International Working Women's Day - Part Five

To begin the fifth part of my International Working Women's Day series, I need to tell you a little about the Stonewall uprising.

The Stonewall Inn was a queer pub in the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan, back in the sixties. As you'd expect, the police regularly raided the bar. They would subject the patrons to sexual harassment and assault, as they did in most queer bars at the time. On the night of the 28th of June 1969, though, they came to the wrong pub.

It's often said that noone knows who struck the first blow, but that's inaccurate - we know who struck the first blow, and the second, the third, and the hundredth. The police did. What we don't know is who was the first to fight back. The way I heard it was that Marsha Johnson was the second one to bottle a police officer, and it's her that I'll be focusing on today.

Johnson was no stranger to police brutality. As a black, transgender, homeless woman she was regularly on the receiving end of violence from queerbashers, civilian and police both. Many others who fought at Stonewall had similar experiences - the uprising was led by the queer street youth, who were primarily transgender and black or latino. As the police began loading people into a waiting van, the patrons of the bar began throwing coins at the officers. That they threw coins was especially important - many of these were people who may not have eaten that day, who had practically nothing, but they took the change in their pockets and used it as a weapon to fight for their brothers, sisters and non-binary siblings. That is what solidarity means.

The coins were followed by bottles, and soon the rioters had rushed the van and liberated the prisoners, while the police resorted to locking themselves in the pub. Detective Inspector Pine, one of the men who was involved in the raid, said, "I had been in combat situations, but there was never any time I felt more scared than then." (1)

He had reason to be scared - the rioters were nowhere near finished. There was an attempt made to set fire the the Stonewall Inn and burn the police inside - when that failed, the rioters ripped a parking meter out of the ground and used it as a battering ram.

When riot police arrived to back up their colleagues, the Stonewall rioters took them on, too, and held their own. Altogether, the uprising continued in spontanaeous protests and disturbances for five days.

Marsha Johnson fought in the Stonewall uprising, but that wasn't her only, or even her most important, achievement. Soon after Stonewall, in the face of condemnation from mainstream gay organisations like the Mattachine Society, Johnson and several other radical queers form the Gay Liberation Front. They consciously named themselves after the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, and they linked the struggle for queer rights to socialism. They raised money for striking workers, and organised in solidarity with the Black Panther Party, leading Huey Newton to publicly declare his support for queer rights. Soon, the GLF had sister organisations on three continents, including one lead by Peter Tatchell.

Along with her close freind and fellow Stonewall veteran Sylvia Rivera, Johnson founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) in 1970 as a caucus of the GLF. STAR took in homeless queer youth, giving them a place to stay and a surrogate family, led by the Queen Mother herself, Marsha Johnson. Johnson and Rivera often did sex work in order to pay rent and bills, and to keep their young charges from having to do the same.

Later, in the 1980s, Johnson became a part of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. At a time when the US government was content to let gay people die from AIDS, ACT UP organised demonstrations to bring attention to the AIDS crisis, and to push for government action to deal with it. They had many successes, and their actions have been credited with helping push the government into passing reforms that made AIDS and HIV medication easier to access.

In 1992, Marsha P Johnson's body was found floating in the Hudson River.

There is some debate over whether she was murdered or committed suicide, but it comes down to the same thing in the end. Regardless, Johnson's life was one worth celebrating: she was by all accounts a colourful, vivacious woman who brought great joy to those who knew her, and she was one hell of an activist, which is why I'm writing about her here.

1. http://www.socialistalternative.org/stonewall-riots-1969/