Stormé DeLarverie
According to many witnesses, her fight with police at the Stonewall Inn sparked the uprising of 1969 – she was called “the Rosa Parks of the gay community”.
Stormé DeLarverie was born in New Orleans around 1920, the daughter of a Black mother and a white father. As a child she was bullied for being of mixed race, and she worked as a singer and in a circus as a young woman.
From 1955 to 1969 she toured North America with the Jewel Box Revue, the first racially integrated drag show. She was the only woman in the cast, introduced as “the one girl”, and performed as the master of ceremonies in a suit and tie, a male impersonator at the Apollo Theater and elsewhere.
On the night of 28 June 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in New York, a butch lesbian fought back when police handcuffed her and hit her. According to many witnesses and to her own account, it was DeLarverie. She called out to the crowd to do something – and the crowd fought back. This moment is regarded as one of the sparks of the Stonewall uprising.
For decades afterwards she worked as a bouncer in lesbian bars and patrolled the streets of Greenwich Village to protect lesbians, earning her the name “guardian of lesbians in the Village”. Her partner, a dancer named Diana, was with her for about 25 years. She died in Brooklyn in 2014, in her nineties.