Happy Birthday Storme Delarverie

Born on Christmas Eve, 1920, in New Orleans, Stormé worked professionally as a drag king and torch singer.  Pictures of her in drag show her to be suave and handsome; uncompromisingly androgynous, you could mistake her for a man trying to look like a woman.  In the forties through the sixties she was the emcee—or, better yet, the ringmaster--for the Jewel Box Revue, a traveling gay drag show, the first in America to be integrated.  Playing to mixed race, as well as mixed gay and straight, audiences, the revue gained mainstream acceptance in larger cities around the country.  In this context, Stormé was the subject of the 1987 film, Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box.  Produced by DC filmmaker Michelle Parkerson, the movie emphasized Stormé’s appropriation of male symbols of power, such as suits and ties, in furtherance of the gay rights struggle.

But Stormé’s real claim to fame is that she’s the person who threw the first punch at Stonewall, the rebellion (named for the bar) on Christopher Street that gave birth to the gay rights movement.  Prior to Stonewall, gay people were subject to arrest, pretty much arbitrarily, for such offenses as kissing or holding hands in public, or for dressing in the clothes of the opposite sex.  The police staged raids on gay bars at unpredictable times, arresting whoever they pleased.  The night of July 27, 1969, was seemingly like any other, with one exception: earlier that evening the city had mourned the passing of gay icon Judy Garland in a funeral attended by twenty-two thousand people.  Whether this had anything to do with what happened next is open to speculation, but this time, when the police raided the Stonewall Bar in the early hours of July 28^th, they soon found that the gay people had had enough and were ready to fight back—in particular one formidable drag king.

            I doubt that Stormé went there that night looking for trouble, but she wasn’t going to run from it either.  When a plain-clothed policeman punched her outside the bar, she retaliated, slugging him in the jaw.  When asked what the policeman did next, Stormé, in an interview for the gay TV news magazine, In The Life, replied, with characteristic terseness, “He was on the ground. Out.” (Excerpt from Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York's Rebel Mecca)