“Then there was the raid, the whimper heard round the world, the fall of our gay Bastille.”
Source: The Stonewall Reader
“GLBT leaders like to criticize young gays for not taking the movement seriously, but don’t listen to them. Just remember that at Stonewall we were defending our right to have fun, to meet each other, and to have sex.”
Source: The Stonewall Reader
“When people are feeling fabulous, they don’t want to take any crap from anybody, particularly the cops.”
Source: The Stonewall Reader
“LGBT history is written, like most history, by the victors, those with the means and those with connections to power.”
Source: The Stonewall Reader
“Writing starts with living.
—Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing”
“It has been over forty years since the Gay Liberation Front first took trans seriously, but the gay men who wore those shirts with the polo players or alligator emblems didn't want trans people as the representation of their community.
Their revisionist history has been accepted into popular culture because they were the ones with connections to publishers, the influence, as well as the money and time to sit back and write about what "really" happened.”
Source: The Stonewall Reader
“You’re not a woman!” I say, “I don’t know what I
am if I’m not a woman.”
Source: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR): Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle
“I’m not even in the back of the bus. My community is being pulled by a rope around our neck by the bumper of the damn bus that stays in the front. Gay liberation but transgender nothing!”
Source: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR): Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle
“Men danced with men, often for the first time in their lives.”
Source: Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights
“When Clinton took office, members of that community still faced a host of legal and cultural barriers. Sodomy laws banned same-sex acts, even in the privacy of one’s bedroom, in more than half of the country’s states plus the nation’s capital.”
Source: Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights