Black LGBTQ+ History:
The Revolution Marsha Started

The Stonewall Inn was a dive bar owned by the Genovese crime family, with watered-down drinks, no running water behind the bar, and regular police shakedowns. The NYPD raided gay bars as standard enforcement — arresting patrons for "masquerading" (wearing fewer than three gender-appropriate items of clothing), which was a real law. The people who patronized Stonewall were not wealthy, closeted professionals protecting their careers — they were drag queens, transgender women, gay male sex workers, and teenagers who had nowhere else to go. They had nothing to lose by fighting back.

When police raided on June 28, the crowd — estimated at 200 inside — resisted. Witnesses and participants credit Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman and sex worker who had been a fixture of the Village since her teens, with throwing the first bottle or shot glass at police. Sylvia Rivera, a Venezuelan-Puerto Rican trans woman, threw a bottle. The crowd fought. The riot lasted six days. Within months, the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance were founded. The first Pride March was held on June 28, 1970, exactly one year after the uprising. It was organized by Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

In 1970, Johnson and Rivera founded STAR — Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries — to provide housing and support for homeless trans youth and sex workers in the Village. They funded it by sex work. The mainstream gay rights organizations that emerged from Stonewall increasingly distanced themselves from trans women and drag queens, viewing them as a political liability. When Rivera attempted to speak at the 1973 Gay Pride Rally, she was booed off the stage by a gay crowd that found her disruptive. She said: "Y'all better quiet down. I've been trying to get up here all day for your sake."

Marsha P. Johnson was found floating in the Hudson River on July 6, 1992. Police ruled it a suicide. Friends and advocates said she had been murdered. The case was closed. It was reopened in 2012 after sustained pressure from the trans community and documentarian David France; the investigation ultimately remained inconclusive. Johnson was 46. She had given the last decades of her life to the community that excluded her. She died poor, homeless at intervals, and largely unknown outside Greenwich Village. She is now on t-shirts worldwide. The t-shirt companies are mostly white-owned.

Black transgender women face the intersection of anti-Black racism, transphobia, and economic marginalization. They are murdered at rates that the Human Rights Campaign calls an epidemic — with an average of 4 documented deaths per month, with the actual count likely higher because trans deaths are frequently misclassified by law enforcement using victims' deadnames and misgender them in reports. Most murders go unsolved. The communities most affected have the fewest resources. The mainstream LGBTQ rights organizations that raised hundreds of millions for marriage equality litigation spent a fraction of that on anti-violence programs for the trans women of color who started the movement they're celebrating.