Stormé DeLarverie, born December 24th 1920, was a butch lesbian whose scuffle with police was, according to DeLarverie and many eyewitnesses, the spark that ignited the Stonewall riots. Born in New Orleans to an African American mother and a White father, her mother worked as a servant of her father's family. She never knew her proper date of birth but celebrated on December 24th anyway.
As a child, she would often face harassment and bullying, and when she was a teenager she rode jumping horses with the Ringling Brothers circus, although she was forced to stop riding them after being injured in a fall. She realised she was gay at roughly the age of 18.
Between 1955 and 1969, DeLarverie was a fixture of the black theatre circuit as the sole Drag King of the Jewel Box Revue, the USA’s first racially integrated drag revue, which would regularly play the Apollo Theater in Harlem, as well as to mixed-race audiences, a rarity in the era of Racial segregation in the US. DeLarverie performed as a baritone. During the shows, audience members would attempt to guess who the “one girl” in the performers was, and DeLarverie would reveal herself as a woman during the musical number “A Surprise with a Song”, often wearing tailored suits and a moustache to make her unidentifiable to audience members. She drew inspiration in her singing from Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday, both of whom she knew personally.
In June 1969, DeLarverie was a central figure of the Stonewall riots, although she made it clear in later years that “riot” was a misleading description and that “it was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience- it wasn’t no damn riots”. Many people, herself included, have said that DeLarverie was the woman who was escorted out of the Stonewall bar in handcuffs by the police, and she had to be brought through the crowd by police several times as she escaped repeatedly, and she fought with at least four of the police officers for about 10 minutes. She suffered a head wound after being hit by a police officer with a baton for saying that her handcuffs were too tight, and bleeding from a head wound she fought back against the police officers, with one eyewitness referring to her as “a dyke-stone butch”. Bystanders remarked that DeLarverie looked at the crowd and sparked them to fight when she shouted “Why don’t you guys do something?” and after an officer forced her into the back of the police wagon, the crowd became a mob and went “berserk”, with many historians and contemporary reports stating that it was at that moment that the scene became explosive, and because of this she has been dubbed “the gay community’s Rosa Parks”.
Whether or not DeLarverie was the woman who fought her way out of the wagon or not, despite DeLarverie herself saying that she was the woman, all accounts agree she was one of several butch lesbians who fought back against the police.
DeLarverie’s role in the gay rights movement lasted well after the Stonewall riots. In the 1980s and 1990s she worked as a bouncer for several lesbian bars in New York City. She was also a member of the Stonewall Veterans’ association, holding the offices of Chief of Security, Ambassador and Vice President from 1998 to 2000. For decades, she served as a volunteer street patrol worker and was dubbed the “guardian of lesbians in the Village” and “a gay superhero”.
As well as her work for the LGBT community, she also organized and performed at benefits for women and children going through abuse. When asked why she chose this work she said that somebody had to care for them and if people hadn’t cared about her then, with her mother being black and being raised in the south she wouldn’t be here at that time to do the work that she did.
In later life, she suffered from dementia, living in a nursing home from 2010 until her death in 2014. She seemingly did not recognise she was in a nursing home, although her memories of the Stonewall Riots remained strong. She died in her sleep on 24th May 2014 in Brooklyn. No immediate family members were alive when she died but Lisa Cannistraci, who had become one of her legal guardians, stated that the cause of death was a heart attack and remembered that DeLarverie was “a very serious woman when it came to protecting people she loved”. A funeral was held for her on 29th May 2014 at the Greenwich Village Funeral Home.
In June 2019, DeLarverie was one of the 50 inaugural American pioneers inducted onto the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall Inn, along with Marsha P. Johnson and Bayard Rustin, among others to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
In loving memory of Stormé DeLarverie; 24th December 1920- 24th May 2014
By Jake Livingstone
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