Recognizing that the Stonewall riots were started by bisexual trans women and street queens of colour who did sex work (and not just the ones in this source, lots of trans and gendernonconforming queer sex workers of colour) is about more than preventing whitewashing and celebrating the real heroes (even though that is very important)
You also really can not understand the Stonewall riots without knowing these facts.
If you don’t know how the civil rights movement politicized queer people of colour, who marched and protested and rioted for their rights as people of colour or were influenced by what happened,
If you don’t know how the Vietnam War and the draft simultaneously caused a boom of the sex industry and a crack down on sex worker by conservative politicians,
If you don’t know how the publishing of The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966 and the availability on physical transition in Harry Benjamin’s practice in New York gave transgender women hope of a better future and an uncompromising approach towards transphobia,
If you don’t know how news of the riot of trans women and street queens at the Compton Cafeteria in San Francisco traveled to trans people in New York,
Then you can’t understand what happened on June 28th, 1969 when queer trans sex workers of colour decided they had had enough, that now was their time to fight back.
The identities of the people who started this riot are vital to understanding why they had that mixture of political awareness, anger,
courage and hope to riot in the first place.
I would loooooooove it if we all talked a bit more about every OTHER part of our history besides Stonewall and acknowledged our long history fighting cops and how necessary that still is.
But if we are gonnna talk about it over and over again this month, let’s at least not reduce it to 2 or 3 or 5 names or decontexualize it.
QueerAnarchism 