In honor of Pride month, it is finally time to get something out that has been bugging me for several years. While Kiwis are more familiar than anyone with the general effort by TRA’s to rewrite everything they can in favor of their cause, from the science of chromosomes to the athletic difference between bio males and bio females to dimorphism, even many on this board seem to have bought into one of the biggest lies of the TRA world.
Stonewall.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve read posts by people on this board that seem to have swallowed the TRA version of events at Stonewall. I expect that shit on Tumblr or Everday Feminism… but on Kiwi Farms? And I’m not just talking about the trans people who post on the Farms or the occasional cis SJW who drops in to argue with us about this stuff. I’m talking about full-on “tranny haters” who still seem to believe the retconned TRA version of Stonewall!
Now THAT is a successful PR/historical revisionism campaign when your absolute arch-enemies believe your bullshit. This is not the fault of Kiwis, it is the fault of an uncritical media that swallows anything Trans, as that is the popular journalistic flavor of the day. If there are any threads that discuss Stonewall Revisionism, please let me know, as I just haven’t seen them.
The current popular version of Stonewall that dominates social media culture AND traditional media, which the LGB community itself has been completely incapable of rhetorically combatting:
“ 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 by black transwomen like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who taught those wimpy white faggots how to fight! Stonewall was mostly a hangout for transwomen, 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. Period. Certainly, drag queens/transvestites (which is what they were) and POC were welcome and a few of them seemed to have participated in both the riot and protests that happened later.
- Stonewall was a Genovese mob-owned bar that appears to have been targeted by the police not for “indecency” but because someone didn’t get paid off. Don’t judge these events by the modern “Blue Lives/Black Lives Matter” social media dichotomy. I’m very pro-cop, but to pretend that the NYC of the late 60s weren’t incredibly corrupt and violent is to live in a Fantasyworld. And yes, they treated gays like crap, and this raid did cause people to boil over at shabby long-term treatment. But the raid itself doesn’t appear to have originated specifically from homophobia… and certainly not from transphobia.
EDIT: I was slightly off in my discussion above of WHY the NYC raided that night. What actually happened: the cops got a tip from Interpol that European bonds were being stolen on Wall St. The thefts were being enabled by the fact that some of the people working at the brokerage houses were gay and the Genovese were blackmailing them into committing theft. The Stonewall was part of that compromising effort by the mob. Stonewall was also violating its' liquor license and often allowing underage drinking as well. The cops who led the raid were NOT paid off and had to be quiet about it, so as not to alert Genovese allies in the NYPD. If anything, this raid was meant to HELP gays who were being victimized by the Stonewall's mafia owners and forced into committing theft of the European Bonds. This is not to say that these cops liked gays, they clearly didn't. But the reason for the raid was NOT morals busts.
- Stonewall was NOT known as being particularly friendly to drag queens. Only a select few, like Marsha Johnson were tolerated and felt comfortable there at all.
- I suspect that the white gays who hung out there were actually pretty tough and didn’t need a black drag queen to teach them how to fight? Many of them were the sons of NYC’s Irish and Italian working class who grew up in an era where it was total open season to beat up gays. Some of the toughest people I’ve ever known were gays who grew up in rough, homophobic areas. When everyone is trying to kick your ass from the moment they spot your gayness, you learn a few tricks, right?
- Transgender WAS a known term prior to Stonewall. And these were largely drag queens and transvestites, not transwomen, as we shall read from them IN THEIR OWN WORDS. This is the biggest pickle for the TRA rewriters: how do we celebrate the drag queens who legit were part of Stonewall without addressing the fact that TRAs generally HATE drag queens and everything they stand for? Well, they just decided to lie about it and retcon them into trans!
So now that we have established that nearly EVERYTHING that we hear in the popular discourse about Stonewall from TRAs and their journalistic supporters is a lie, I’m going to narrow down my focus onto three areas, otherwise I will wind up writing a fucking book on this topic.
- Photographic evidence
- Marsha Johnson
- Sylvia Rivera
PHOTOS
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, who I have not heard of having a connection to those dastardly TERFs. 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. But photos do survive, and while they do show some blacks and latinos and a spattering of drag queens, for the most part the participants seem like gay white males! Nobody spots trannies like Kiwis and I bow to those who are much better at that than I am, so please correct me if you spot a suspicious fivehead, ill-fitting binder, Adams Apple, or “manhands” that I may have missed. But I am not seeing trans people in these pics other than a few blatant drag queens and transvestites.
This first one is from the first night of riots. There appear to be a few non-whites in an otherwise gay white male crowd.
Here's some from activism in the days following. Note sign only says "gay oppression", not "save the trans". Those sneaky gay white males! Even from the first days they were erasing the Trans!
Here is a pic from the protests. This is often cited to claim "Sylvia and Marsha started the riots". But it was AFTER the riot, not during. Sylvia and Marsha are there on far left. Note the signs are all about gays.
Next pic has a slightly androgynous Puerto Rican, but mostly white gays. The Puerto Rican certainly claimed "gay" rather than "trans" judging by his sign.
Next pic has a few blacks and latinos, and maybe a drag queen in front. Not positive. No crowd of trannies, though.
Here's a sign from the early days of activism after the riots. Note "we homosexuals", not "we POC trans sex workers who must be centered".
MARSHA JOHNSON
There is a lot of disagreement over Marsha Johnson, her involvement in Stonewall, and the worthiness of her as an LGBT icon. I’m not going to pretend that I know the full truth, but I will offer some interesting tidbits about her life and views. However, there are two things I am 100% certain of:
- If Marsha had lived into the social media era, she would have LOVED it and gotten addicted to it, and used it to harass her enemies and rally her friends.
- Marsha would have been a lolcow. Guaranteed. With her own thread and everything. Her life was a fucking mess.
Marsha was, to put it simply, a transvestite hooker who was arrested, in her own words, over 100 times. She was also a drug addict 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.
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. But guess what? NEITHER of those versions is true! It does appear that there is a consensus that she did climb on a traffic pole the second night and drop 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!
In her own words…
https://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/episode-11-johnson-wicker/
(note: much of this transcript is hilarious, and includes fellow gay activist Randy Wicker, who doesn’t hold back on Marsha, even though she is his roommate! Haven’t listened to the audio, but it may be worthwhile)
“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.
Got that? Marsha WASN’T EVEN THERE WHEN THE RIOT STARTED!
continuing...
Let’s hear again from Marsha about how Stonewall was mostly a transgender scene. Spoiler: it wasn’t.
“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. “
In other words, this was a gay bar that had only recently allowed a few drag queens to hang out.
Let’s let activist Randy further establish Marsha’s lolcow bona fides.
“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.
Remember, shitlords, these are NOT transvestites! Transvestites are bad, bad people who make transgender people look foolish. This is my favorite part as Randy tells the truth about Marsha’s political org. I do admit that I miss this old school gay shit, where gays weren’t all so PC and were more worried about being funny and talking shit than being ideologues. Imagine what would happen to Randy today on Twitter, Tumblr, etc. for “talking over a POC transwoman”, even if it was his roommate and close friend. He would be dogpiled by SJW troons and quickly excommunicated. Fucking nuked from orbit.
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
Sylvia, like Marsha, is also credited by modern TRAs 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.
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, like Marsha, was a lolcow. This is from an otherwise fawning report on Rivera, but even this author felt compelled to let some truth slip in. She even got her self banned from the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Hell, doing something like that is practically a prerequisite for an LGBT lolcow!
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.
