This pioneer was a notable transgender rights activist and popular figure in New York City’s gay and art scene, as well as one of the city’s best known trans women of the times. She was a leader in clashes with the police amid the Stonewall Riots.
She was a co-founder, along with Sylvia Rivera, of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) in the 1970s, and also the “mother” of S.T.A.R. House along with Sylvia, getting together food and clothing to help support the young trans women living in the house on the lower East Side of New York.
Once, appearing in a court the judge asked Marsha, “What does the ‘P’ stand for?”, Johnson gave her customary response “Pay it No Mind.” This phrase became her trademark.
In July 1992, her body was found floating in the Hudson River, shortly after the 1992 Pride March. Police ruled the death a suicide, but her friends and supporters denied this, and a people’s postering campaign later declared that Johnson had earlier been harassed near the spot where her body was found. Attempts to get the police to investigate the cause of death were unsuccessful.
During WWII the United States Military starting issuing “Blue Discharges.”
A Blue Discharge/Blue Slip was named because of the color paper it was printed on. These slips were used exclusively for dishonorably discharging soldiers accused of being homosexual. Once discharged, a serviceman could NOT receive any government benefits for his service in the armed forces and could be REFUSED employment by anyone.
Side Fact:
The government hired psychologists to find “the homosexual” recruits. When soldiers signed up for the service, they would be asked a series of questions with (code) words that were thought to highlight homosexual behavior. It is projected that for every one LGBTQ* individual who was detained, ten passed. By the third year of World War II, the United States Government told psychologists to stop screening. Every physical body was needed for deployment.
History generally speaks of the Stonewall Inn Riots as the first queer riot and turning point for LGBTQ liberation but before June 1969, two other riots broke out years before and some 3,000 miles away: The 1959 riot at Cooper’s Donuts in Los Angeles and a 1966 riot at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco.
Though knowledge of both has faded over the years, they provide an important illustration of where trans folk, queens and sexual outlaws figure into the modern LGBT rights movement and what led them to finally stand up to abuse and discrimination.
In the ’50s and ’60s, Los Angeles cops made a habit of screwing with queers: They would raided gay bars, marching the queers out in a line and arresting anyone whose perceived gender didn’t match what was on their ID. Occasionally, they’d even single out a few lucky victims for special attention in the form of insults and beatings. Entrapment was common: Attractively dressed vice cops would cruise gay bars, bathrooms and hook-up spots, pick up tricks and arrest them as soon their target leaned in for a kiss. In other cases, plainclothes cops would wait outside of gay hangouts, trail two men as they walked home and burst into their residence to catch them in the act.
As bad as gay men had it, trans people had it worse: With laws against cross-dressing on the books in California, police kept an eye out for them entering or leaving gay bars—any excuse to raid and shut the place down. (Many gay hangouts rejected trans folk for this very reason.)
Many in the trans community couldn’t get decent jobs (hell, they still can’t) and some resorted to hustling, giving the whole community the reputation of being prostitutes. The media often conflated homosexuals with cross-dressers, drag queens and trans people, making gay men and lesbians resent trans visibility even more.
So what better place to kick back than Cooper’s Donuts, an all-night eatery on Main Street in downtown L.A.? Smack dab between two gay bars—Harold’s and the Waldorf—Cooper’s become a popular late-night hangout for trans folk, butch queens, street hustlers and their johns.
Two cops entered the donut shop that night, ostensibly checking ID, and arbitrarily picked up two hustlers, two queens, and a young man just cruising and led them out. As the cops packed the back of the squad car, one of the men objected, shouting that the car was illegally crowded. While the two cops switched around to force him in, the others scattered out of the car.
From the donut shop, everyone poured out. The crowd was fed up with the police harassment and on this night they fought back, hurling donuts, coffee cups and trash at the police. The police, facing this barrage of [pastries] and porcelain, fled into their car calling for backup.
Soon, the street was bustling with disobedience. People spilled out in to the streets, dancing on cars, lighting fires, and generally reeking havoc. The police return with backup and a number of rioters are beaten and arrested. They also closed the street off for a day.
The Cooper’s Donut riot often gets confused with the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot some years later: There were similar political circumstances leading up both riots. And like Cooper’s, Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district was a popular all-night hangout for trans people (called “hair fairies” at the time), hustlers and assorted sexual renegades.
And both stories involve coffee cups.
In August 1966, a cafeteria worker called the police when some transgender customers at Compton’s became unruly. When a police officer attempted to arrest one trans woman, she threw a cup of hot coffee in his face. Within moments, dishes were broken, furniture was thrown, the restaurant’s windows were smashed and a nearby newsstand was burned down.
Trans people, hustlers and disenfranchised gay locals picketed the cafeteria the following night, when the restaurant’s windows were smashed again. Unlike the Stonewall riots, the situation at Compton’s was somewhat organized—many picketers were members of militant queer groups like the Street Orphans and Vanguard.
Also, the city’s response was quite different from the reaction in New York: A network of social, mental and medical support services was established, followed in 1968 by the creation of the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, overseen by a member of the SFPD. Directors Victor Silverman and Susan Stryker’s recount the historic two-day incident in their 2005 film, Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria.
“Many literary scholars consider Walt Whitman [the United States of America]’s most influential poet. Widely referred to as the father of free verse, he liberated poetry from rhyme and meter, opening it up to the flexible rhythms of feeling and voice. The works collected in Leaves of Grass pay homage to the freedom and dignity of the individual while celebrating democracy and the brotherhood of man, even though early critics condemned his references to same-sex love as being obscene.
Peter Doyle was a 21-year-old conductor on a horse-drawn streetcar when he and Whitman, who was at the time, began their romantic relationship. During their quarter-century marriage, Doyle became Whitman’s muse…
Despite the men being attracted to each other, family circumstances kept them from living together. Whitman repeatedly told his young partner that he wanted them to set up housekeeping as a couple, but Doyle insisted that it was his duty, as the oldest unmarried son, to live with and care for his widowed mother. And so, Whitman had to be satisfied with spending most nights with Doyle, either at a hotel or at the poet’s rooming house, while the two maintained separate residences.”
The creator fucking left us out solely bc the creator said some “aphobic” things and decided ppl who don’t fuck r more a part of the community THAN THE GOD DAMN L
Ace and Aro people are just as much a part of the community as “the god damn L”. We are much more than people who don’t fuck.
Honestly.
Shitting on and excluding a part of the Lgbtqia+ spectrum while you yell about being excluded is more than a little tone deaf. Tap dancing baby jesus on a fucking unicycle, it isn’t that hard.
Really? What have you contributed?
what oppression do the Ace community face exactly?? You don’t feel valid?? Fuck off.
Remember when an ace person got “homosexuality” removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental illnesses? Oh wait, that was Barbara Gittings, a lesbian. Did an ace person punch a cop at Stonewall and incite the riots? No, that was Storme DeLarverie, a lesbian. Were there any asexuals helping to organize the first Pride? Again, those were lesbians (Ellen Brody and Linda Rhodes) and gay men (Craig Rodwell and Fred Sargeant), as well as a bisexual woman (Brenda Howard). Were asexuals known to help gay men during the AIDS crisis? No, that was lesbians. Did an ace person overturn the discriminatory “defense of marriage” act? No, that was also a lesbian, Edith Windsor. Even outside of the US, you will find that activists for the gay rights movement (now referred to “LGBT”) were, well, gay people.
Our fight was always one of sexual freedom. And, while asexual people have their own struggles, I’m sure, the idea that they belong in the “LGBT” community is very new and misguided. To assert that asexuals are “just as much of a part of the community” as lesbians is absolutely absurd. Lesbians are the ones who, throughout history and still today, were oppressed because of their same sex attraction. They (along with gay men) built this community from the ground up, struggling for centuries to get where we are today.
You all didn’t even force your way in until the 2000s. In fact, I’m old enough to remember when the “A” still stood for ally.
The Q used to stand for Questioningin order to offer solidarity to those who were struggling with internalized homophobia or who couldn’t come out bc their parents were homophobic. But straights just couldn’t fucking resist calling us a homophobic slur
I still can’t get over how genderqueer and nonbinary are the same made up thing and they put both of them.
^^ This. They won’t include lesbians, but they’ll include 2 completely meaningless terms??? That’s like kicking us when we’re down. The misogyny is RIFE.
Man, the closest to a ‘golden age’ of being a homosexual must have been the late 2000′s, early 2010′s…I remember being a young teen going through the realization that I was gay and going online to spaces where it was actuallyokay in their eyes to be a homosexual.
So many YouTubers who were based around serious and light-hearted discussions about being lesbians really helped me, as well as seeing gay men express themselves since that helped me learn more about the LGB community. I felt like things were looking up for us and that even though being gay was different and could sometimes be scary, there would always be this community to back each other up. It was going to be okay to be a gender non-conforming lesbian, because the older women I saw on my laptop screen were trying to make it so.
And then in about 2015-2016, something shifted right before my eyes. It’s not like the trans community didn’t exist before - I knew them well enough, and was 100% supportive of them, but they had grown muchlouder. I think the most damning thing for me personally was watching all the lesbian idols I had come to know on places like YouTube started coming out as trans men or nonbinary. I couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed each time, even though I had been taught by now that this feeling of disappointment was “transphobia”. These were my role models, my only connection to gender non-conforming females since I lived in a small conservative town in the armpit of Florida.
I tried to be supportive all the same, even though it seemed like every day those channels I watched or blogs I read started to disappear or change themselves to being about exclusively trans topics. It was like these people thought that the legalization of gay marriage in America was the end-all to oppression or issues for homosexuals, and so they had to move on to the next thing. I felt frustrated, but also pressured to joining the bandwagon, accepting that trans people were the oppressed now, and “cis” gay people had power over them even if it didn’t make much sense to me.
I wish I could go back to those times. Most libfems and tras really think that because gays can marry now and sometimes commercials on TV will show a gay couple, they don’t need to care about us anymore. But I’m still here. There’s plenty of people still here. This is a very America-centered post as well, since I’m sure the experience of anyone outside of it may be different, but my personal experience really opened my eyes to the trans community and their ‘allies’. Greedy consuming erasers.
Hey everyone, due to some research snags, we aren’t going to have an episode in time for release tomorrow. We’ll be back on the 1st of April, and in the meantime I encourage you to check out our backlog if you need your Queer as Fact fix!
Today would have been the 75th birthday of Filipino-American activist Richard Adams (right).
Richard married his Australian partner Tony Sullivan (left) in 1975, with a marriage licence granted by a Clela Rorex, a County Clerk in Boulder, Colorado. When the Immigration and Naturalisation Service denied Tony’s application for permanent residency as Richard’s spouse, Richard became the first person in America to file a lawsuit seeking federal recognition of same-sex marriage.
The couple’s marriage was finally federally recognised in 2016, four years after Richard’s death.
[Image: Richard and Tony smiling with their arms around each other, source]
[Image: Front Cover of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Giovanni’s Room, the 1956 novel by James Baldwin. It features the silhouettes of two men and the legs of a woman]
Hey everyone! If you have a minute, you can help out with some research on queer history in schools. The survey only takes a couple of minutes, with the option to sign up for a follow-up interview.
Before the pink triangle became a worldwide symbol of gay power and pride, it was intended as a badge of shame. In Nazi Germany, a downward-pointing pink triangle was sewn onto the shirts of gay men in concentration camps—to identify and further dehumanize them. It wasn’t until the 1970s that activists would reclaim the symbol as one of liberation. Although the pink triangle has been reclaimed as an empowering symbol, it is ultimately a reminder to never forget the past—and to recognize the persecution LGBTQ+ people still face around the world.
This blog is dedicated to two original characters, Monty Fitzgerald and Henry Higgins. They are lovers who started their journey together in 1912, and we hope to tell you about their life through several years. It is a sweet story with tender and funny moments about two gay men who found happiness despite the hardships of their time. If you are interested in this sort of stories, and also in queer history of 1910s and 1920s, we are happy to welcome you here.
❝As bisexuals, we experience pressure from both sides to make up our minds, to make a final choice. If we don’t, we incur a collective contempt.
Bisexuals deal with homophobia, biphobia and even heterophobia. The desire to identify with a community often forces bisexuals to repress one side of themselves.
It is a key element in the overall strength and wisdom of the lesbian/gay community that it include and validate bisexual people, and the bisexual movement as an ally in fighting the common enemy, heterosexism.
It is clear that homophobia is at the root of biphobia. Bisexuals have no intention of undermining the gains made by lesbians and gay men in the struggle to be a free people. Coming out as a bisexual is not something that is done to acquire or flaunt heterosexual privilege.
I am bisexual because I am drawn to particular people regardless of gender. It doesn’t make me wishy-washy, confused, untrustworthy, or more sexually liberated. It makes me a bisexual.❞
— Lani Ka'ahumani. “The Bisexual Community: Are We Visible Yet?” Out & Outraged: Non-Violent Civil Disobedience at the U.S. Supreme Court, 13 Oct. 1987, pp. 47–48.
Today marks the 200th anniversary of the American literary icon who influenced Brooklyn’s artistic and intellectual life in the mid-1800s. Did you know that Whitman was an acting Librarian at the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library? The predecessor institutions of the Brooklyn Museum, the Apprentices’ Library and the Brooklyn Institute, engendered cultural legitimacy in the rapidly expanding village of Brooklyn, and fostered a creative atmosphere that bolstered Whitman’s talents. These institutions played a role in Whitman’s writings throughout his adult life—from Brooklyn Standard, a poem recounting Revolutionary War hero General Lafayette laying the cornerstone of the Apprentice’s Library building, to the multiple Brooklyn Daily Eagle art reviews praising the Institute’s representation of Brooklyn artists. An art aficionado himself, Whitman inspired many young artists, including painter Walter Libbey whose portraits are currently on view in our fifth floor Luce Visible Storage and Study Center. His deep-rooted connection to Brooklyn as a whole is pervasive in his literature: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry describes the common commute of a Brooklynite traversing the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and Leaves of Grass was published here. Even after moving away, Whitman’s lasting love for the borough caused him to return multiple times over the following decades, and his legacy remains alive in Brooklyn today. Come visit the Brooklyn Museum and help us celebrate two centuries of Walt Whitman!
Posted by Alison Hirsch Thomas Johnson (American, born England, 1843-1904). Walt Whitman, ca. 1890. Etching, drypoint, on white wove paper. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Spencer Bickerton, 33.338
A Medieval Gay Brawl in the Synagogue On Yom Kippur
Sometimes the finds of the Genizah are so incredible that you have difficulty believing that it’s really there, that you are really peering through this window into the lives of medieval Jews around the Mediterranean. This story caught my attention in a footnote of Goitein’s and I thought I would post it for Yom Kippur… It’s not really magic-related, except that I think there’s a certain magic in recovering and reclaiming the past.
The fragment shown here, T-S 8J22.25 in Cambridge, is a letter from a Jewish pilgrim named Hasan ben Mu’ammal, who had gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the High Holidays, Tishrei 4813 = September 1052 CE. He reports that a certain Daniel had wished to see him but he was unable to, because of “the altercation” that had happened in synagogue. Apparently, on Yom Kippur, many pilgrims had gathered from around the Mediterranean, and “a man from Tiberias and a man from [Tyre] became involved in love, and the Tiberian began fondling [?] the Tyrian in the sight of everyone… and the people from Tiberias and those from Tyre began to fight with one another and went out to […] and they brought the chief of the police to the synagogue and […] until the people calmed down.” Hasan goes on to report that Daniel had told him that “such is the behaviour of these people every day,” and concludes the letter with best wishes to the recipients (his brother Abu Nasr and family). A wild ride from start to finish. Goitein drily observes that the letter indicates that homosexuality was regarded as a “vice rather than a deadly crime… [and] it did not form the object of great social concern.”
Shana tova — welcome to 5777! May all who are fasting have a meaningful, enriching, and affirming day… and hopefully a peaceful one too!
A classic post! This source is now available with a full translation and commentary in my book, A Rainbow Thread. Shana tova, and may all who are observing Yom Kippur have a meaningful holiday!
Most Americans, and most other people, are familiar with Abraham Lincoln. He was the 16th president of the United States and was known for freeing slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation before his assassination.
What most people are not familiar with, however, is Lincoln’s sexuality. Lincoln was married to Mary Todd from 1842 up until his death. However, it is thought that Lincoln had some male lovers both before and during his marriage to Todd.
From these relationships, it is thought that Lincoln was at the very least fluid with his sexuality, if not bisexual or pansexual.
Today (12/1/20) is World AIDS Day. Today is a day to grieve the lives lost, to feel your anger and disappointment with the government’s handling of queer issues. Today is an emotional day for all of the queer community, young and old. However, in this day of “negative” emotions, remember that despite our lack of outside support and devastation of the queer community, remember that AIDS brought us together, brought ud to fighting, and strengthened our community.
An invitation to G.M.H.C.’s first fundraiser, held at the legendary Paradise Garage, in 1982, which raised $50,000. At this point AIDS hadn’t even been identified as a virus.
“WE ARE YOUR CHILDREN,” Gay & Lesbian Freedom Day, San Francisco, June 25, 1978. Photo by William S. Tom, @onearchives. . In 1977 and 1978, as Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign worked to repeal equal rights ordinances on the premise that children needed protection from LGBTQs, activists across the country answered: “We are your children.” #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #Resist #SFPride2017 #Pride2017 #FridayVibezzz (at San Francisco, California)
