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From the Archives: An interview with Lesbian Stonewall Veteran Stormé DeLarverie

Editor’s introduction: Back in 2010, four years before her death, AfterEllen was fortunate enough to interview Stormé DeLarverie. Despite anything else you’ve read, DeLarverie is the brave, butch lesbian who incited the Stonewall Revolution, and her legacy deserves to be honored.

The name Stormé DeLarverie may not ring a bell, but it should.

Some have referred to her as “the Gay Community’s Rosa Parks.” She fought the police during the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 and has been identified by many — and has identified herself — as the legendary “Stonewall Lesbian” whose assault by the police became the pivotal moment in the street disturbances that spurred the crowd to action. She was also a singer who toured the country as the cross-dressing emcee of the famed Jewel Box Revue, in which she was the only female performer. Radio City Music Hall, the Apollo Theater, and the Copacabana are a few of the venues where she has graced the stage, either with the Jewel Box Revue or as the frontwoman of various bands. She was the subject of at least three documentaries, including Stormé, which was produced by her friend Sam Bassett and was screened on July 11, 2010 at Webster Hall and Stormé: Lady of the Jewel Box, currently screening at The Crossing Boundaries Exhibit in Manhattan. Now 89 years old, she resides in a sparsely furnished room on the sixth floor of a nursing home in Brooklyn. During Pride Weekend on June 26th, I went to a STONEWALL Veterans’ Association (“S.V.A.”) meeting, where she was scheduled to appear. DeLarverie continues to hold the title of Ambassador of the S.V.A. I was hoping to chat with her about her experience as a queer gender-bending woman in entertainment and her role in the Stonewall Rebellion. She never arrived. I was told that the nursing home would not let her leave the premises. She also missed the Pride March, an absence that was so unusual and conspicuous that it attracted New York Times reporters to the nursing home to inquire and report about her condition and whereabouts.

Last week I went with a friend of hers, Hilary Farrell, to visit her in the nursing home, and what I saw was saddening. The interior of the facility was reminiscent of an institution. The sheen of the walls seemed like paper that had turned yellowish grey with age. Fans were nailed into makeshift wooden planks that hung precariously from walls and ceilings. The elevator took ages to arrive. One would never imagine that a gay civil rights icon, an entertainer who graced the stages of The Apollo and Radio City Music Hall, and one who gave so much of herself to the community would live out the final years of her life alone in such a lifeless and drab environment.

Her home for decades was the Hotel Chelsea, a building rich with history and one that, over the span of over a century, housed a string of artists, writers, entertainers, and colorful characters. Protected by New York City as a cultural preservation site and historic building of note, it housed legends and was itself the subject of legends. Mark Twain, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jack Kerouac, Uma Thurman, and Anthony Kiedis are just a few of the writers and entertainers who have resided in the building.

In March, Farrell, who lived next door to DeLarverie at the Hotel Chelsea, found DeLarverie disoriented and, uncharacteristically, asking for help. DeLarverie was shaking and dehydrated, and she was taken to and treated at the nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital. No next of kin has been located, and she no domestic partner. Friends say that she had a long term relationship with an aerialist and burlesque performer, but that was “a long time ago.”

With no one in her life legally able to make health care decisions, she was given a court appointed a guardian: the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged (“JASA”). She remained at the hospital as doctors ascertained her ability to care for herself. When St. Vincent’s went bankrupt and closed abruptly, she was transferred to the nursing home. SAGE, an advocacy group for elderly members of the LGBT community, has also been offering assistance. Her friends say that communication with the aforementioned groups has been inadequate and a source of frustration, and they feel powerless to improve her situation.

When Farrell and I entered room 609, DeLarverie was lying on her twin sized bed motionless, expressionless, her blue-grey eyes focusing on nothing in particular. Then she saw Farrell, she instantly brightened up, telling her that she had a spill earlier in the week but that she was fine. I was introduced to her, and she sat up. “Ask me anything,” she said.

DeLarverie has dementia. During my visit, she occasionally believed she was still at the Hotel Chelsea, but memories of her childhood, the pivotal night in front of the Stonewall Inn, the characters important in her life, and other significant life experiences remain as fresh as ever. Farrell and I chatted with her about her life experiences, from the life altering to the mundane.

One of the first things I noticed was a few pictures that were arranged neatly on a shelf beside her bed. One photograph depicted her and a young man standing arm in arm. “Who is that?” I asked. “That’s one of my children,” she responded. Farrell explained that she calls young people in the gay community that she befriends her “children.” “He’s a bastard,” DeLarverie added about the man in the photograph, chuckling. She continued, saying that she would meet younger gays in various bars and clubs throughout the city. “So you refer to young gay men that you meet as ‘your children?'” I asked. “Lesbians too,” she corrected.

DeLarverie was born in 1920 in New Orleans. Her father was a wealthy white man, and her mother was an African-American woman who worked for his family. I asked her whether she encountered difficulties growing up as a mixed race child in the segregated south. “Yes I did,” she said emphatically. Neighborhood kids used to harass her. It was something she didn’t want to revisit, because when I asked what the other kids said to her, a look of displeasure crossed her face said, “I don’t want to repeat.”

There were two bullies who were particularly odious, and she said that one day she became fed up with the bullying and fought back. “I knocked their heads together. They thought they were hardasses. They ended up one on top of the other!” In Bassett’s film, she recalls, “When you grew up like me, honey, you better be able to see all the way around you, because when the black kids weren’t chasing me, the white kids were chasing me, and if they weren’t, the dogs were chasing me, or the snakes were chasing me. Somebody was always chasing me – until I stopped running.” Her friends say that the bullying was so persistent that her father sent her away to school for a few years to study in a safer and less chaotic environment.

As a teenager she joined the Ringling Bros. Circus. “I rode the jumping horses,” she said, mimicking jumping motions with her hand. “Sidesaddle,” she added. In Bassett’s film she humorously commented on the discomfort encountered while riding sidesaddle. “Let me tell you. Learning how to ride a horse sidesaddle can be injurious to your butt… My butt took a beating!” A fall resulting in a few fractured bones ended her days as an equestrian.

She first realized that she was gay when she was around 18, she said. She recalled the day when the vague and nebulous feelings of being somehow different from everyone else finally crystallized into something definitive. “One day, I woke up and went, ‘oh!'” she said, her hand motioning to an imaginary light bulb above her head. I remarked that the late 1930s and early 1940s were probably not good times for gay people, that there was no such thing as a gay identity, and there probably wasn’t even a word for being gay. She said, “Oh yes there was. The word was ‘queer.’ That’s what they called us.” The word was used as a slur. Broadway musical A Chorus Line contains a monologue about the Revue. DeLarverie’s time in the Jewel Box Revue inspired a documentary by filmmaker Michelle Parkerson, Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box, and her masculine presentation and attire in the Revue have been examined in college textbooks. DeLarverie mentioned a few times that she used to wear men’s clothes around New York City. “I was doing it, and then [other lesbians] started doing it!” she said.

The conversation turned to the night in June of 1969 at the Stonewall Inn where she made history. Quite a few friends, writers and historians over the years have identified her as the tough cross-dressing butch lesbian who was clubbed by the NYPD, which evoked enough indignation and anger to spur the crowd to action. She was identified as the Stonewall Lesbian in Charles Kaiser’s book The Gay Metropolis, and her scuffle with the police has been mentioned a few times in passing by The New York Times in the past couple of decades. Then in the January 2008 issue of Curve Magazine she identified herself as the Stonewall Lesbian in a detailed interview with writer Patrick Hinds, an excerpt of which is below:

“[The officer] then yelled, ‘I said, move along, faggot.’ I think he thought I was a boy. When I refused, he raised his nightstick and clubbed me in the face.” It was then that the crowd surged and started attacking the police with whatever they could find, she said.

I asked my last question hesitantly. “Have you heard of the Stonewall Lesbian? The woman who was clubbed outside the bar but was never identified?” DeLarverie nodded, rubbing her chin in the place where she received 14 stitches after the beating. “Yes,” she said quietly. “They were talking about me.”

And then, almost as an afterthought, I asked, “Why did you never come forward to take credit for what you did?”

She thought for a couple of seconds before she answered, “Because it was never anybody’s business.”

I asked her if she still remembered that night. She answered in the affirmative. After the cop hit her on the head, she socked him with her fist. “I hit him,” she said. “He was bleeding.” A natural protector, she has worked as a security guard at a few of the lesbian bars in the city. I spoke to her friend, Lisa Cannistraci, who has known her for around 25 years. Now one of the owners of lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson, Cannistraci said that DeLarverie worked as a security guard at the original Cubby Hole, located at 438 Hudson Street, starting in 1985. Cubby Hole eventually moved to the corner of West 4th and West 12th. Then Henrietta Hudson opened at the 438 Hudson Street location, and DeLarverie continued working there until 2005. “Until she was 85 years old?” I asked her. Cannistraci said yes.

Footage from Parkerson’s film showed DeLarverie patrolling the premises with her trademark swagger in front of Cubby Hole, hugging patrons as they left and barking at guys who tried to make trouble by gawking through the window.

Cannistraci also added that DeLarverie was a licensed and bonded security guard who carried a pistol. At one point during my visit to the nursing home, DeLarverie mentioned that she used to carry a gun and was “a good shot.” She said she has handled guns her entire life; she even went into a detailed and humorous tangent about a tiny hand pistol called a derringer, noting that one could hide several of them in one’s clothes, and no one would ever find out.

DeLarverie continued emceeing and singing after Stonewall — at gay events and at benefits. Her friend Williamson Henderson, President of the S.V.A., told me that she hosted an annual gay nightlife event, The Gay Bar People’s Ball, where all of the movers and shakers of NYC gay nightlife would congregate and receive awards. “It was an event that was well known and a big deal,” he said. In Sam Bassett’s film, DeLarverie said that she continued to sing at benefits for battered women and children, remarking “Somebody has to care. People say, ‘Why do you still do that?’ I said, ‘It’s very simple. If people didn’t care about me when I was growing up, with my mother being black, raised in the south.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t be here.'” What does the future hold for DeLarverie? Cannistraci told me that she is currently in the process of petitioning for legal guardianship of DeLarverie and hopes to move her into a brighter, more modern nursing home with a larger staff and activities for the residents — and one where a friend of DeLarverie’s already resides. “She was a protector of the community, and [her situation] is heartbreaking,” she said.

In the New York Timesarticle about DeLarverie, Cannistraci voiced her frustrations at the gay community’s apathy regarding DeLarverie’s plight.

“I feel like the gay community could have really rallied, but they didn’t,” said Lisa Cannistraci, a longtime friend of Ms. DeLarverie’s who is the owner of the lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson, where Ms. DeLarverie worked as a bouncer. “The young gays and lesbians today have never heard of her,” Ms. Cannistraci said, “and most of our activists are young. They’re in their 20s and early 30s. The community that’s familiar with her is dwindling.”
DeLarverie’s situation is, unfortunately, not unique, and it highlights some of the issues faced by gay and lesbian seniors. It is unclear whether DeLarverie has no surviving family members or whether she has surviving family members but simply lost touch with them over the years. Many elders become isolated from their families, either because of family disapproval or because they moved away from their families to a big city with a large gay and lesbian population, thereby becoming out of sight and out of mind. If they do end up in a retirement home or nursing home, there is also the issue of whether other residents will have a problem with their sexual orientation. Furthermore, in many states, same-sex partners cannot be legally bound, and if there is no next of kin, one can end up being a ward of the state. If the Rosa Parks of the gay community can end up in a nursing home among strangers like other forgotten elderly men and women, it is certainly a wake up call.

As it was time for Farrell and me to leave, DeLarverie offered to escort us to the door, and struggled a bit to stand. We protested. “No, no, we’re fine!” She was having none of that, as she steadied herself and made a beeline for the door. Old age and a spill earlier in the week would not get in the way of good manners and chivalry. Farrell took her right hand, and I took the left, and we all walked towards the door together. She kissed us both on the cheek and bid us farewell. “Take care, babies,” she said.

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