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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A line I love, from Desai's Geopolitical Economy in 2013, is "Crises teasingly hold out the possibility of dramatic reversals only to be followed by surreal contuinity as the old order cadaverously fights back."
I've found that the solution isn't to embrace doomerism whenever a political or geopolitical setback occurs, but as you say, keep an eye on how, despite the lack of a sudden revolutionary moment, the threads of bourgeois rule came a little more undone. When you analyze these moments, whether that's postwar Italy or coronavirus or Palestine today, there's a tendency for a great swelling of hope that THIS is finally IT, then a pessismistic reaction when it doesn't actually change the world, then years later, with the benefit of a little temporal distance and seeing consequences unfold, somebody will incorporate it into a wider theory on how it was actually a very meaningful event after all. The challenge is to not fall into undue optimism OR pessimism at the time as Gramsci alluded to, and instead maintain a sense of perspective even while the event is ongoing.
If you're not careful with this, you can fall into a sense that (especially local) events are determined and unchangeable despite your own potential actions, so you can't just surrender all agency, but nonetheless it's a worldview that I am intentionally trying to cultivate. I mean, it's a coping mechanism, but everything is when you don't wield any power directly.