page_title: Stormé DeLarverie
section_title: Stonewall uprising
hierarchical_section_title: Stormé DeLarverie / Stonewall uprising
caption_attribution_description: English: A banner that says "Everybody knows black lesbian female homosexual Stormé started Stonewall", a reference to Stormé DeLarverie, a butch lesbian whose scuffle with police was the spark that ignited the Stonewall riots, spurring the crowd to action.Location: Austria, Vienna Event type: Europride Parade Date or year: 15/06/19
context_page_description: Stormé DeLarverie was a butch lesbian whose scuffle with police was, according to Stormé and many eyewitnesses, the spark that ignited the Stonewall riots, spurring the crowd to action. She was born in New Orleans, to an African American mother and a white father. She is remembered as a gay civil rights icon and entertainer, who performed and hosted at the Apollo Theater and Radio City Music Hall. She worked for much of her life as an MC, singer, bouncer, bodyguard and volunteer street patrol worker, the "guardian of lesbians in the Village." She is known as "the Rosa Parks of the gay community."
context_section_description: Fifty years later, the events of June 28, 1969, have been called "the Stonewall riots." However, DeLarverie was very clear that "riot" is a misleading description:
  It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience – it wasn't no damn riot.
  — Stormé DeLarverie
  At the Stonewall rebellion, a scuffle broke out when a woman in handcuffs, who may have been Stormé, was roughly escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon. She was brought through the crowd by police several times, as she escaped repeatedly. She fought with at least four of the police, swearing and shouting, for about ten minutes. Described by a witness as "a typical New York City butch" and "a dyke-stone butch," she had been hit on the head by an officer with a baton for, as one witness stated, announcing that her handcuffs were too tight. She was bleeding from a head wound as she fought back. Bystanders recalled that the woman, whose identity remains uncertain (Stormé has been identified by some, including herself, as the woman), sparked the crowd to fight when she looked at bystanders and shouted, "Why don't you guys do something?" After an officer picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon, the crowd became a mob and went "berserk": "It was at that moment that the scene became explosive." Some have referred to that woman as "the gay community's Rosa Parks".
  "'Nobody knows who threw the first punch, but it's rumored that she did, and she said she did,' said Lisa Cannistraci, a friend of DeLarverie and owner of the Village lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson. 'She told me she did.'"
  Whether or not DeLarverie was the woman who fought her way out of the police wagon, all accounts agree that she was one of several butch lesbians who fought back against the police during the uprising.
caption: A parade banner that says "Everybody knows black lesbian female homosexual Stormé started Stonewall," Europride 2019, Vienna, Austria
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