Truth, Injustice, & the Homo Way

"A lie can run around the world before the truth has time to put its shoes on!" -Terry Prachett

In this year's Metroline Pride issue, editor Joe DaBrow, referring to the 1st night of the Stonewall Riots made the statement that there were no drag queens there. Since then Metroline has been inundated with emails claiming that Joe is anti-drag queen, anti-transsexual, anti-lesbian, and that he must be fired or there will be protests of Metroline on all fronts.

As nice as it is to see that people are picking up and reading the magazine, I have to admit that I haven't seen such an outrageous jumping to conclusions since the Republicans decided that... actually come to think of it I have never seen such outrageous jumping to conclusions. I'm still trying to figure out how people interpreted a statement about drag queens to be anti-lesbian (I personally have never met a lesbian drag queen but if there is one out there please drop me a line at the magazine so I can interview you for an upcoming issue).

On the other hand this is exactly the sort of injustice I have come to expect from the GLBTQ (or LGBTQ) community where persons latch onto one line without reading the whole article and start raising a stink about it without actually checking the facts. But why should they check the facts. After all, everyone knows that Stonewall occurred when a group of drag queens in their finest frocks formed a kick line through every street in Greenwich Village and chased the NYPD clear to Hoboken. Everyone knows that. Everyone. Just as everyone knows that before Columbus discovered America everyone knew the world was flat and the before Copernicus everyone knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. Funny thing about what everyone knows is that it very often proves to be not true.

In addition, it also appears that most of the persons raising a stink about the statement weren't at the Stonewall Inn on the night of Friday, June 27th, 1969. I admit I wasn't there either because I was only 8 years old and even with NYC's liberal view towards carding people I suspect I probably wouldn't have been admitted. So I started by asking people over the last couple of weeks what they knew about that first night of Stonewall. I got many diverse answers, my favorite being that thousands of people rioted that first night starting in Greenwich Village but eventually ranging from Central Park to the World Trade Center (I didn't have the heart to tell the person who told me this that the World Trade Center hadn't been built yet).

Given the diversity of answers, most of which are based on information that they heard from a friend who had a relative who knew somebody who knew someone who was there that night, I went to the one source that I knew would be accurate, The Stonewall Veterans Association, specifically the President of the SVA, Williamson Henderson.

Mr. Henderson was there that first night. He was one of the 12 persons arrested that night. And according to him there was no one in drag there that first night. Remember that the police had been conducting raids for several weeks prior to June 27th and many of the regular patrons were afraid to go out and those that did, while they may have at other times dressed in drag, were dressed in civvies (for want of a better expression). Of course this begs the question as to whether a drag queen not in drag is still a drag queen but I'll get back to that later.

I also found the newspaper articles from the NY Times & the NY Post about that first night of the riots and neither one of them mention anything about drag queens (which the Times might choose to omit but the NY Post? Come on! Like they would pass up any chance to sensationalize anything). In addition both articles mention only one name of a person being arrested for throwing something at a police officer and that was Dave Van Ronk, a 33-year-old folk singer. So those are the facts and you can stomp your size 12 black slingback pumps all you like but it won't change the facts. There were no men dressed in drag at Stonewall on Friday, June 27th in 1969. And for all those people who took offense at it - get over yourselves - there are far more important issues facing our community than your attempts to revise history to suit your own agendas.

Now you will notice that nowhere does anyone claim that there were no transgendered persons or lesbians there that 1st night. Nor do we in anyway dismiss or diminish the vital role that all members of the gay community played in the subsequent nights of rioting. However we do our community a disservice by sacrificing facts on the altar of political correctness (which is just a general agreement to tell little lies so as not to offend anyone, especially ourselves when we come to realize that deep down we really do believe that "those people" really are shiftless, lazy, greedy, born-criminals, drunks, or just no damn good). I found it very interesting while searching for info about Stonewall that early articles referred to it as a "riot" but then someone must have realized that "riots" are "simple criminal acts of petty vandalism on steroids" whereas "rebellion" is the "heroic struggle of the wrongful oppressed against cruel despotism" and so all later articles refer to it as the Stonewall Rebellion (if gays were Irish we would call it the Stonewall Uprising and we would probably have much better songs about it).

So that brings me back to the question about whether a drag queen not wear drag is still a drag queen. For that matter is a man who has had sex reassignment surgery and become a woman who sleeps with men still a homosexual? Is a woman who chooses to live as a man but hasn't had the surgery yet any less of a man than someone who has had the surgery or was born male? Does it really matter? Or do we still support them however they identify themselves simply because they are a human being and that really is the only thing that matters? As a community we need to stop dividing ourselves into separate groups. Its time we stop being the GLBTQ or LGBTQ (whichever you prefer) community and just be The Community.

Now I fully expect that Metroline will get a whole bunch of e-mails complaining about this article but before you waste the electrons I just want to point out two things - first we have in this country a little thing called Freedom Of Speech and therefore I am entitled to express my opinion, and second before you waste your time demanding that Metroline fire me - as a freelance writer, I don't actually work for Metroline, so there.