted in a video docudrama by Sasha Wortzel and the artist Tourmaline, and in a bannerlike sequined hanging by Tuesday Smillie.

Friends in life, the two historical figures are tutelary spirits of an exhibition in which a trans presence, long marginalized by mainstream gay politics, is pronounced.

It’s here in the work of the queer graffiti artist Hugo Gyrl, in the diarylike photographs of Elle Perez (a participant in the current Whitney Biennial), in the vivid memorial portraits of murdered trans women by the painter David Antonio Cruz, in the songs of Linda LaBeija, in the internet-based work of Mark Aguhar, a femme-identified transgender artist who died in 2012; and in the hand-sewn textile protest signs of Elektra KB.

For many reasons, protest is a logical direction for art right now. There is still no federal law prohibiting discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q.+ people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity (although some states and cities have enacted laws prohibiting it). Trans women continue to be victims of violence. The rate of new H.I.V./AIDS transmission among gay black men remains high. And the impulse within the gay mainstream to accommodate and assimilate is by now deeply ingrained. The time has come to hear Sylvia Rivera calling us out again.

Art After Stonewall, 1969-1989

Through July 21 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, 26 Wooster Street; 212-431-2609, leslielohman.org, and through July 20, at Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East; 212-998-6780, greyartgallery.nyu.edu.

Violet Holdings: LGBTQ+ Highlights from the N.Y.U. Special Collections

Through Dec. 31, New York University Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South; 212-998-2500, library.nyu.edu.

Stonewall 50 at New-York Historical Society

Through Sept. 22 at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West; 212-873-3400, www.nyhistory.org .

Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: 50 Years After Stonewall

Through Dec. 8 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway; 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org,.

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