Talk Description to Me
Talk Description to Me
Episode 110 - Stonewall and LGBTQ Activism
It's time for our second annual Pride episode! Last year, in episode 57, we described the visuals of Toronto's Pride Parade. This year we take a look at the historical event that led to the first political (and celebratory!) Pride Marches in North America: the Stonewall riots.
To hear firsthand accounts from those who were at Stonewall, and journalists who have studied the event and its aftermath, check out this New York Times video. It's not described, but the interview subjects are quite descriptive in their recollections.
https://youtu.be/S7jnzOMxb14
Talk description to me wwith Christine Malec and JJ Hunt
Christine Malec:Hi, I'm Christine Malec.
JJ Hunt:And I'm JJ Hunt. This is talk description to me, where the visuals of current events and the world around us get hashed out in description rich conversations.
Christine Malec:Get out your feather boas and your sequins and your high heels and whatever leather or lace you wear for pride, its Pride Week Pride Month. It's always pride time. And if you missed our episode, last year on pride, you should go check it out because it was really good we, we talked about parades and the visuals of what you might see in a pride parade. Some of our experiences, it was really good. It was a great episode. So check it out. What we thought we would do this year is to look at some of the historical images of the gay rights movement. So those actually turned out to be a few challenges about that. But the first point to be made, which is an important one is the gay rights movement and did not start in Stonewall in New York. So that's often seen as a high watermark where, where things kind of got rolling in the public eye around pride, but people have been struggling for for gay rights probably as long as there's been people. So JJ, in that vein of looking back where Where did your your investigations take you? Where did you land?
JJ Hunt:Of course, we're going to talk about Stonewall today because you know, the Stonewall riots or the rebellion, as most of the folks who were there seem to call it you know, that was instrumental in, you know, the LGBTQ rights movements in North America. But the idea, like you said that queer activism started in lower Manhattan in 1969. That's absurd. These are movements that have roots in the fight against daily injustice all around the world. And these movements build on the work of 10s of 1000s of people taking stands in their own lives, not just the celebrated activists that we're going to be describing and discussing today. So like I said, yes, we've worked Shoot, we're choosing to describe the visuals around Stonewall because it's key to understanding the movement here. But there are similar stories to be found all around the world, and other kinds of events and people and victories that are truly just as worthy of discussion. So we could just as easily be describing, say, the magazine arena three, which was a publication for lesbians and bisexual women in the UK that was launched in 1966. We could spend a whole episode describing images from that magazine, we could describe the first church basement meeting of camp, the campaign against moral persecution. This was an LGBT activist group established in 1971. In New South Wales, Australia, we could describe the friendship walk, which was the first gay pride march in India in 1999, 15 participants only 15 men, all wearing matching yellow T shirts, walked through the streets of Kolkata to raise awareness. Oh my god, we could talk about what is likely the very first queer rights group in modern history. Magnus Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual research, which was founded in Berlin in 1919. So Hirschfeld was a doctor who was interested in sexual health. His Institute promoted ideas that are really very similar to the concepts of gender fluidity and non binary identities that we talk about today. And this was in 1919. I've got a great picture here that I found from a fancy dress party that was held at the institute. It's a black and white picture frayed at the edges. There are more than a dozen people in this picture. And they're all dressed in suits and dresses, long white gloves, pearls, wigs, fancy hats, and all of these people are piled together on I don't know some kind of bench or long seat they're all piled in so tight, you can't even see what they're sitting on. They're all touching one another holding hands sitting in each other's laps, their legs are draped over each other. And at the lower right is Hirschfeld himself. He's a white man with a round head, round wireframe glasses and a big bushy mustache, and he's gone on a dark suit with a pop collar over cravat, if you like, really wanted to come up with a picture of a researcher, German researcher in 1919. This is the exact image you are going to come up with. All of this is to say, yes, we'll be focusing focusing on Stonewall and figures from Canada in the US, because that's what we're familiar with. That's what does. Those are the stories we know, but not because the fight for equal rights was invented at Stonewall.
Christine Malec:I love those little examples like the friendship march in India, or just the day to day acts of defiance that the gay rights movement has to have included, still does include even I'm sure in Canada, the United States, Western Europe, but especially in other parts of the world, where you, you're in a lot more danger for expressing yourself. And so, you know, throughout this episode, both JJ and I keep in mind the courage of people, even today, you know, even today, yeah, it's not always easy to to be your true self. And so we just raise our metaphorical glasses to those who stand up and fly the flag. And so one of the I'm thinking about a photo from 1919. And it raises the question of what images we do actually have to draw from because, you know, not everyone was walking around with a portable camera in their pocket. So what is I imagine with that in mind, I imagine it being a situation where the same images get recycled all the time to talk about that. Is that true?
JJ Hunt:Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, when I first Googled Stonewall, lots of images pop up, and I'm like, Oh, great, this will be fantastic. Lots of images. And then I started, like zooming in and paying a little bit more attention. And I realized, first of all, there's a lot of repeats, like it's a lot of the same image being presented over and over again. And then what I found was a lot of the images of Stonewall, like when you just Google Stonewall, you don't just get pictures of Stonewall itself, you get pictures of what happened because of Stonewall, all the things that were to follow that can be linked to Stonewall, but weren't actually of the moment. The thing is, like you say, like, their people didn't have a phone in every pocket in the 60s and 70s. That wasn't the case. And this is history, we're talking about history unfolding. You don't always see history coming. So it's not like all the journalists show up knowing that this is going to be the day that history is made. And then you add to that the fact that the mainstream media news organizations of the time, they weren't necessarily covering the struggle, right, this was not the case. So a lot of the images that we would imagine to be around for these moments in time just aren't. But that said, a lot of the key players in the movement are still around, right? We're talking the 60s and 70s, these folks were still around. And these things grew over time. So that the same people who were involved in some of these early scraps, these smaller moments, these day to day moments, they developed into the activists of note the people who were being interviewed in the later years of the movement. So they have given firsthand accounts of those times of those moments. So for this episode, yes, I've got some images to describe. I found some images in my research. But I also pulled descriptive details from those firsthand accounts that I read and heard. So I'm going to try and insert some of those descriptive details that they spoke about, into our coverage today to kind of supplement the description of the images that I have those kind of firsthand sources.
Christine Malec:So what are the stock images that you always we would always see when someone's covering the history of the movement in North America?
JJ Hunt:Well of course, you look at you look up images of Stonewall and and then there are images of pride parades, black and white images of the early pride parades. What's great about these is, it's all it's all handmade, nothing, there are no corporate signs. There's no corporate intervention. There's no pre made anything. These are people, folks, people who are marching so I've got an image here, black and white photo. There's a bearded white man in a military like kind of Castro style baseball cap, and he's got an open shirt, and he's holding an American flag and he's marching with several long haired white men, these hippy looking guys, behind them as a hand painted banner carried between two poles like someone just made this banner and it reads Stonewall means fight back. Smash gay oppression. This is a kind of sign it was it. These were marches. These weren't parades. These were marching These are different types of things. And another photo here of a woman with a large Afro medium skin tone. She's wearing a button down shirt that is actually unbuttoned but tied at her stomach. And she's holding a sign that reads gay pride and block letters. And this would have been a new saying this is a new idea.
Christine Malec:Inagine!
JJ Hunt:Yeah, this is the this is the thing she wants to hold on her sign, because this is a new concept. So those are the kinds of photos that you find. But again, they come they come after the event itself, the event itself comes first and then you get these, then you get the marches, then you get the parade. So, you know, that's that's the order of events here.
Christine Malec:Are there any images from the event itself?
JJ Hunt:One or two. So should we go back to the beginning and talk about the Stonewall events, the actual riot?
Christine Malec:Yeah. What actually happened?
JJ Hunt:Yeah.
Christine Malec:I think that would be a good idea.
JJ Hunt:Okay, so the Stonewall Inn was a gay bar in Greenwich Village, lower Manhattan opened in 67 Bit of a dive bar, kind of grungy by most accounts. Apparently, it had serious mob ties, most gay bars in the area at the time were run by the mob. And that was because there was money to be made. And the mob wanted to make money. But also the reason they could stay open was because the mob would pay off the various police organizations and outfits to to keep these things going so much. There's a mob bar, a grungy bar, two story brick building brick on the first floor stucco actually, on the second, there's a large vertical sign on the front that reads stone wall, mounted on the second floor of this of this building kind of looked like it from the black and white photos that I've seen. The name was both painted on the sign and written in bent neon tubes. Again, you see the same pictures of the place over and over again, because there weren't that many people taking pictures of this big dive bar. It was just a bar, right? Yeah, a very heavy wooden door with small windows and arched brickwork above, there is a space for a big window at the front of the bar. But that was actually a boarded over in advance like that, not because of because the window had gotten broken. It was boarded over and painted black to allow privacy for the folks inside and because these places got raided a lot and Windows did get broken and people did throw bricks through them. So the window was was covered with a with a you know, black painted sheet of plywood from the get go. So police raids of gay bars were pretty common. Even though the mobsters were paying people off the raids were still common. And on June 28 1969, the police raided the Stonewall Inn. There were only a handful of officers on scene at the start a few undercover officers a few Vice Squad officers but what happened is they start from the inside with these undercover officers This is a raid and they you know raid from the inside. A few people run outside, they start the cops gather people, they separate by how people are presenting. So they separate people who are presenting as men from people who are presenting as women. They start gathering the booze which was illegal and you know, they're they're sorting things out and they're waiting outside for the paddy wagons, you know the patrol wagons to come so that they can start carting people away and making arrests. But it takes a long time outside for these support vehicles these patrol wagons to show up. And what happened was news started to spread around the neighborhood that there was a raid going on because a few people had split. And there were cop cars parked outside. So people from around the neighborhood start coming to see what's going on. And again, very few pictures from this part of the early evening. Only one photo that I found of this time in the evening where the cops are outside and a few cops are outside, a few cops are inside the crowd is starting to gather. So this one picture, it features this crowd outside the bar. You can see the brick arch over the door of the Stonewall. That's how you know this is this is where we're located. There are several police officers and a man in a suit and they're kind of pushing the crowd away. So we're actually looking at the faces of those people who are in the crowd. The officers are all white. They're wearing short sleeve police uniform, so no body armor or anything like that. This is 1969 So just like slurred short sleeve shirt uniforms, they have their palms out. They are literally pushing the crowd and the crowd young people mostly medium to light skin tones for the people in this photo mostly male presenting. There's one person who's wearing a striped sweater There's another person in this group who's wearing a loose knit vest over a white dress shirt. Some members of the crowd are yelling, some are watching, like, like literally just stepped back and are watching the scene unfold. A few people are smiling in this picture. And there's one person in the crowd that's looking directly at us. So they would have been looking right into the camera that's taking the picture over the shoulder of the police officers. So the crowd on the outside is growing. The arrests are being interrupted, more police do start to arrive, but they're heavily outnumbered by the crowd. And at some point, the onlookers become protesters, and they start taunting the police. There are lots of reports from members of the community who were there at the time, that they actually formed kick lines to taunt the police. So all of these of these members of the community, linking arms and doing like, you know, like a kancan style like rockets, kick lines, taunting the police, like we are the Stonewall girls like oh my gosh, she has a wonderful image. I could again, I couldn't find any photos of that. But I did see several interview clips where people confirm that story. The tipping point seems to be this moment when a woman who is usually identified in most of these, you know, first hand reports as a butch lesbian, was arrested and escorted out of the bar in handcuffs. It's suggested heavily that this was a woman named stormy de la va, who was a bouncer and MC and a street patrol worker stormy was at the time in her late 40s. A woman of mixed race, a lien woman with short hair, often dyed blonde, heavy eyebrows and a very strong chin. A lot of the photos you can find of her from that era is from her when she's emceeing kind of like promotional photos, and she's dressed in a tuxedo or suit. And as she was dragged out of the bar toward the patrol wagons, she was actively fighting with the police by lots of accounts, throwing punches, it took 10 minutes to get her from the door to one of these police wagons by some accounts. throwing punches. Apparently one of the police officers whacked her over the head with a baton and these were like baseball bat size batons. These were not small, big bat, she got whacked over the head reportedly. And at that point, she apparently turned to the crowd of onlookers and taunt errs and protesters and yelled, why don't you guys do something? And that's the moment when the real fighting begins. The aroud members start to throw things there's like there's this question like who threw the first brick at Stonewall? No one knows. But bricks were being thrown rocks were being thrown glasses were being thrown. The police were swinging batons. But again, because word had spread throughout the community. This is a this was a gay neighborhood at the time, and there were people who came from different bars that cater to different groups of people. All of these people came to see that this raid was taking place the crowd had grown by some reports to five or 600 people at this point. And it's all kinds of folks from around the neighborhood. lesbians, gay men, Drag Queen Street Kids sex workers, all involved in this fight. And again, some call it a riot. Some call it a rebellion. But the bar ends up being torched. Because some of the cops are trapped inside during this period who starts the fire is absolutely up for debate. I did find a photo from inside the bar after the scene had calmed down. And in this photo, there's a broken wooden chair like the back is off the wooden chair like you can imagine someone picking up this wooden chair, smashing it over someone's back and the whole back of the chair snaps off. That's what looks like happened with this chair. There's a jukebox that was ripped, clear open all the records tossed. There's a cigarette machine that has the front ripped right off. Just an amazing looking violent scene inside this bar. And honestly, if listeners are interested in a full telling of how this riot unfolded, you can find these firsthand accounts from people who were there online. So there's some great interviews just you can look up the interviews on YouTube. We can link to a couple of them. They're amazing.
Christine Malec:What some of the key figures? Are there certain people whose images are sort of synonymous with this with this occurrence?
JJ Hunt:Yeah, there are there are some folks who are really key to this event. Marsha P. Johnson is the first person that comes to mind Marsha P Johnson, was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front and the radical activist groups STAR - street transvestite action revolutionaries. Johnson identified as gay. They identified as a transvestite and as a drag queen. I think it's fair to say that Johnson was gender non conforming, although to be fair, that's a term that is being put on to them now, that's not a term that would have been abroad use in Johnson's lifetime. They were at Stonewall the night of the riots. It's often said that Marsha P Johnson was the person who threw the first brick. But in interviews, they always say with a smirk, oh, no, I wasn't there that early. I threw the second brick that's there stick with that. They were a tall, black person. Dark skin tone, broad shoulders. Great big smile, wide nose, narrow chin. It's hard to describe their hair. Because Johnson always seemed to be wearing a wig, or some kind of fabulous floral headpiece, lots of different floral headpieces and wild clothes. That frankly just do not summarize very well. dresses and skirts and furs and big jewelry. But this smile Marsha P Johnson always had this amazing smile. So she was there. Sylvia Rivera was there a lot of these folks that then grew into kind of the activists of the day, along with like, other key figures, you know, like Audre Lorde described herself as a black, lesbian, feminist warrior poet. I mean, come on, who doesn't want that on their business card?
Christine Malec:Right!?
JJ Hunt:So Lorde often talked about identity and gender in her work and in her activism. And like many black queer activists who lived through the 40s 50s and 60s, she was a player in both the civil rights movement and the queer rights movement. The suit is a black woman with medium dark skin tone, a round face accentuated by the roundness of her tight afro. Audrey Lord had piercing wide set eyes, heavy eyelids and high eyebrows that add to this particular expression. She seems to have an A lot of the photos that I found online, especially when photographed when raising her chin. So it's not exactly a confrontational expression. But a challenging one, perhaps like this is clearly a person who, who is who's like you got something to say. Go ahead, say it.
Christine Malec:Right, right right.
JJ Hunt:Yeah, so another person who was in this kind of intersectional civil rights gay rights movement was Byard Reston, chief organizer of the March on Washington, by Reston was also part of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. Reston was a thin black man, generally unsmiling, and all that in the photos that I found of him. long face, narrow chin, heavy eyebrows, glasses with black frames, hid tightly curled hair worn a bit shorter at the sides taller on the top, so kind of like a flat top but a little bit more gentle, not quite as severe on top, very distinguished, academic looking fellow. And then I mean, of course, if you're going to talk about activists, you can't not mention Harvey Milk, an American politician, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California in 1977. Harvey Milk, of course, assassinated in 1978. And he was an icon in San Francisco's gay community and then became a martyr after his death. And what I love about pictures of Harvey Milk is that he's always smiling, always smiling, oh, thin white man. Deep set eyes with heavy lids, narrow face, dark hair, deep smile lines that stretch from under his cheeks almost all the way down to his jawline, and often wore suits with big wide ties because this was the 1970s of course. But there's a wonderful series of pictures from the San Francisco Pride Parade, where he's sitting on the back of a convertible in a white t shirt with dark trim on the on the short sleeve cuffs and all around the neck. And right across the chest and very small simple print is the is the sentence I'll never go back. And Harvey Milk in the parade is wearing a long floral lay around his neck, and he's got a black band around his bicep, right? It's important to remember all these Pride marches and pride parades they come directly from stone On Wall, because, of course, the year after Stonewall happened the year after these riots. There was a march that walked right by the site of the Stonewall riots. It was in March in New York, there was also a march in Chicago, LA San Francisco. And these all happened in June, to mark the one year anniversary. And that's why we have pride parades is is these pride parades that we now have evolved from the Pride marches in June, that happened every year to mark the riots, the rebellion at Stonewall.
Christine Malec:What a great reminder because to us, naively, you know, pride is a big celebration as it should be, it's just a big party. And that's how we framed it last year in our coverage, and that's absolutely accurate. But it's a it's never wise to lose sight of the road that got us here because sometimes those roads go backwards. Um, we, we were gonna we thought we'd talk in the in the context of celebration about some of the earliest photos of sorry, photos of the earliest same sex weddings. And I think that's a lovely idea.
JJ Hunt:Oh I love these same sex wedding photos. And of course, we do have said a little bit of extra pride in this being Torontonians because the first same sex marriages in Canada in the US were held here in Toronto, so there's some extra pride January 14 2001, Anne and Elaine Vatour, and Kevin Bourasa and Joe Varnell, were married in Toronto by Reverend Brent Hawkes, this these were the first same sex marriages in Canada conducted in the Christian tradition. There are some great pictures from this event, lots of kissing. In one picture, all four of the newlyweds are kind of standing in a general line, a loose line kind of with their arms around each other. The men are on the left, the women are on the right. The men tall white men with short dark hair and dark suits, their kissing. They've got red roses in their lapels. And the women who are on our right are both shorter white women with short dark hair. They're both kissing. They're wearing white blouses with Pete pleated blue pants and they've also got red roses as corsages. One of one of them is wearing a long blue vest, the others wearing a bolo tie. There's another picture that's taken during the ceremony itself. Each couple hugging at the altar, so they were both both sets of couples. They were married basically at the same time with the Reverend standing between them. So in this photo, you've got the women hugging on the right, the men hugging on our left and between them with an impish grin is Reverend Hawkes. He's a balding white man with a sparse beard and glasses and he's dressed in a white pulpit robe adorned with an image of two identical lanterns in front of a thin blue black cross. The lanterns are these kinds of red bowls with orange flames rising out of them, and they're surrounded by halos and the halos in this image that's that's on the front of his pulpit robes. The halos are overlapping. Yeah, so that was kind of that was the first gay marriage that was conducted a you know in the Christian tradition. The first civil ceremony for gay marriage in Canada was Michael Lesnar and Michael Stark, the two Michaels they got married in a civil ceremony on June 10 2003. Both white men one of the Michaels has a blonde like white blond curly hair really tight the other Michael has brown curly hair a little bit looser, both have glasses, and there's this picture of the two of them kissing where I can't remember which Michael is which my think it's Michael Lesnar, who is grabbing onto Michael Starks, the back of his neck and pulling him in for a kiss and they've engaged in his real face smashing nose matching kiss with their glasses are almost touching the first same sex marriage in the US was Marcia Kaddish and Tanya McCloskey, a couple of 20 years. They tied the knot in Boston, May 17 2004. There's a photo of them taken during the ceremony. These two middle aged white women are just beaming. Both have shoulder length, kind of slightly feathered hair. Marsha is wearing a green shirt over an open. She's wearing this green shirt open over a black turtleneck Tanya's gone on a blue and black striped blouse. Marcia is in the process of slipping a ring onto Tanya's hand and both women are looking at the officiant who's just out of frame on our left and both have these two Do these smiles that highlight their glossy, round cheeks? They're just beaming. Lovely, lovely pictures. Who doesn't love a wedding picture?
Christine Malec:Oh, so sweet. Um, there's there's one aspect that I'm curious about. And, you know, you and I are old enough to have this conversation in the last. Okay, let's call it 30 years. What are the How have the public norms and mores shifted around? Same sex affection in public?
JJ Hunt:So that's a good question. Of course, this is all through my perspective. Me walking through my city. So other people's interpretation of this will be totally different. But you know, you 15 years ago, 20 years ago, one of the things I always liked about pride parades, and you know, Pride month was that in the city of Toronto, our pride parade is so big, tons of people come from all over the world. And the gay population swelled, and you could see it walking around on the streets. You could see it in the subways people holding hands in a way that they didn't necessarily do before. And people dressed however they wanted to be dressed that was, I back then was able to note that difference just people watching out and about in the city. And I don't notice that as much anymore. It's still the case that 1000s of people flock to the city for the Pride Parade. But seeing people holding hands, same sex couples holding hands is not that unusual anymore. Seeing people kiss on the streets, not particularly noticeable anymore. So I mean, how much that says about me what that says about Toronto, what that says in other cities, I don't know. But from my point of view, it isn't as unusual it is genuinely common. If you're walking around downtown Toronto to see couples of all kinds, holding hands and sharing pics on the cheek totally commonplace.
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