“It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was civil disobedience. It was no damn riot”

- Stormé Delarverie

Police raids were common in the gay bars of 1960s New York.  Being gay was illegal, and unlicensed, Mafia-run bars in Greenwich Village were often the only refuge available.  A New York criminal statute even allowed police to arrest people who weren’t wearing at least three items of clothing deemed to be “gender appropriate”; they often enforced this rule by marching patrons to the toilets to “verify” their gender.  But on the night of 28th June 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, something changed.  And a Black lesbian named Stormé DeLarverie, was on the front line.

Stormé was borne in Louisiana in 1920.  Her mother was a Black servant, working in the house of her father, who was white.  She had a tough upbringing, and was bullied and taunted throughout her childhood.  When she was older, she became a singer and Drag King, travelling the country with a group of musicians and performers.  In New York, she was a bouncer in Greenwich Village helping safeguard her community, a role she carried out well into her old age; she was lovingly referred to as “guardian of the lesbians” by those who knew her.

By 28th June 1969, the Stonewall Inn had already been raided by police earlier in the week; it was one of the few establishments in the Village where same-sex couples were free to dance together, and it was a prime target.  So when half-a-dozen police officers, some from the NYPD’s so-called Public Morality Division, entered the bar on that balmy Friday night in the summer of ‘69, the tinderbox just needed a spark.  With the help of undercover officers already inside, the NYPD forcibly ejected the bar’s patrons outside onto Christopher Street.  Some resisted, some were arrested.  One of Stormé’s friends was being roughed up by the police, so she tried to help him and fought back before herself being hit over the head with a baton by a police officer.  Bleeding, handcuffed, and being dragged into a police van, Stormé yelled to the crowns, “Why don’t you guys do something?”.  That was the spark.

The crowd reacted to Stormé’s rallying cry, and started to fight back.  They threw coins, bricks, shot glasses, anything they could find, forcing the police to retreat back into the bar for their own safety.  The word spread across the Village, and the uprising continued for six nights, growing momentum, and with it the LGBT rights movement.  Just weeks later, the Gay Liberation Front was founded, and the following year in 1970, the GLF’s founders organised the Christopher street Liberation Day, a march to celebrate the uprising of the year before, and to demand legal protections.

50 years later, on 28th June 2019, its hard to believe how far things have come.  Pride is now a celebration, a carnival - you can be part of it in London on Saturday 6th July, and at other events across the country over the summer.  Could Stormé have possibly imagined how her act of defiance in the face of police brutality could have started a revolution?  Because she took a stand, alongside Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and countless others that hot summer night in Greenwich Village, others have had the courage to do the same.  Stormé passed away in 2014, at the age of 93, but she will forever be remembered for her pivotal role in the event itself, and the movement it helped build.