Stormé DeLarverie, born on December 24th in 1920, was a biracial queer icon whose reported scuffle with police was the spark that ignited the Stonewall Riots in 1969. She is sometimes referred to as the "Rosa Parks of the gay community" or "Rosa Parks of Stonewall".
DeLarverie was born in New Orleans to a black mother and a white father, and spent the 50s and 60s as a "male impersonator" in the Jewel Box Revue, the period's only racially integrated drag troupe. Her gender-bending style of zoot suits and black ties was groundbreaking for the era.
On June 28th, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City, a scuffle broke out when a woman, believed to be Stormé, was roughly escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon. The woman fought with at least four of the police, swearing and shouting, for about ten minutes. When she shouted to the bystanders "Why don't you guys do something?", the crowd began rioting and clashed with police.
"It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience - it wasn’t no damn riot."
- Stormé DeLarverie
A Brief History of Stormé DeLarverie, Stonewall’s Suiting Icon
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Tonight's sauce: Moonshine. Store-bought stuff so there's no risk of permanent blindness here, unfortunately, but it's doing the trick decently well. Takes me back to a book I grabbed that revealed to me that the slice of the Oregon Coast I hung around as a kid had a pretty lively moonshiner scene. Also they were sterilizing the Tillamook natives under the table into the '70s. Also apparently a Eugenics Fair truck with a display like this passed through at some point?
Oregon was/is racist as fuck
Yeah, it's nuts. Hard to believe given the rep the state has these days.
I ended up relocating to Illinois later on in my youth, and picking up on the regional history was kind of surprising - it almost seems like regional settlers almost managed to eke out a relatively peaceful coexistence with some local leaders like Shabbona or Aptakisic prior to national level politics going apeshit.