Stonewall was a ‘notorious hangout for sex workers, trans women and other marginalized people’ or ‘drag queens, hustlers and homeless young gays to congregate’, and these were the people that led the Stonewall riots.

It goes without saying — this isn’t true.

Stonewall was actually a fairly ‘mainstream bar’. It was also run by the Mafia, and it is widely suspected one of the motivations for the Stonewall raid was that the Mafia had not paid off the police on time to keep the bar open.

Sylvia Rivera describes the Stonewall in her 2002 essay Queens In Exile:

“ What people fail to realize is that the Stonewall was not a drag queen bar. It was a white male bar for middle-class males to pick up young boys of different races. Very few drag queens were allowed in there, because if they had allowed drag queens into the club, it would have brought the club down. That would have brought more problems to the club. It’s the way the Mafia thought, and so did the patrons. So the queens who were allowed in basically had inside connections. I used to go there to pick up drugs to take somewhere else. I had connections”

Morty Manford, in Eric Marcus’ Making Gay History also recounts similar information about Stonewall

“The Stonewall was a dive. It was shabby, and the glasses they served the watered-down drinks in weren’t particularly clean. The place attracted a very eclectic crowd: some transvestites, a lot of students, young people, older people, businessmen. I met friends at the Stonewall regularly. There was a dance floor and a jukebox. There was a back-room area, which in those days meant there was another bar in back. There were tables where people sat.”

Carter describes it as such in his Stonewall:

“While the clientele was generally in their upper teens and lower twenties, those at the front bar tended to be white men in their upper twenties and lower thirties, with men over the age of thirty-five being unusual, though by no means unheard of. On the wall in back of the customers seated at the long bar was a narrow ledge on which customers could rest their drinks”

Carter spends several pages on the debate around the Stonewall’s clientele, particularly on the ‘queen issue’:

“The presence of drag queens at the Stonewall Inn has been much exaggerated over the years for a number of reasons. One of the first is a terminology problem. The word queen was more widely used in the late sixties to indicate any gay man who was not conventionally masculine, whereas today the word usually occurs in the phrase drag queen or indicates a very feminine gay male. Thus when a contemporary person reads about “a whole bunch of queens,” the picture that may come to mind is one of transvestites, whereas the 1960s usage probably simply indicated a group of gay men, with the understanding that none of them were totally straight-acting.”

There were also fewer lesbians who frequented the Stonewall Inn, according to patrons recollections:

“One of the more disputed points about the Stonewall clientele is to what extent women went there and how many of those were lesbians. Hampton says that “all gay men went there. Very few, if any, gay women at all. Usually I would practically be the only woman around.” Shaheen said, “It was 98 percent men.” Certainly some of the women were heterosexual. One Stonewall regular recalls, “Some women who would go to the Stonewall were hippie straight women, or some woman who would look like a drag queen.”41 One gay man who went to the Stonewall Inn with a female — although a very young one — was Chris Babick. When Chris started going there in 1968 he was a seventeen-year-old high school senior but looked so much younger that he relied on his fifteen-year-old friend Peggy to buy him drinks. Shaheen adds that “the floormen [waiters who circulated selling drinks] always loved girls to come in because [the floormen] were straight.” Early Stonewall researcher Tina Crosby concluded in 1974: “The screening process at the door effectively excluded women; each person I talked with remembered the Stonewall as an exclusively male bar, with the only exception being an occasional tough lesbian or female friend of one of the male patrons.”42 Jennifer “Hardy” (not her real last name) remembers seeing a lesbian of this very type on her first visit to the Stonewall Inn as a seventeen-year-old runaway: “There was this woman in there, and she was big.… That’s not what I was looking for. I didn’t want somebody that would control me and beat me up and that’s kind of the impression I got from her, that she was strong and that she was mean. I don’t know if she was a bouncer or what she was, but I steered clear of her.”43 The presence of this kind of lesbian at the Stonewall reflects the predominance in the lesbian social scene at that time of the butch-femme model. The one dissenting voice about the kind of lesbians who frequented the Stonewall is Shaheen, who remembers beautiful hairdressers, which suggests that “femme” lesbians patronized the Inn and raising the intriguing possibility that they might have been mistaken for heterosexual women or even for “fag hags,” since they brought along their male homosexual counterparts: “There were lesbians and they were not of the very butch type of lesbians in those days. Remember that its biggest clientele were hairdressers.… They were big tippers, and some of them were women and some of them were gay.”

And as for claims of ‘whitewashing’ the Stonewall’s patrons:

“While the clientele was mainly male and young, Hampton says that the bar had “some of everything… a lot of them were businessmen and didn’t want their families to know, naturally.” She states that the mixture included various ethnic groups: “They were mixed Spanish, whites, and blacks, but there were more whites than the others.” Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt agreed that “somehow, it covered the range… the whole mixture of everyone gay at the time.”

There you go. Multiple recollections of Stonewall: all agree that the Stonewall was not a bar for ‘QTPOC’ as we say these days. It was a Mafia-owned and run bar, with high drink prices for watered down beer. It was a place where a doorman restricted entry to known patrons. It was a bar for homosexuals.

The assertion that Stonewall was either a ‘notorious hangout for sex workers, trans women and other marginalized people’ or ‘drag queens, hustlers and homeless young gays to congregate’ is, to put it mildly, wrong. The street kids would not have had the money to pay the door charge, nor drinks, which staff heavily pressured patrons to buy.

There were street kids present at the riot — but they were not at the Stonewall and joined in afterwards, which is the reports of witnesses to the riot:

“Many other credible witnesses offer similar testimony concerning the gay street youth. Lanigan-Schmidt says, “What I know definitely from my own experience is that the people who did the most fighting were the drag queens and the hustlers. [They] fought with the same ferocity they would fight with when any situation of survival put their sense of dignity on the line, very much like Bob Dylan’s ‘When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’ ”

As for trans people leading the charge in the riot? Well, that’s not quite the case either:

“The question of transvestite participation in the riots is complicated by differences in the gay male community that have developed since the Stonewall Riots. Scare and flame queens hardly exist anymore, and Garvin insists that it was flame queens who contributed most to the fighting: “When people say, you know, it was the drag queens that started it, it wasn’t the drag queens, it was the flame queens. The ones who were getting angriest and giving attitude were the flame queens.” While Fader is a credible witness who says that “no one group did any more bravery than any other group that I saw,” the preponderance of witnesses who are both credible and who witnessed significant amounts of the action agree that the most marginal groups of the gay community fought the hardest — and therefore risked the most — on this and the following nights. “ […] Still, it is important to note that it was not only homeless or street youths who were fighting the police. Men like Robert Bryan, a middle-class college graduate, joined the fray.

It is fairly safe to say that Stonewall was a riot of a collective of groups, rather than a single one, nor was it led by any particular group.

Now for that third question — who did throw the brick?

Whodunit?

The question remains: who started the Stonewall riot? While we’ve eliminated several of the most popular candidates, the question remains unanswered.

But does it matter? While Stonewall was important, it was not the gay rights singularity. Outside of the US, its impact at the time was negligible. Its true impact may be in the activism that galvanized around it — activism that had already had started in the 1920s with organizations like the short-lived Society for Human Rights in Chicago, inspired by Magnus Hirschfeld. In the early 50s, groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis sprung up, along with magazines like ONE and The Ladder. While it probably accelerated the progress of gay liberation in the United States, protests had already occurred in 1967 at the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles, and gay lobbying had successfully decriminalized homosexuality in England and Wales with the Sexual Offences Act 1967. To view Stonewall as a singularity is not only a US-centric view, but an East Coast-centric one — Harvey Milk was elected city supervisor in San Francisco, after all. Stonewall is less a singularity and more an event that was capitalized on by the very activists that were already working towards gay liberation in the 1950s and 1960s.

With that said — given the importance of the topic — maybe it is worth discussing ‘who threw the first brick at Stonewall’.

While we have discussed the fact it is unlikely to be either Marsha Johnson or Sylvia Rivera, there are a few other candidates. Two anonymous figures are reported to have done so in David Carter’s Stonewall:

The first is an an anonymous, unnamed butch lesbian, where multiple sources agree began putting up a fight with police as she was dragged from the bar:

“According to Harry Beard, a former Stonewall employee, the lesbian’s fight with the police had begun inside the bar. She had been visiting a bar employee who was a friend, Beard relates, when the raid occurred. Arrested for not wearing the three pieces of clothing correct for her gender according to New York law, she was handcuffed and, while in the hallway and just a few short steps away from the entrance, was “yanked” by a policeman. She told the officer, “Don’t be so rough.” According to Beard, the policeman’s response was to hit her in the head with a billy club. (In two other versions, one given by Beard in 1980 and another one given in 1989 by Beard and two friends, Gene Huss and Don Knapp, it was a request to the police officer to loosen her cuffs that resulted in a blow to her head.Yates’s account might corroborate Beard’s in part, for he remembers that “they were manhandling her out the door [emphasis added] to try to push her into a squad car.” Yates also described her as “one rather beefy, good-sized woman who had probably given them a ration of shit back,” which also seems to fit in with Beard’s assertion that she had complained to the police while still inside the Stonewall Inn. Like Beard, Yates remembered handcuffs: “They had her pushed down with her hands cuffed behind her.” There is no doubt that, furious for whatever reason, she put up a fight. Yates says, “She was giving them their money’s worth,” and remembers that there were three or four policemen on her. She fought them all the way from the Stonewall Inn’s entrance to the back door of a waiting police car. Once inside the car, she slid back out and battled the police all the way to the Stonewall Inn’s entrance. An unknown woman who recorded the scene in a letter emphasized the lesbian’s fury: “Everything went along fairly peacefully until… a dyke… lost her mind in the streets of the West Village — kicking, cursing, screaming, and fighting.” But after she reached the Stonewall the police pulled her back to the police car and again placed her inside it. She got out again and tried to walk away. This time an officer picked her up and heaved her inside.64 Yates estimates that the struggle between the police and the lesbian lasted between five and ten minutes. According to yet another account, at around this time a woman — possibly this same lesbian — urged the gay men watching her struggle to help her: “Why don’t you guys do something!” Bob Kohler remembers that at about this time “a couple of the kids threw some change over. I got mad and said, ‘Stop throwing your money! I probably gave you that money. Stop throwing it!’ The cops closed the paddy wagon, got rid of the paddy wagon, because they obviously felt something was going to happen.” As the heroic fight by the lesbian who had twice escaped the car neared its end, the crowd erupted. The anonymous author of the letter wrote that the woman’s fighting “set the whole crowd wild — berserk!” Both the Voice reporters are agreed that it was the lesbian’s struggle with the police that ignited the riot. Truscott wrote: “It was at that moment that the scene became explosive.” Smith’s account pinpoints the policeman bodily throwing her inside the car on the third and final attempt to put her in the vehicle as the moment “the turning point came.”

Multiple other sources who spoke to Carter agreed with this assessment, such as Steve Yates and Jennifer Hardy, both Stonewall witnesses. They then agree that this event sparked the throwing of objects, such as money, cobblestones, bricks, and shoes. This was done by a crowd, not a single person.

Carter writes in a footnote that is unlikely to have been another popular figure, Storme DeLaverie, who is occasionally identified as this lesbian(who consistently called herself a lesbian throughout her life and was not transgender, simply butch):

“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. Finally, there has been much speculation about who this woman could have been if a lesbian did play a key role. Stormé was well known in the local lesbian community at the time of the riots and has remained so ever since, and it is highly improbable that this woman who was seen by hundreds of people could have been a person of note in the community, else she would have been identified at the time or shortly thereafter.

Carter has another candidate — an anonymous man in a red t-shirt:

“While Truscott saw — indeed, felt — the garbage can being thrown, according to Rat reporter Tom, it was the man in the dark red tee-shirt Tom had earlier seen dancing in and out of the crowd who had the honor of throwing the opening volley after the police retreated inside the Stonewall Inn: “The cat in the tee-shirt began by hurling a container of something at the door. Then a can or stone cracked a window. Soon pandemonium broke loose.””

Or an anonymous Puerto Rican man:

“Kevin Dunn, a nineteen-year-old gay man, dressed in hippie attire and a true believer in the peace movement, recalls how he stood thinking to himself, “‘I’m sick of being told I’m sick’ and went to grab something — I don’t know if it was a halfway-filled milk carton — it was some kind of a carton — and I was just about ready to throw it, but I stopped and said, ‘But you’re not supposed to be violent, you’re against violence.’ ” But as Kevin hesitated, “a big, hunky, nice-looking Puerto Rican guy — but big mouth — yelling out (at the police) next to me… took that thing out of my hand and threw it! And it was one of the first things that got thrown at the Stonewall”

Maybe the answer is simple: we don’t know. Tim Stewart-Winter, who studies gay history at Rutgers is unsure:

“Tim Stewart-Winter, who studies the history of gay movements at Rutgers University, says it’s actually unclear who started the Stonewall riots. “We don’t know who threw the first brick just because no one knew at the time that this would be an event of world historical importance,” he explains. “It was late at night; it was a murky situation.”

Or perhaps, this was the brick-thrower, as suggested by an anonymous internet commenter:

“A cis female corpse — Judy Fucking Garland’s — zombie walked over to that freaking Stonewall Inn and threw a brick, too. Darn tooting!”

Perhaps that is the real answer. It seems as good as any of the others. I like the thought of zombie Judy Garland throwing the first brick.

Or maybe we simply don’t know. It was a collective effort by a group of angry homosexuals. The brick-thrower, whoever they may be or even if they exist, did not then single-handedly create fifty years worth of LGBT activism. That was a collective project. It’s okay to acknowledge that. We do not need to mythologize the brick-thrower.

To return to the two concepts I introduced (or reintroduced) to you at the start of this piece — historiography and hagiography — I feel that any attempt to find the ‘first brick thrower’ or the one person who started Stonewall, or doling out credit for Stonewall marks a departure from historiography into hagiography. Modern retellings of the story of Stonewall have turned into panegyrics about Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who have become more legends convenient to the trans narrative than the complex, human figures they were. It does them an utter disservice. It fails as history, and it fails Stonewall as an event. It is better to know history than to know mythology and urban legend peddled for political convenience.

It’s also okay to acknowledge that gay rights movement was founded on the discrimination against people who have sex with the same sex, who love the same sex. It was homosexuality. Not ‘gender’. The Stonewall riots were started on that basis — no bar for heterosexuals would have been raided like that. The Mafia ran the gays bars in New York because homosexuality was criminal. Because it was criminal to wear more than three pieces of clothing that were ‘wrong’ for your sex. The Stonewall scenario does not exist if same-sex love isn’t criminal. There would be no need for Mafia-run gay bars if same-sex love isn’t criminal. Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, all the Stonewall rioters, they had no reason to riot if homosexuality wasn’t criminalized. They would not have lived the lives they did if homosexuality wasn’t criminalized.

Yet today, the hagiography of Stonewall is weaponized against homosexuals, used to say that homosexuals ‘owe’ transgender people their time, movement, and rights. Often, these transgender people are attracted to the opposite sex. Many of them are straight men claiming to be lesbians to validate a sexual fetish. Or straight women claiming to be gay men.

They would have not had reason to riot at Stonewall. They were not oppressed by the law, forced into mob bars, beaten, imprisoned, and threatened with job loss if anyone found out they were homosexual. Because they are not homosexual. There is nothing homosexual about sticking a penis in a vagina, no matter how the owners of said penises and vaginas identify.

The criminalization of homosexuality had nothing to do with gender or ‘love for the same gender(s)’ It was about biological sex — ‘gender’ had nothing to do with it’. Magic words would not erase that fact. To say that is so is to erase homosexuals, and erase the very reason for the Stonewall riots. Now, outlets like Bust call for the removal of ‘TERFS’ from Pride Parades — for saying that homosexuals are attracted exclusively to the same sex. That is utterly ridiculous, and shows how the symbols of Stonewall, and Pride by extension, have become victims of this revisionism.

Stonewall, as a symbol, has been appropriated, distorted, twisted and heterosexualized. It is no longer a key event in the history of homosexual resistance, gay and lesbian resistance. It has become a rhetorical billy club, like the ones used in the bar that night, to beat gays and lesbians into submission over their own rights. It is a hagiography designed to further a false narrative that centers transgenderism rather than homosexuality. As an event, it’s history has been ignored, and two somewhat peripheral figures on the night — Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, have, after their deaths, been victims of historical revisionism and mythologized, deliberately misgendered, and shoved into the spotlight. No single figure was responsible for Stonewall, nor any single demographic, group, or social class. But one thing united them.

At that moment, the moment the lesbian fought back, the moment the first objects were thrown, that one thing was their homosexuality — their love for the same sex.

It’s time to re-establish that historical fact.