Episode 31: Stonewall and Queer Survival (2/11/2021)

Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me on my exploration of the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Generation Z.

Today’s episode: Queer history, how much of it has been lost, and the cultural divide that some people refuse to see.

For the past week or so, I’ve been researching the Stonewall uprising for a class. If you aren’t familiar with the Stonewall uprising, it was a protest against police harassment of gay and trans people that took place at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City. The police regularly raided gay bars, assaulting and arresting the attendees and often fining or threatening the employees and owners. When the police raided the Stonewall Inn in the summer of 1969, the bargoers defended themselves and delivered a wider message that unjust harassment would no longer be tolerated without conflict. The Stonewall uprising is often called a riot, though the word “riot” implies that the conflict was initiated by the crowd, not the police. Anyway, the Stonewall uprising has become a sort of legend in the LGBTQ community. A legend for its influence, certainly, but also a legend for its lack of certainty of information. In short, nobody actually knows exactly what happened at Stonewall.

For example, the one fact that a lot of people can pull out about Stonewall is that the first brick was thrown by Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha P. Johnson was a Black LGBTQ activist who is usually referred to as a trans woman using she/her pronouns. Though it’s impossible to know now, it’s likely that if she had had the opportunity and vocabulary to describe her gender that we have today, she’d probably have identified as “gender non-conforming” or “genderfluid,” since she identified as a gay man, a drag queen, and, in her words, a transvestite at varying times in her life, but most often publicly presented as feminine with her drag persona’s name, Marsha, and using she/her pronouns, so that’s what I’ll use here. If she were still alive, we’d be able to ask, but she was probably murdered in 1992. The police very quickly ruled her death a suicide then, despite lack of evidence, and her loved ones and other activists have been pushing to reopen the case since then. As it stands now, I believe that her official cause of death was changed to “undetermined,” which is, I suppose, a step. Anyway, saying that Marsha P. Johnson threw the first brick at Stonewall is almost undoubtedly false. She herself claimed that she only arrived at Stonewall after the riot had begun, and reported seeing that the police had already set the building on fire when she arrived. But people still say she threw the first brick, which probably was not a brick and was more likely a bottle or a rock. This entire topic has been filled with uncertain language, because apparently we don’t know anything about an event that lots of people who are still alive were at.

It doesn’t especially matter who threw the symbolic first brick, not in the grand scheme of things, but because it’s been turned into a catchphrase with false information: “Marsha P. Johnson threw the first brick at Stonewall,” it makes itself important. When we treat things as important, they become that way. So, to hop on the bandwagon of obsession over who actually threw the first thing at a cop, I did some additional research, and the results were… frustrating.

Frustrating at best.

Any source that looked half-credible, which in the field of researching inaccurate queer history basically means anything that isn’t a blog, seemed to contradict every other half-credible source. There’s no agreement. For whatever reason, nobody can quite figure out what actually happened at Stonewall. I think this is partially because it’s hard to figure out what happened at a riot and eyewitness accounts can be faulty. But realistically, there’s no way to know. You could travel back in time and interview every single person who was there the night the Stonewall uprising began, and you would still eventually have to decide who to believe.

I think that’s the main frustration I have with researching Stonewall and other impactful events in queer history. Eventually, you have to decide who and what to believe. Which is absolute bullshit. Imagine if straight white history was recorded and told this way. Oh yeah, Washington crossing the Delaware River? Are you absolutely sure it was Washington? And who did he lead? His soldiers? James Monroe said he was there, and Washington said James Monroe was there, but of course they would have said that. James Monroe became the president eventually, of course he would have wanted to be seen as important. It sounds stupid. Because it is! Straight white history would never be so uncertain, because we actually know for certain what happened. Because it got recorded at the time and if it got editorialized afterwards, it got editorialized consistently. The people in power write the history. The winners of the American Revolution wrote what happened during the war. FDR and his cabinet wrote what pulled the US out of the Great Depression. The NYPD wrote, or rather, didn’t write, what happened at Stonewall. Any stories that got told afterward, true or not, got treated as false or at best uncertain because they didn’t come from the people we’re taught to learn history from.

It doesn’t matter whether the first brick at Stonewall was actually a brick. It doesn’t matter who threw it. Except that it does. It matters, but not for the reason that people think. It doesn’t matter because it’s vitally important that we know who started the riot, it matters for the sake of intersectionality.

The 2015 film Stonewall offered the world a nearly all-white cast and the first brick thrown by a young, white, gay man. It’s a whitewashed version of history in a fight that has been anything but. Marsha P. Johnson is a figurehead used to combat that because her persona, however little we know about it, is undeniably Black and undeniably queer. If you push into people’s heads that it was a Black trans woman responsible for the legend of Stonewall, it makes it harder for people to erase and forget the existence and importance of Black LGBTQ people. Whether it was Zazu Nova Queen of Sex, another Black trans woman who is often credited with the first brick, or whether it was a street queen or survival sex worker or any other marginalized member of the community, the first brick doesn’t matter because of the person it was thrown by, it matters because of the people it was thrown for. The people who get consistently erased and ignored because if you’re going to teach queer history to straight people, it better be white, and if you’re going to teach Black history to white people, it better be straight. Marsha P. Johnson, the symbol, not the person, is a refusal to cater to the straight white gaze, just like the uprising itself was.

A lot of queer history ends up this way. It’s not seen as valuable, so the details don’t get recorded. It becomes a story, a legend that gets told over and over again because to tell a story is to believe that it has value. The more a story gets told, the more people think it’s being told because it is important, and thus it becomes what they believe it to be. Usually, the stories that we believe are important don’t have anything to do with Black history or queer history – we just think of it as “history.” We see them in books, we hear them at school, we reference them in essays, we undoubtedly believe that they matter. Black history and queer history has to fight to matter, and so do Black and queer people.

It’s incredibly difficult to gain credibility as a gay person talking to straight people, because they don’t want to believe you about anything. It’s difficult to educate straight people about the scraps of queer history that we have because they see the gaps in our stories and decide that means it’s not important or not real. It’s difficult to talk about culture and experiences with people who don’t share them because they decide it isn’t real because they haven’t experienced it. My father, though he does it unintentionally, finds it really hard to accept it when I reference queer culture because he firmly believes that gay people and straight people can’t be all that different. It’s impossible to him that every social interaction I have is somewhat informed by my sexuality, because for him, it isn’t. The concept of bad representation doesn’t exist for him, or my mom, really, so movies like Love, Simon and The Christmas Setup are totally progressive and awesome and there’s nothing wrong with them. If I reference a stereotype that originated within the queer community, like… oh, I don’t know, what’s a stupid one… all lesbians walk the same way. If I reference a stereotype like that, and explain myself if there’s confusion, the straight people around me are always completely baffled that there are things they don’t see about queer culture and therefore I must be lying or exaggerating. They’ll think one stereotype is ridiculous, but then turn around and label every boy wearing nail polish as gay.

Sharing queer culture is new liver, same eagles. I try talking about lesbian fashion over time and how it’s important because it’s a marker of community and often a method of expression outside of typical fashion and gender norms, and my straight sister will say “That’s not gay fashion, that’s just a TikTok trend.” When I talk about meeting new queer friends and essentially speedrunning the stages of friendship because it’s so much easier to break down personal barriers around other queer people, and my straight friends and family are absolutely baffled that I’ve swapped life stories and deepest regrets with this person who I’ve known for three days. But friendship between queer people always, always means more than just friendship. It means mutual protection against judgement, it means support of self-exploration and personal growth, it means a person to share an experience with so you’re less alone. Queer friendship is survival because so much of our history is built around the fight to allow queer people to convene publicly. The police only raided gay bars in New York City because it was illegal to be gay in public. Literally. No holding hands, no dancing with someone of the same sex, no wearing clothes outside of your assigned gender. The New York State Liquor Authority argued that gatherings of queer people were inherently disorderly.

Gathering together is protection. Back in in-person school, I didn’t particularly like all of the people within my queer friend group, but it didn’t matter, because I knew that I was safe there and they knew that they were safe there and we would protect each other and move on. A theater class I was in once slowly came out to each other over a few years, just to be sure we were safe, but once we all knew, it was so much easier to get through the class. The teacher was lightly homophobic, but really good at teaching, so we were in it for the learning, and then once we realized we were a queer friend group, it was a lot easier to survive an authority figure who quietly thought we shouldn’t exist. We survive the world in packs, because otherwise we won’t survive at all. Of course, this gravitation to each other makes us pretty easy targets for bullying, since we’re less reserved with each other and thus care less about social expectations, and also because it’s easy to look at a group of openly queer kids and say, “Gosh, why is their whole personality being gay?” I’ve also had thoughts like this, though I’m trying to grow out of it. Because honestly? Being openly gay is a big fuck-you to the violence our ancestors experienced. Relishing a shared culture is a safe haven from the fear and careful words when we’re outside of our group.

We lost nearly an entire generation of gay men to AIDS. BIPOC men especially, because racism in the healthcare industry is a medical risk factor. We lost a generation, and the government intentionally did nothing until thousands had already died. Ronald Reagan’s press secretary laughed at it and called it “the gay plague” when asked about it. The first drug the FDA approved to treat it was prescribed in amounts that led to overdose and cost $10,000 a year. That epidemic lasted over 10 years. A major organization in the fight against AIDS, ACT UP, made posters and political art criticizing Rudy Giuliani, who was the mayor of New York at the time, for ignoring the crisis. Rudy Giuliani still had an enormous amount of official power as recently as this year, and currently still has immense influence. The violence of the past is also the violence of the present. I recently saw an anti-gay protest sign that read “You deserve AIDS.” The violence of the past is also the violence of the present.

Physical violence and the tragedy of the AIDS crisis is one form of violence, but words are violence too. Lack of understanding, brushing people off, judging them, refusing to listen. Makes it easy for men to suggest they could turn me straight, or to ask my bi friends to a threesome. Lack of willingness to listen makes it easy for people to glorify Harry Styles as a pioneer and ignore Prince. When Taylor Swift’s song You Need to Calm Down came out, people applauded it as a great advancement in the normalization of queer culture, while Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road outperformed it because art by queer artists will always do more for the queer community than even sincere supportive art by straight artists. But nobody wants to hear that. Nobody wants to hear that their support isn’t enough or isn’t what we’re looking for. Nobody wants to hear that they swung and missed because they weren’t listening.

After nearly a year stuck in my house with only text access to my gay community, I’m exhausted. I’m stressed out. I came out… well, was outed, to my grandparents during this year, and it was really hard to get through that without a group of people immediately with me who understood exactly what happened without any explanation other than “I got outed to my grandparents.” I haven’t processed it all the way yet because I haven’t had people to process with. My parents very graciously watched two queer Christmas movies with me this year, but it still felt weird to criticize one of them for poor representation. My dad always says that you can criticize something while still enjoying it, and that’s true for things that aren’t actively harmful, but it’s hard to get across what makes bad representation harmful when I know that they’re trying to support me. It’s lonely. That loneliness is difficult for my family to understand because gay people and straight people can’t possibly be all that different, right? It can’t possibly be that hard, right? But they’ve never experienced it and they never will, and that makes it very difficult for them to empathize.

This was a hard podcast to make. I almost didn’t, because it’s scary to call these things out without my queer group with me to bounce thoughts off of and retreat back to when judgement flares up. It’s also just… sad, you know? It’s sad. I’m sorry to give you a sad episode, but that’s how I’ve been feeling, so here we are. Here we are.

Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m grateful for you. This is Callie, signing off.