Gay Activists Association (GAA)

​The post-Stonewall activist organizations:

While QLF and STAR were run by trans women, trans women also played significant roles in GLF and GAA. 

Queens Liberation Front (QLF)
StreetTransvestite Action Revolutionaries. (also Part III of Sylvia Rivera)
Gay Liberation Front (GLF) - New York
Gay Activists Alliance (GAA)
Gay Liberation Front (GLF) - London

See also The Five Years Following Stonewall - A New York Timeline

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The GAA was founded in New York City on December 1969 by dissident members of the Gay Liberation Front  who did not approve of the donation of $500 to the Black Panthers. The GAA were prepared to work within the political system, their meetings adhered to Robert’s Rules of Order and they had a constitution.

Sylvia Rivera and Bebe Scarpi first met at an early GAA meeting, however many of the members were initially uncomfortable with Sylvia.

GAA applied for incorporation to the New York State Division of Corporations and State Records.  However they were rejected on the grounds that the name was not a fit name for a New York corporation because of the connotation in which the word "gay" was being used, and that the corporation was being formed to violate the anti-sodomy laws of New York. It took five years to win the right to incorporate under that name.

Initially GAA met at the Church of the Holy Apostles, 9^th Avenue at 28^th Street. The GAA preamble included “The Right to Our Own Bodies”:

This is the right to treat and express our bodies as we will, to nurture, display and embellish them solely in the manner we ourselves  determine independent of any external control whatsoever.

In March 1970 the GAA organized protests following the police raid on the Snake Pit gay bar, and this led to the first Christopher Street Liberation Day.

Sylvia, right, collecting signatures.

GAA had started a petition to get the reluctant Carol Greitzer, representing Greenwich Village on the New York City Council, to introduce a bill for gay rights. In April 1970,  Sylvia, liking the idea, started soliciting signatures right on 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues where she did her usual sex hustling – and was arrested on the 15^th while doing so. This was GAA’s first arrest. Sylvia recounted her adventures at GAA. This was heard by Arthur Bell, who wrote a story for Gay Power, and made Sylvia a celebrity. When her case came to court the public gallery was filled with activists from GAA and GLF. Gay rights attorney Hal Weiner volunteered his services, and GAA picked up the other legal fees. After several appearances, Sylvia’s court case was thrown out when the arresting officer failed to show.

Sylvia wrote to Gay Power newspaper:

I want to tell you a little about a new gay group. The Gay Activists  Alliance. I really want to talk to my sister queens. So girls, pay me a little mind.
Well, girls, many of us were waiting for a group like GAA. I knew many of us when we used to talk about the day we could get together with other gays and be heard and ask for our freedom and our rights.

GAA collected over 6,000 signatures, but Greitzer refused to accept the petition.  Sylvia was part of the 35-person delegation that GAA sent to confront Greitzer on the issue - to no avail.

In August-September 1970 GAA/ Christopher Street Liberation Day booked the basement of Weinstein Hall, a New York University residence building, for fundraising dances. On the eve of the third dance, to be held 21 August, the administration attempted to cancel the rest. Although the two remaining dances were held, the situation escalated and the Hall was occupied. Sylvia, Marsha and Bubbles were present – and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries was born.

In March 1971 there was a Conference of Gay Liberation held at Rutgers University in New Jersey with forums on sadism, masochism, and leather; bisexuality; and transvestism. Speakers from S.T.A.R., Queens Liberation Front and GAA addressed the inaugural event on transvestism.

GAA headquarters was moved to the Firehouse at 99 Wooster St in May 1971. It offered weekly dances, with a sound system as good as in the best nightclubs; film nights curated by film historian Vito Russo; and of course political organizing.

GAA and STAR marched together from the Firehouse to Wards Island State Hospital where Marsha Johnson was then confined.

John Wojtowicz, who had become well-known in gay circles after his marriage to trans woman Liz Eden,  was a GAA member, although mainly for social activities, rarely for political events.

In July just after Mafioso Mike Umbers had evicted the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) from one of his houses, Arthur Bell wrote about his influence in the gay bar scene in The Village Voice, and shortly afterwards GAA organized a protest campaign outside Umbers’ major gay bar, Christopher’s End, at 180 Christopher Street.  Wojtowicz was out of favor as it became known that he was associated with Umbers - he turned up at the demonstration holding a sign supporting Umbers, and apparently had passed on information about GAA's plans.

GAA succeeded, after lobbying and protesting, in getting the New York City Council's General Welfare committee to discuss the problems faced by gays and transvestites in late 1971. GAA equivocated and for a while agreed to the removal of transvestite protections. However it ultimately endorsed them. STAR and QLF also gave evidence.

The GAA Street Theatre Subcommittee included trans activists and supported trans expression.

GAA published the Gay Activist newspaper until 1980.

The Wooster St Firehouse was burned down by arsonists in October 1974 – perhaps by the Mafia to eliminate the competition. The Chief Fire Marshall reported that the fire, soon after 3 am had been set in at least six places on the upper floors.

The GAA was disbanded in 1981.

• Eric Holm.  "Dog Day Afternoon, Dog day aftertaste".  Jump Cut, 10-11. 1976:3-4.  Online.
• Martin Duberman. Stonewall. A Plume Book, 1993: 230-4,
• David Carter. Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. St Martin’s Griffin, 2004: 233-8, 248-9.
•  Stephen L Cohen. The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York “An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail”. Routledge, 2008: 37-40. 107-111, 136-7
• Lillian Faderman.  The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. Simon & Shuster, 2015:.214-7
• Phillip Crawford Jr.  The Mafia and the Gays.  2015: 34. 37.

     EN.Wikipedia

-----------------

It is now well known that Carter made no mention of Sylvia Rivera in that overall the evidence is that she was not at the Stonewall riots.  But why is there no mention in his book of her arrest re the Carol Greitzer petition, and her subsequent trial attended by both GLF and GAA?  He does otherwise write about the petition.  He is also silent about QLF and STAR, but not about GLF and GAA.

Faderman, who places Sylvia at the riots in a fleeting role, also ignores the arrest and trial.

I follow Cohen who discusses it in detail.

I was going to link to the EN.Wikipedia page for Carol Greitzer.   However all it says about her refusal of the petition and her general stonewalling on gay rights is "Following the nearby Stonewall Riots that had occurred months earlier, Greitzer met twice with members of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) in May 1970".   I was appalled by this whitewashing and am not linking. 

Gay Liberation Front (GLF) – New York

The post-Stonewall activist organizations:

While QLF and STAR were run by trans women, trans women also played significant roles in GLF and GAA. 

Queens Liberation Front (QLF)
StreetTransvestite Action Revolutionaries. (also Part III of Sylvia Rivera)
Gay Liberation Front (GLF) - New York
Gay Activists Alliance (GAA)
Gay Liberation Front (GLF) - London

See also The Five Years Following Stonewall - A New York Timeline

----

After the Stonewall Riots, radicalized gays and lesbians attempted to work with the Mattachine Society of New York but the MSNY urged a tempering of demands and the avoidance of further uprisings. On 9 July 1969 a meeting was called by Mattachine-New York, and almost a hundred attended, and a majority voted for a march. The march planning committee felt that it needed a name, and Gay Liberation Front was suggested: in homage to the Vietnamese Liberation Front which was fighting US imperialism and the Algerian Front de libération nationale, which had gained independence a few years earlier.

The GLF met again a week later independently of Mattachine, and decided on a march and protest one month after the riots. The ad placed in The Village Voice said that the march on 27 July was co-sponsored by Mattachine and the Daughters of Bilitis, but at the march 2000 appeared and it was clear that Mattachine and DoB were no longer in charge.

The GLF that emerged was what today would be called intersectional. It denounced racism and the US invasion of Vietnam, and allied itself with third-world struggles and the Black Panther party. They spoke out against capitalism and the nuclear family, psychiatry, organized religion and mafia-run gay bars. And also against lookism, role-playing and objectification in the gay culture. And the homophobia and sexism in the New Left. Meetings were based on consensus and the chair was rotated. This was sometimes chaotic, and some debates continued for weeks.

Their manifesto:

“Gay Liberation Front is a revolutionary homosexual group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished. We reject society’s attempt to impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature. We are stepping outside these roles and simplistic myths. We are going to be who we are.”

By December, some members had become dissident, and a donation to the Black Panthers was considered too much. They broke away and founded the Gay Activists Association.

Consciousness-Raising groups in GLF were organized. One cell published the newspaper, Come Out! – Zazu Nova was a contributor; another organized dances.

Bob Kohler became prominent in GLF. He lived close to the Stonewall Inn and befriended and helped the street queens who congregated in the park across from the Stonewall. He would sit and talk to them, give clothing or change, and sometimes pay for a room in a cheap hotel. He knew their problems. He spoke up for them in GLF meetings, despite opposition. At different times he brought along various queens, including Bambi L’Amour and Zazu Nova (who is cited by David Carter as being in the vanguard at the Stonewall riots). He had brought Boom Boom Santiago to an early meeting. “Here are the people that you’re supposed to be helping. Meanwhile they’re starving, they’re dying, they have no clothes, they have no food. They’re the ones who started the goddamn [Stonewall] riot”. Kohler’s appeal was actually met with hostility.

Only Sylvia Rivera had the staying power. Kohler was on the committee that organized GLF dances. He put Sylvia on door duty, where, even though often stoned, she fiercely collected and guarded the money.  However the queen known as Orphan Annie volunteered to distribute GLF leaflets in Greenwich Village, and gave one to lovers Arthur Evans and Arthur Bell – which led to them coming into the group.

There was an ongoing problem with homophobia within the Black Panthers. They had been confronted on this issue by GLF at a rally at New Haven on 1 May 1970. Shortly afterwards Panther Huey Newton published an admonishment that militant blacks should acknowledge their insecurities about homosexuality. The GLF was invited to send a delegation to a Panther convention in Philadelphia, and Sylvia was chosen as part of the delegation. Huey even remembered her from a demonstration in New York.

By this time GLF women were becoming impatient with the sexism of the men, and many of them left and founded Lavender Menace, which had a different fight after being excluded from the First and Second Congress to Unite Women.

New York GLF folded in 1971.

• Martin Duberman. Stonewall. A Plume Book, 1993: 188-9, 219-32, 235-9, 246-53,
• David Carter. Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. St Martin’s Griffin, 2004: 213-232, 241-3.
• Stephen L Cohen. The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York “An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail”. Routledge, 2008:
• Lillian Faderman. The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. Simon & Shuster, 2015: 194-201, 210-3, 228-232, 265, 343, 589.

Review of two books about Stonewall

While Stonewall was an iconic event for both the trans and the gay movements, the perspectives of the two movements are quite different.   This is shown in the two books here, which, although both of much merit, do mainly reflect the gay perspective, but not the trans.


• Richard Schneider Jr (ed). In Search of Stonewall: The Riots at 50, The Gay & Lesbian Review at 25, Best Essays 1994-2018. 245 pp  G&LR Books, 2019.

The Gay & Lesbian Review is a bi-monthly magazine out of Boston that publishes much that is worth reading.  I read most issues.   Unlike most gay/lesbian organizations and publications from the 1990s, the G&LR never renamed itself as the LGBTQ Review.   Writing from a trans perspective, it is right that they did not do so, as while it publishes occasional pieces about trans issues, they are usually from a gay and/or lesbian perspective.   Many of the issues that a trans reader would look for have not been tackled, so the magazine name is appropriate.

The book contains various essays previously published in the 25 years of G&LR, with new essays by Martin Duberman, Lillian Faderman and Andrew Holleran, and an introduction by editor Richard Schneider.   The book itself is supplemented by the May-June 2019 issue Stonewall Special. 

Schneider writes: ”If nothing else, it is a marker in historical time with a clearly defined ‘before’ and ‘after.’ But to imply that Stonewall interrupted the flow of history, singlehandedly resetting the LGBT calendar, is to pile a lot of responsibility onto a single event or era. Still, something happened, and it happened quite rapidly and even magically after the riots, so in this sense the search for Stonewall can also be a desire to reconnect with the overpowering energy and excitement of this period.”

From this he includes essays about before and after Stonewall, and about elsewhere in the US, although not in Canada nor in Europe.  No one discusses the wave of partial decriminalizations of homosexuality that had swept Europe in the 1960s: 1961 Czechoslovakia, Hungary, 1963 Israel, 1967 England & Wales, 1968 East Germany and Bulgaria, 1969 Canada and West Germany.   In the US, only Illinois and Connecticut followed.   The question of whether the fact that the US had fallen behind other countries contributed to the Stonewall events is not discussed.

Nor are there any essays in the book about how movies, theatre and novels partly prepared the way.  In the few years leading up Stonewall, there were plays by Jackie Curtis, John Vaccaro and Charles Ludlam, films by Andy Milligan, Avery Willard, Jack Smith and Paul Morrissey - not to mention Boys in the Band and Myra Breckinridge. This dificiency is addressed in the May-June issue with a review by Andrew Holleran of Kembrew Mcleod’s The Downtown Pop Underground.

Martin Duberman, in his introduction to Part 1, says:

“A prominent theory about the corrupt Sixth Precinct's uncharacteristic failure to alert Stonewall's Mafia owners to the imminent raid ascribes it to the owners' tardiness in the making their usual payoff. An opposing theory emphasizes instead that the Precinct's new commanding officer was sending a message that henceforth the payoffs had to be higher-or, argues yet another theory, that he was determined to abolish them altogether. And so it goes.”   

Surely there should be mention of the theory presented in David Carter’s book that Ed Murphy was running, from Stonewall, a blackmail racket against gay employees in the financial services and that stolen bonds were turning up in Europe.  Having noted that, I also noticed that none of the writers mention Police Inspector Seymour Pine who was in charge of the Stonewall Raid, and also of the raid on the Snake Pit the following March.  Nor are any of the mafia persons mentioned: not Eddy Murphy (who, in addition to working from the Stonewall later founded the Christopher Street Festival committee), nor Michael Umbers, landlord of STAR House, nor Matty Ianiello who co-ordinated the Stonewall for the mafia, and would in 1974 be behind the opening of the Gilded Grape - a new bar for trans women.

There were four activist groups in New York that emerged in the wake of Stonewall: Gay Liberation Front (GLF), Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and the Queens’ Liberation Front (QLF).   There is significant mention of the first two.  There is a passing mention of the third, and nothing at all about the fourth.  The mention of STAR names Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson, and Duberman’s Introduction concedes that she may actually not have been at Stonewall.  But that is all.   Not a word about Tammy Novak. Joe Tish, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Lee Brewster, Bebe Scarpinato, Jayne County, Allyson Allante, Bubbles Rose Lee, Bunny Eisenhower, Kim Christie, International Chrysis, Siobhan Fredericks, etc.  The only trans woman featured is Major Griffen-Gracy, usually referred to as Miss Major.  Griffen-Gracy is not mentioned in either Duberman’s or Carter’s book on Stonewall, and did not particiapte in GLF, GAA, STAR or QLF.  So to choose her as the one and only trans woman to feature is a very odd choice.

I seem to be mainly listing what the book is not.  Much of it is well-worth reading, but do not expect coverage of the trans content of the Stonewall event. 



• Jason Baumann (ed). The Stonewall Reader.  316 pp. The New York Public Library & Penguin Books, 2019.

This book is a collection of pertinent documents from the New York Public Library donated by many gay and trans New Yorkers, and as such is invaluable to gay and trans historians. Some of the interviews were previously published in Eric Marcus’ Making Gay History, 1992.

Like the G&LR book, this does before, during and after Stonewall, and spreads out to other cities across the US, but is also totally disinterested in Canada and Europe.

There is much more trans content: Masha P Johnson (twice), Sylvia Rivera, Holly Woodlawn, Jayne County, and again Major Griffin-Gracy.   So the four best known trans women in New Yorks activism and the arts, and Griffin-Gracy who was not in STAR or QLF or in any films, but all the others listed above are again ignored, and in particular there is nothing on the Queens’ Liberation people.  The trans bits are all in the “during” section, with nothing in the “after section” except for the second Masha P Johnson piece which is about STAR.  The “before’ section includes an excerpt from John Rechy’s City of Night, but not the section about Miss Destiny. 

There also is an entry from Transvestia in which Virginia Prince discussed being divorced by wife number 1 and marrying wife number 2 – which is rather out of sync with the rest of the book.   Prince was not a gay-libber in any sense.   Not that I want to wall off the FPE-TriEss people from the rest of the trans movement, but surely  - to take a sample from Transvestia - something by Susanna Valenti would be much more suitable, or perhaps an excerpt from Darrell Raynor’s A Year Among the Girls.  Both Susanna and Darrell were, of course, New Yorkers.

This leads to the question: having included material from Transvestia, a Los Angeles trans newsletter, why is there nothing from the New York trans magazines and newsletters: nothing from Turnabout, nothing from Female Mimics, and most importantly, nothing from Drag, A Magazine of Transvestism (which featured writings by Lee Brewster and Bebe Scarpinato and was by far the most radical of the trans periodicals).


--------------------------------

To recap:

None of the trans historians are mentioned or quoted (not even yours truly).   I published a before and after Stonewall, New York trans timeline last month.   The story from a trans perspective is significantly different than that from a gay perspective.   We need to know gay perspective and read their books, but unfortunately, the gay editors are not paying much attention to the trans perspective.

My Timeline:

The four years leading to Stonewall
The five years following Stonewall
The trans geography of New York 1966-74

The four years leading to Stonewall – a New York timeline

On the topics of, and around Stonewall, I have already published the following accounts
                                                           Stonewall Inn and the Riots
                                                           Three Centuries of Police Raids
                                                           Other Trans Person in New York 1969-72
                                                           Recurring Untruths: Masha P Johnson's Birthday 
                                                           Where was Sylvia the night of 27/28 June 1969?
                                                           New York in the 1960s
                                                           East New Jersey in the 1960s
                                                           1969 – a Year of Much Activity

Trans New York, 1960-1962.

Trans New York, 1963-1965. 

It is now 50 years since the Stonewall riots.  They became a pivotal event for both trans and gays.  There are a number of commemorative books out this year, but all from the gay perspective.   My June 2011 account is one of only a very few from a trans perspective.

What I am doing here is putting Stonewall in context.   What else what was going on in New York by and/or for trans people in the surrounding years?   I start with 1966 because that is the year of Benjamin's influential book, and continue to 1973 and the contentious pride march when Sylvia Rivera was badly treated, the death of Candy Darling, and with 1974, new beginnings.

The four years leading to Stonewall
The five years following Stonewall
The trans geography of New York 1966-74

1966

The decision by the New York Bureau of Records to omit a sex designation from amended birth certificates for transsexuals was tested legally but unsuccessfully in Matter of Anonymous v. Weiner,

Harry Benjamin referred Phyllis Wilson to the new clinic at Johns Hopkins.

Sylvia Rivera was hustling as a woman.   She used a gun on a trick who was beating her.  He later had her arrested and charged.   Ray appeared in court as a clean-cut young man and was acquitted.

Marsha Johnson, 22, from Hoboken and Elizabeth, New Jersey, moved to Manhattan.   Sometimes she worked as a waitress, but usually she worked the streets.  

Spring 1966: the new New York City mayor, John Lindsay, had announced a crackdown on pornography and prostitution. Sylvia, at her usual spot on 9th Avenue and 44th Street was one of many caught in the sweep. Sylvia was put in the gay section in Rikers Island prison. It was here that she started doing heroin. She also met Bambi L’Amour.

After release Sylvia tried female hormones for a while: then stopped.  

“I don’t want to be a woman. I just want to be me. … I like pretending. I like to have the role. I like to dress up and pretend, and let the world think about what I am. Is he, or isn’t he?”

The noted photographer Walter Rutter came and took a series of photographs at Susanna Valenti's transvestite resort Casa Susanna in upstate New York.

Later that year Phyllis Wilson had become a dancer in New York.  Oct 4 a gossip column in the New York Daily News carried the item about her: 

“Making the rounds of the Manhattan clubs these nights is a stunning girl who admits she was male less than a year ago and that she underwent a sex change operation at, of all places, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore”. 

Johns Hopkins made a tactical decision and gave an exclusive to The New York Times, which ran the story on the front page on Nov 21. A press conference was called on the same day, where Edgerton and several colleagues announced at a press conference the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic under the chairmanship of plastic surgeon John Hoopes. They announced that they had already operated on 10 patients, all of whom were happy with the outcome. Three were already married, and three more were engaged.

A black trans girl (born 1948) previously in the New Jersey foster care system, expressed the kinds of statement that a trans girl normally would, and for that was committed to a psychiatric institution.

Holly Woodlawn went to John Hopkins for the operation, but she was denied it in that she had not been in the program for at least a year. She went on a shopping spree instead with the money that her boyfriend had provided for the operation.

Kim Christy and her friend Billy, who was becoming known as International Chrysis and entering pageants and performing, shared a tiny apartment in the area that later became New York's SoHo. They met sex magazine pioneer and editor of Exotique magazine, Lenny Burtman who arranged photo-shoots and other favors. She got to know New York female impersonators such as Tammy Novak, and performed at Club 82 as a stripper and as a showgirl. 

·         Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Julian Press, 1966. With a bibliography and appendix by Richard Green.  A close reading.   The seminal work that defines the field for decades to come.   

1967

The Harry Benjamin Foundation presented eight separate papers at a meeting at the prestigious New York Academy of Sciences on January 16, 1967, mainly considering etiology based on pre and post examinations of Benjamin's patients. Robert  Stoller,  Richard Green, Herbert Kupperman, Wardell Pomeroy, John Money, Ruth Doorbar, Leo Wollman and Henry Guze presented papers, based on their work with the HBF.

Harry Benjamin and Reed Erickson had been having disputes, sometimes quite petty, about how the money was spent. In the spring of 1967 the EEF grant to the HBF was reduced to $1,200, and in the fall – after the promised  three years expired-- stopped entirely.   Shortly afterwards, the Erickson Educational Foundation asked Benjamin to vacate the office that it was subsidizing.

Over 700 desperate transsexuals wrote and implored the doctors at the Johns Hopkins Clinic to help them. However the Clinic would approve for surgery only those whom they unanimously deemed to be ‘good candidates’. They often chose to err on the side of wait-and-see, recommending therapy rather than progressing a patient on to surgery.

Dr Edgerton adopted and adapted Burou's penile inversion method of vaginoplasty.

April: Mauricio Archibald, en femme, having been to a masquerade party, was on a New York subway platform waiting for a train. A police officer charged him as being a vagrant in violation of subdivision 7 of section 887 which forbids a disguise "in a manner calculated to conceal his being identified". He was tried and convicted.  See also Felicity Chandelle, who had been convicted under the same law three years earlier.  Neither Virginia Prince nor Siobhan Fredericks arranged help as they had done for Felicity.

September: Section 105 of chapter 681 of the Laws of 1967, which chapter repealed section 887 came into effect as of September 1, 1967, "provided that the newly enacted sections were not to apply or govern the prosecution for any offense committed prior to the effective date of the act".  

One-year-old Bruce Reimer from Manitoba was brought to see Dr Money after losing his penis in a botched circumcision, and was surgically reassigned to female as Brenda, and continued annual visits for almost 10 years, until Brenda began to refuse, and started to change back to male as David.

Phyllis Wilson’s marriage in Baltimore was reported in Jet Magazine.

Ray Rivera (Sylvia) was called to the draft board.   She proclaimed “I know I like men. I know I like to wear dresses. But I don’t know what any problem is”, was rejected and was still able to get a lift home.  

Eddie Dame, a cross-dresser since early childhood, was best man when his lover of four years married a women (Eddie and the lover had sex the night before and continued to do so occasionally until 1982 when the lover was seriously ill).   Eddie then went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and bought a full set of female clothing. Back in New York Eddie started going out dressed female. 

Flawless Sabrina/Jack Doroshow had organized 46 Nationals Pageants a year from 1959-1967, including the annual Miss Philadelphia contest held at the Hotel Philadelphia (now demolished) at Broad and Vine Stree, which was won in 1967 by the 19-year-old Rachel Harlow.

Flawless Sabrina held the Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant.  Miss Philadelphia (Rachel Harlow) was the winner;   Mis Manhatten (Crystal Labeija) staged a tantrum.  Kim Christy and International Chrysis were in the chorus line.  Minette and Mario Montez performed songs.   Dorian Corey, Jackie Curtis, Andy Warhol and Terry Southern were also present.  

Wayne County (the future Jayne) arrived in New York for the first time, and survived by meeting people in the Stonewall Inn.   However  he returned to Atlanta come September as could not afford a winter coat.

Siobhan Fredericks’ Turnabout magazine for transvestites ceased publication.

 

Valerie Solanas, masculine woman and room-mate of Candy Darling, wrote the SCUM Manifesto Scum stood for Society for Cutting up Men.  She commented on male transvestites: 

“Women, in other words, don't have penis envy; men have pussy envy. When the male accepts his passivity, defines himself as a woman (males as well as females think men are women and women are men), and becomes a transvestite he loses his desire to screw (or to do anything else, for that matter; he fulfills himself as a drag queen) and gets his dick chopped off. He then achieves a continuous diffuse sexual feeling from `being a woman'. Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female.”

Pudgy Roberts  was a New York female impersonator most famous in the late 1960s. He also wrote two novels, an how-to book, and edited a monthly magazine, The Great Female Mimics.

·         Andy Milligan (dir)  Compass Rose, with Minette.  US 73 mins 1967.

·         Jackie Curtis play:   Glamour, Glory and Gold.   Performed by Candy Darling and Robert De Niro.  

·         Pudgy Roberts.  Female Impersonator’s Handbook.  Capri Publishers, 1967

·         Bob Clarke (dir).  She-Man. With Hans Crystal and Dorian Wayne. US 68 mins 1967.  Bad transvestites blackmail men into feminization.  

·         The Rolling Stones in the song “Citadel” on Their Satanic Majesties Request: “Candy and Taffy, hope we both are well/Please come see me in the citadel”

1968

Leo Wollman  was on the WBI Boston television channel with Virginia Prince.

Renée Richards met with John Money at Johns Hopkins, but at the end was told that Johns Hopkins was not accepting any more transsexual patients at that time.

Dr Stanley Biber, in Colorado, contacted the Johns Hopkins Clinic for advice on how to do gender corrective surgery.   He was supplied with diagrams based on Dr Burou’s penile inversion method.

The most prominent patient in the Gender Identity Clinic was writer Dawn Langley Hall who had surgery in 1968, married an African-American the next year, and publicly announced the birth of a daughter in 1971 (a claim that the Gender Identity Clinic said was “definitely impossible”).

Erica Kay had surgery with Dr Benito Rish.

Lee Brewster, from West Virginia, who had been fired from the FBI finger-printing section because of suspicions that he might be gay, had arrived in New York, and started organizing drag balls as fund raisers for the Mattachine Society.

Eddie Dames joined Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and had a part in When Queens Collide.  The troupe gave him the name Bunny Eisenhower.  

Wayne County met photographer Leee Childers and they shared a coldwater walkup.  Later Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn moved in.

June 3. Valerie Solanas, shot Andy Warhol three times.  He was pronounced clinically dead. The doctors managed to revive him and operated for 5 1/2 hours, removing his spleen. Warhol was in critical condition but survived.

At approximately 8:00 pm, Valerie walked up to a traffic cop near Times Square and surrendered.  She was arrested and later taken to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric examination.

A photograph of Kim and Chrysis appeared in Female Mimics.

Flawless Sabrina/Jack Doroshaw was special advisor for gay and trans aspects on John Schlesinger’s film Midnight Cowboy.

Schlesinger’s new lover, photographer Michael Childers -- an old friend of Morrisey -- negotiated for a bunch of Factory regulars to be in the film’s party scene.  They each got $25 a day, but were left sitting around and became very bored, and only a few of them appeared very briefly in the film.  Schlesinger’s film was the first notable Hollywood film to tell of hustlers and the underground countercultural life.  Warhol, still in hospital, spoke on the phone to Morrissey,  and admitted jealousy that his material was being stolen.   They had made a film, My Hustler, in 1965.  Warhol suggested the Morrissey make a similar film, and have it out before Schlesinger’s, and use whoever had not been sent to Midnight Cowboy.   This Morrissey did.  He shot the film, Flesh, over six weekends, and for less than four thousand dollars (compared to $3 million for Midnight Cowboy).   He again used Joe Delasandro, as a hustler called Joe, and he included two trans actresses who had not been in the bunch sent to Midnight Cowboy: Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling.   During their short scene, they sit reading Hollywood magazine, commenting on the articles while Joe gets a blow job. The film opened at the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre in the last week of September 1968 and played there for seven months before moving to the 55th Street Playhouse in May, 1969. At the Garrick, its average gross was $2,000 per week, making $10,000-12,000 during the first six weeks.

A troupe of street queens, with varying membership sometimes camped out in the parkette opposite the Stonewall tavern.   It was a tough life.  One drugged-out queen fell asleep on a rooftop and came close to death with third-degree sun burn;  ‘cross-eyed Cynthia’ (?=Wanda) died when she was pushed out of a window of the St George Hotel in Brooklyn; another, Sylvia (not Rivera) jumped off its roof; Dusty ‘ugly as sin, never out of drag, very funny, big mouth’ who was careless about the term she used to refer to an African-American and was stabbed to death.

Sandy, a Yale-educated lawyer, was 6'5" (1.96m). He liked to say that he was five foot 17 inches. He was a regular in both Virginia Prince's FPE organization in New York, where he rarely wore female clothing, but did show photographs of himself so dressed.  He was also part of the local bondage community.   His lover was the drag performer Tobi Marsh.

David Wilde, who had been a focal point for FPE members in Manhattan, met Joan Bennett (1910-90), the film star and member of the New York acting dynasty, at a party.  When she met David she was appearing in the occult soap opera, Dark Shadows, 1966-71. They would date for ten years. When David told her about his female persona, Gail, she was initially dismayed, but afterwards she was unperturbed. David knew Harry Benjamin and asked him to talk to her about cross-dressing. 

Susanna Valenti responded in her column to Prince’s recent appearance on the Alan Burke television show. Burke pushed the line that a transvestite taking hormones and considering surgery was close to being a transsexual. Prince replied that she would not have the operation for anything. Susanna commented:   “Such a statement marks the boundary between the TV and the TS. The TV rejects the thought of surgery. He enjoys living the two sides of the human coin.”  However she estimated that she personally knew a dozen transvestites who had had surgery. “I met them all before the sex change, and some of them, at first, did not know they were TS’s, they only knew that they enjoyed dressing and would feel much happier as girls than in their male role.”  However she believed that many who did think themselves as transsexuals were mistaken. She also criticized transsexuals as a group as not being able to pass: “Very few of the TS’s I know have learned to move and gesture with that suppleness that is exclusively female”. Later she continued: “Society insists upon females behaving like ladies—and this is where our TS and pseudo TS friends fail in a most regrettable way. I am thinking right now of several instances whereby people continue to ‘read’ a TS as being a man even AFTER the operation”.

Catherine Bruce was photographed by Diane Arbus in both female and male personas.

Joe Tish had been a female impersonator since the early 1950s.   In particular she performed at the Moriccan Village on West 8^th St.  In the late 1960 she had a long running show at the Crazy Horse. Tish was one of the few performers who left the club dressed as female. Although refused admission at the Stonewall when so dressed, she had no such problem at uptown straight clubs. 

Alexis Del Lago, from Puerto Rico had studied at the Parsons School of Design, and had started going as female.   She met Jackie Curtis which led to her being introduced to Andy Warhol’s Factory where she was invited to be in one of his films.

Desiree, who had previously hung around the Stonewall Tavern, took up with Petey, a gangster, and they moved to the suburbs as a heterosexual couple.  Petey, in a fit of jealousy, shot and killed her.

++Big Bobby, the bouncer at Tony Pastor's, a mafia gay club at 6th Ave and McDougal St, was the lover of Tony Lee who performed ballet at the club.

October:  Mauricio Archibald appealed to the New York Supreme Court. He contended that a) he could not be a vagrant in that he has visible means of support b) while cross-dressed, he had no intention of committing any illegal act. Judge Markowitz observed that the 1845 law had been updated and readopted, with a more modern aim to discourage “overt homosexuality in public places which is offensive to public morality” as well as disguises used to cover criminal activities.” But Archibald was not engaged in criminal activities, nor was he gay. Mere “masquerading” without harming third parties is not a crime in New York, suggested Judge Markowitz. “If appellant’s conviction was correct then circus clowns, strangely attired ‘hippies,’ flowing-haired ‘yippies’ and every person who would indulge in the Halloween tradition of ‘Trick or Treat’ ipso facto may be targets for criminal sanctions as vagrants. However Judges Streit and Hofstadter rules that the wording of subdivision 7 does not require that the State must establish either a lack of means of support or an intention to commit an illegal act. Thus the conviction was affirmed.

Edward Sagarin, who had published The Homosexual in America, 1951 as Donald Cory, wrote a paper "Ideology as a Factor in the Consideration of Deviance" for The Journal of Sex Research, in which he made the commonplace observation that scientists are not always as objective as they should be. In the section he named "Normal Necrophiles and Transsexuals", he quotes Harry Benjamin finding "no evidence of serious mental illness", and replies: "Benjamin describes a condition in which 'the male speaks of his female counterpart as of another person,' but to label this schizophrenia would constitute social condemnation, rather than diagnostic realism" and "One need only read the case histories, written by Benjamin or his collaborators, to note how disturbed are the patients". The Journal allowed Benjamin to reply: "My criticism of Sagarin's contribution is that his own ideology leads him to draw unwarranted conclusions in some (not all) instances, and his tendency to generalize too much".

Patrician but ever controversial novelist, Gore Vidal (1925-2012) produced a novel, Myra Breckinridge, (named for San Francisco transvestite Bunny Breckinridge, and an outgrowth of a proposed sketch for the risqué revue Oh! Calcutta! - itself produced by semi-closeted transvestite, drama Critic Kenneth Tynan).   An exploration of what real-life transsexuality never could be.   Myra, the supposed widow of film critic Myron, is taken on at a Los Angeles acting academy owned by Myron’s uncle, also rapes one of the young men.   After a car accident, Myra reverts back to being Myron.

·         Frank Simon (dir). The Queen, with Flawless Sabrina, Rachel Harlow, Crystal Labeija, Mario Montez, Minette and uncredited in the chorus line:  Kim Christy and International Chrysis.  US 68 mins 1968.  Rachel went to the Cannes International Film Festival with the film and was a center of attention. David Bowie, in his androgynous phase, would cite her influence. 

·         Mart Crowley.  The Boys in the Band.   Dir: Robert Moore.  Premiered Off-Broadway April 14, 1968 and played 1001 performances through September 1970.   Despite its rather old-fashioned view, it was one of the first plays centered on gay men.

·       Jack Smight (dir). No Way to Treat a Lady. Scr: John Gay from a novel by William Goldman, with Rod Steiger and Kim August.  A misogynist serial killer does drag for one killing of a cis woman played by Kim August.  US 108 mins 1968.     One scene shot in the 82 Club. 

·       Andy Milligan (dir).  The Filthy Five. A heterosexual sex film, with Selena Robbins as the stripper who has a threesome with two men.  Robbins was featured prominently on the film’s poster – and incidently was post-op by then. 

·        Paul Morrissey (dir). Lonesome Cowboys with Francis Francine as the transvestite sheriff.  US 109 mins 1968.

·       Avery Willard (dir) Flaming Twenties. With Mario Montez, Minette, Jack Smith, Charles Ludlam, Bill Vehr.  US ? mins 1968

·        Minette.  Come to Me at Tea-Time.  LP, 1968.

·       Jean Marie Stein.  Season of the Witch. Essex House, 1968.   Stein was still pre-transition when she wrote this science fiction of a man, accused of rape, who has his consciousness transferred to the woman’s body.

·       Jackie Curtis’ play Amerika Cleopatra with Harvey Fierstein and Alexis Del Lago.

·       Lou Reed’s song “Sister Ray” – said by some to be about Sylvia/Ray Rivera who was 16 at the time. although the lyrics don't support this.

·       Lou Reed’s song “Lady Godiva’s Operation”.  “Life has made her that much bolder now/ That she [has] found out how/ Dressed in silk, latin lace and envy/ Pride and joy of the latest penny-fare”  -- however the operation ends badly.  

1969

Transsexual pioneer Christine Jorgensen came to Johns Hopkins for corrective surgery. 

Future showgirl Michelle Brinkle ran away to Baltimore intending to register at the Johns Hopkins Clinic, but never did, and ended up at Dr Burou’s Clinic in Casablanca instead.

Psychiatrist Jon Meyer became chairman of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, and his predecessor, John Hoopes wrote: “The surgery, often considered outrageously excessive and meddlesome by the uninformed, must be undertaken regardless of the censure and taboos of present society”.

Charles Ihlenfeld was a medical internist with an interest in endocrinology when a friend arranged an introduction to the then 84-year-old Dr Harry Benjamin who asked him to cover the office during the summer while Benjamin was in San Francisco. Ihlenfeld learned on the job, and stayed on: 

"I was awed by the courage of people who were willing to risk losing everything to gain the truth of their own lives".

Kim Christy was being kept by an oil tycoon.  She also starting doing photography for Eros Publishing Company, which published Eros, Mode Avantgarde, Hooker and Exposé.

Phoebe Smith, from Atlanta, came to New York after initial surgery with Dr Barbosa in Tijuana, to see Harry Benjamin for a hormone prescription.  She returned in November and Benjamin declared her ready for final surgery.

Terry Noel had been performing at the 82 Club since her operation in 1964.  Later she was a typist.  Then she moved to Virginia and married a naval officer.

Holly Woodlawn talked her way into Paul Morrissey’s Trash, first in a bit part, but then as the female lead (a heroin addict’s girlfriend).  She was paid $25 a day, and ad-libbed many of the lines.   Several Hollywood people petitioned the Academy to nominate her for best actress.

Vicki Strasberg, sex worker, was photographed by Diane Arbus at her birthday party.  

Susanna Valenti, writing her column in Transvestia, took up the concept that had been proposed by Sheila Niles of ‘whole girl fetishist (WGF)’ for members who did not pass well enough, particularly if it were for lack of trying,   Susanna even estimated that the majority of members were WGFs (Transvestia #55, 1969).  Later in the year, despite what she had written the previous year, Susanna Valenti had decided to live full-time as female. She planned to quit her job in the city and run Casa Valenti as a year-round bed-and-breakfast.

Joe Tish was performing in upstate New York. 

June 22: Judy Garland died, age 47 from an overdose. 

June 27: Judy’s funeral.

Edmund White: “I was just walking past Sheridan Square with my close friend Charles Burch the night of the raid. I had stopped going to the Stonewall because it had been taken over by drag queens, whereas before it had been a simple gay cruise bar where people danced to jukebox tunes.”

27/28 June  - 1^st night of Stonewall Riots.  The police raid against the Stonewall Tavern hours after the Judy Garland funeral, was co-ordinated by Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, who used the excuse that the bar was unlicensed. The raid was carried out without the knowledge of the local precinct which was suspected of being on the take. Interpol had recovered negotiated bonds from Wall Street which were turning up in Europe. The bonds were being stolen by Wall St. employees who were victims of a blackmail operation run by Ed Murphy, sometimes called the Skull from his time as a wrestler. Murphy sometimes worked the door, where one task was to hand envelopes to a representative of the Sixth Precinct, rumored to be $1,200 a month. Other times he behaved as if he were the manager of the Stonewall Inn. Murphy had served time for stealing gold from dental offices, and had been arrested previously on blackmail charges, but supposedly had incriminating photographs of J. Edgar Hoover, and the charges had not been pursued. The NYPD figured out that the theft of bonds was tied to blackmail at the Stonewall Inn, and the order went out to shut down the club.  One of the first reported actions that started the riot on the 27th, was that a cop hit a butch female/trans man and that he hit back. It has been debated whether this was Stormé DeLarverie, who was previously the sole male impersonator in the Jewel Box Revue. Deputy Inspector Pine has testified that the first significant resistance that he encountered in the bar was from the transvestites. Allyson Allante, then 14, was arrested, as was Maria Ritter who was there with her friend Kiki to celebrate Maria being 18 and legally able to drink for the first time. Street queen, Birdy Rivera was also there. Diane Kearny was in the area and for a time joined the crowd that was observing events. Tammy Novak was arrested and put in the paddy wagon for drag queens, but escaped in the confusion and ran to Joe Tish's apartment where she holed up for the weekend. A police officer putting Maria Ritter into the paddy wagon had commented that he couldn't believe that she was a boy. She said that she wasn't. As some more trans women were directed in, Maria stepped around them and walked away. The same policeman went to intercept her, but as she broke into tears, waved her to go away. Marsha P. Johnson and Zazu Nova were also active in the riots, and Michelle, Dario Modon and Christine Hayworth were present. Marsha was observed dropping a heavy weight onto a police car. Wayne County met Miss Peaches and Marsha P Johnson on arrival and realized what was going on.  He joined an impromptu march up and down Christopher Street shouting "Gay Power!".  Beat poet Alan Ginsburg lived on Christopher Street and inevitably joined the crowd. Ed Murphy was handcuffed to another man, but they managed to escape into the crowd and took a taxi to an S&M friend who knew how to remove handcuffs. Perhaps the Sixth Precinct cops, already peeved in not knowing about the raid in advance, recognized the man who paid them off.

Apparently Sylvia Rivera was not at the Stonewall Inn at the outbreak of the riots as often been claimed.  Comparing the different accounts, the most likely account is that she had fallen asleep in Bryant Park after taking heroin. (Marsha later went to Bryant Park, found her asleep, and woke her up to tell her about the riots.)

A few weeks later the Gay Liberation Front was formed.  Five months later, the Gay Activists Alliance split from GLF. 

A few months after the riots, the Stonewall Inn closed. The space was occupied in turn by a bagel sandwich shop, a Chinese restaurant, and a shoe store.

19 September:  Leo Wollman was on the Phil Donahue television show to discuss transsexual operations.

1 October:  ++The opening of John Osborne's play, A Patriot for Me, at the Broadway Theatre, was picketed by female mimics complaining about the disrespectful presentations during the drag ball scene. 

In the October 1969 Transvestia Susanna Valenti, announced what she was doing. She had lost the “fabulous thrill” that comes with the transformation from ‘him’ to ‘her’ but it was becoming increasingly agonizing for her to make the switch back to ‘him’. She was criticized for failing to maintain the balance.

John Money conducted a follow-up study of ‘17 male and seven female patients’, and found that after surgery nine patients had improved their occupational status and none declined. “Seven male and three female patients married for the first time” and “All of the 17 are unequivocally sure they have done for themselves the right thing”.

There had been discussion that a book should emerge to embody the findings of the Harry Benjamin Foundation, but this was felt to be too narrow.   In particular that would exclude the important work being done in Europe.   The book, financed again by the Erickson Educational Foundation, eventually came out in 1969.

·         Richard Green and John Money (eds) Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, with a preface by Reed Erickson, an introduction by Harry Benjamin. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969.  With contributions by Erickson, Money, Green, Stoller, Guze, Pomeroy, Doorbar, Hamburger, Wollman, Sherwin.

• Avery Willard (dir). Camp Burlesgue. With Pudgy Roberts impersonating Bette David, Carol Channing, Tiny Tim, Marlene Dietrich, Lily Tomlin, Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand. US 6 mins 1969.
• Jackie Curtis play: Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit, with Candy Darling.
• Lou Reed’s song “Candy Says”:  “Candy says, I've come to hate my body/ And all that it requires in this world …. Candy says, I hate the big decisions/ That cause endless revisions in my mind”

Other trans persons in New York 1969-72

Out of the Stonewall riots 27-30 June 1969 grew two pioneering trans organizations: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and Queens Liberation Front (QLF), and two gay organizations Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). Of course at that time ‘gay’ was the umbrella word that included bisexuals and trans persons, but GAA and GLF were not usually focused on trans issues.  

There are already articles in this encyclopedia on the major persons in both trans groups:

STAR - Bubbles Rose Lee, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P Johnson, Bebe Scarpinato, Bambi L’Amour
QLF: Lee Brewster, Bunny Eisenhower, Bebe Scarpinato (again), Vicky West, Chris Moore.

This article is about other trans persons who were around them, but of whom there is insufficient information to do a full article, although in a few cases a short article has been done. While I say trans, from the perspective of 2017, most of them look more gender queer than transgender. Harry Benjamin had been treating transsexuals in New York for many years, and had published his definitive book in 1966, and Johns Hopkins had done a very few transgender operations starting in the same year. There were cheaper doctors in the New York: Leo Wollman, David Wesser, Benito Rish, Felix Shiffman, Peter Fries. However to progress down the transsexual path required both money and some degree of stability in life. Holly Woodlawn was given the money by her boyfriend, but she quickly found that Johns Hopkins would require a multi-year evaluation as well as the money. It was possible but not easy to go from selling your body on 42^nd Street to being a completed transsexual. Patricia Morgan is a salutary example of how that could be done.

Some regard gender queer as second best to transsexual, but others regard it as an equally valid identity or choice. The persons below didn’t use either of these terms. They were homosexual, transvestite, drag queen, street queen etc.

How was the word ‘transvestite’ used? Here is Marsha P Johnson’ definition: “A drag queen is one that usually goes to a ball, and that’s the only time she gets dressed up. Transvestites live in drag. A transsexual spends most of her life in drag. I never come out of drag to go anywhere. Everywhere I go I get all dressed up. A transvestite is still like a boy, very manly looking, a feminine boy. You wear drag here and there. When you’re a transsexual, you have hormone treatments and you’re on your way to a sex change, and you never come out of female clothes.” The QLF magazine was called Drag: a magazine about the Transvestite.

Certainly this definition is radically different from the usage of Virginia Prince, Ethel Person and DSM III that attempted to limit the word to heterosexuals, and even regarded transvestism as a type of fetishism.

The persons below are mentioned in the books about Stonewall, STAR, QLF etc, but the pictures of them are far from complete. They are but snapshots, and in almost all cases we do not know which of them lived only a few years more, which of them lived a normal life expectancy, nor do we know if any of them later did a successful transition.

Major sources:

· Martin B Duberman. Stonewall. Plume, 1994.
· David Carter. Stonewall : the riots that sparked the gay revolution.: St. Martin's Press 2004.
· Stephan L. Cohen. The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: 'An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail'. Routledge, 2008.

Andorra

Andorra lived at STAR House, and went with Sylvia and Bambi in the demonstrations at New York University, and to the state capital, Albany.

Duberman: 252, 254.
Cohen: 91, 111, 122, 127, 132, 139, 147, 159, 253n212,

Birdie Rivera

From the age of 11, Birdie was the lover of a police officer who beat him and made him wear dresses. Birdy and other gays at school formed a gang, the Commando Queens. They staked a claim to Riker’s, a restaurant at Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue, which they took over from the winos. He was active at Stonewall.

Carter: 59-60,167,177,179.
Cohen: 17.

Boom Boom Santiago

Boom Boom was one of the street transvestites whom Bob Kohler brought to the early GLF meetings (1969). “Here are the people that you’re supposed to be helping. Meanwhile they’re starving, they’re dying, they have no clothes, they have no food. They’re the ones who started the goddamn [Stonewall] riot”. Kohler’s appeal was actually met with hostility.

Cohen: 99

Chris Thompson

Chris was a dancer, and aspired to be a dance therapist. Chris was also black, gay, trans and asthmatic. She sought treatment for asthma at New York’s Bellevue Hospital in 1970, but was locked in the psychiatric wing. She was ridiculed by the staff for sexual and gender deviance, and was threatened with transfer to the state mental hospital, but was quite accepted by the other patients. Arthur Bell & Sylvia Rivera discovered her and were able to do an interview. “When I came into admitting office, I told the doctor I had congestion and asthma. Because of me wanting to be a woman so much, he asked me did I ever have a fear of cutting my penis off. I didn’t tell him one way or the other, but on my record they have it down that I have a fear of cutting my penis off, to become a woman. I want to become a woman that bad, so they asked me these questions — do I still have a fear of taking a razor and cutting my penis off and I told them no, and if I did decide to have a sex change I would go through the legal procedures and go to the proper physicians and have it done.”

Arthur Bell & Sylvia Rivera. “Chris: Gay Prisoner in Bellevue.” Gay Flames, Nov. 14, 1970: 1, 2, 7. Online.
Cohen: 136.

Christine

Christine was described as a ‘hard old queen’. She was once bailed by Bob Kohler, the GLF activist.

Cohen : 98.

Congo Woman

Congo was regarded as ‘nasty’. She used to throw a brick though a display window to grab a dress or a wig.

Carter: 56

Ivan Valentin

Ivan, also Hispanic, was a friend of Sylvia from 1966, and also a friend of Ed Murphy of the Stonewall Inn. He is quoted: “A drag or transvestite is somebody who always dresses as a woman. A female impersonator is someone who claims to actually be a woman. I’m just a man who likes to dress up.”

Ivan was at the first night of the Stonewall riot where he was hit in the knee by a policeman’s billy club, and had ten stitches at St Vincent’s Hospital. He credits Sylvia with jumping a cop and starting the Stonewall riot – however he is alone in this claim.

Ivan later headlined a drag troupe “Leading Ladies of New York”. This show was shut down in Spring 1975 in West Hartford by the Connecticut state liquor authorities. Valentin took the case to the University of Connecticut School of Law, and got the law changed.

Eric Gordon. “An Imitation of Images,” The Hartford Advocate, Oct. 27, 1976, Feb. 9, 1977.
Duberman : 125, 182-3, 192, 201, 290n25, 297n14, 300n40.

Josie

A friend of Sylvia’s from the mid-1960s. When Sylvia first went to a GAA meeting, it was Josie who went with her.

Duberman : 235,
Cohen: 102, 109

Lola Montez

Listed, but no further details.

Cohen : 99,

Michele

Michele, 3rd from left, at Stonewall

Listed but no further details.


Cohen : 99

Nelly

Also known as Betsy Mae Kulo, a young Latina, who passed very easily.

Carter : 56

Orphan Annie

With white skin, a red afro and prominant eyes, Annie was said to resemble the comic-strip character. She had a habit when in cheap hotels of throwing radios or lamps out of the window. It was apparently Annie, giving out GLF leaflets in Greenwich Village, who gave one to Arthur Evans and his lover Arthur Bell – which brought them into the group.

A character in the 2015 Stonewall film was given this name.

Carter : 56, 60, 227
Cohen : 99, 101

Miss Pixie

Miss Pixie lived in STAR House. She was at the March 10, 1972 conference on transvestism attended by STAR, QLF and GAA.

Cohen : 91, 132, 145.

Raquel Wilson

Raquel was known as the ‘queen of sex’.

Cohen: 99.

Stanley

Despite her name, Stanley was always in drag, and given to claims such as that she had attended a famous school, which she would not name.

Carter: 56.

Wanda/cross-eyed Cynthia

She was pushed out of a window of the St George Hotel in Brooklyn. More.

Wallace Hamilton. Christopher and Gay ; a Partisan's View of the Greenwich Village Homosexual Scene. Saturday Review Press, 1973: 8-9. 57-9 .
Duberman: 188-9.

Carter: 56, 60 refers to a cross-eyed Sylvia, who would liberate hotel curtains to make dresses, and who fell from the roof of the St George Hotel.

Zazu Nova

Zazu was from upstate New York, and a staunch Unitarian. She had a violent temper and had been in prison more than once. It was rumored that she had done time for murder. She often carried a large chain in her purse for self-defense.

Cohen p48

David Carter writes of the Stonewall riots: “we can name three individuals known to have been in the vanguard: Jackie Hormona, Marsha Johnson and Zazu Nova”.

Nova was active in Gay Youth and GLF – she wrote for GLF News. Cohen quotes Perry Brass: “the divine Nova, a great transgendered creature whom I adored back then: totally original young man, who was maybe 19 or 20, and gorgeous, I mean Fab-u-lasss in the most intense way. I have no idea what happened to him (or her, in the more pc language). Nova was not strictly speaking a “she.” He often dressed as much young male as female. But he was a great dancer, and I can still hear his voice and the way he spoke—hugely poetic, outrageous, and very sweet. He was tall, about 6’, and looked wonderful.” She disappeared a few years after GLF folded.

Carter : 64-5, 162, 261, 298-9n11.
Cohen : 38, 41, 47-8, 88, 99-100, 116-7, 234n5, 236n30, 247n60.