Her role was incredibly important, of course, but the events of Stonewall and all other protests by the LGBTQ community are not fuelled by individuals but the group the community. 1 She is often referred to as the “Stonewall Lesbian”: there has recently been debate around who “threw the first punch” at Stonewall, and it is very likely that it was Delarverie who prompted the crowd to fight back against the police after she was clubbed in the face by an officer.
Later in her life she worked as a bouncer for lesbian and queer bars around Greenwich Village, New York City. Stormé Delarverie was born in 1920 and worked as a male impersonator (or perhaps now we would refer to her as a drag king) for the Jewel Box Revue, a travelling cabaret, from 1959 to 1969. My choice to refer to Delarverie with she/her pronouns is not a dismissal of these lives and realities. Because of this, Dressing Dykes is always an inclusive space for he/him and they/them lesbians. This is not to force Delarverie into a gender essentialist box – lesbian gender exists separately to heterosexist gender assignations, after all, and I firmly believe that lesbian womanhood is an experience which prioritises lesbianism rather than womanhood. As a precursor to this post, I want to state that I have thought about these discourses and, as Delarverie was alive until 2014 and yet there is only one alleged source (that I can find) claiming that Delarverie used he/him pronouns, I will continue to use she/her in my writing. There are many stories, opinions and think-pieces about Stormé Delarverie floating around the internet, many of them arguing what her role was in the Stonewall uprisings of 1969 or, more recently, her pronouns/gender identity.
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