She was born in 1920 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her father was a white man. Her mother was Black and worked for his wealthy family. She was never given a birth certificate and wasn’t entirely sure of the date of her actual birth, so she celebrated it on December 24th, Christmas Eve. At some point her father married her mother, and the family moved to California.
She would grow up and become a drag king, bodyguard, activist, and self-appointed guardian of lesbians in the Village, style inspiration for butch lesbians to come after her, and is known mostly as a gay civil rights icon who, according to many eyewitnesses, was the one who incited the crowd into action at Stonewall.
In today’s installment of Brief Biographies of Badass Bitches:
Meet Stormé DeLarverie.
Stormé DeLarverie was considered a tomboy when she was a child. She didn’t do well with the kids at school and suffered from bullying and harassment both over the fact that she was mixed race and for the way she carried herself through the world.
She loved nature and all animals, but she especially loved horses. And when DeLarverie was 16 years old, she ran off and joined the circus. She was soon riding the “jumping horses” with Ringling Brothers, though that was short-lived; after being injured in a fall and suffering an injury that kept her from performances for some time, she quit riding altogether.
It wasn’t long after this that DeLarverie realized that she was a lesbian. Of course, at the time, it was an even riskier realization than it still is today, so she sat on that revelation for quite some time.
She began performing as a singer by her late teens, first presenting as feminine. She eventually took on a more androgynous appearance, switching between masculine or feminine, both of which she could pull off quite convincingly, and eventually stuck with the masculine and singing as a baritone. For a while she sang in a jazz group and performed in Europe.
DeLarverie’s next career move was to take a break from performance and do work as a bodyguard and a lookout for mobsters in Chicago for several years.
While in Chicago, she began exploring the nightlife of gay bars and night clubs. DeLarverie began performing again, singing under the stage name Stormy Dale.
During a 1946 trip to Miami, she found herself in conversation with a gay couple, Danny Brown and Doc Benner, at the club they ran together called Danny’s Jewel Box. After hitting it off, the men informed DeLarverie that they needed some help with a new project they were putting together.
“There were around 25 guys and me.”
Enter the Jewel Box Revue, America’s first racially inclusive traveling revue of female impersonators that was established in 1939 by Danny and Doc. It was staffed almost entirely by gay men and one gay woman: DeLarverie.
Danny and Doc’s review fostered one of the first gay-positive communities in America, if not the first. “Gayness” was openly welcomed there long before the concept of a “gay identity” was widely accepted as anything more than a deviation, and the two men are referred to by many as godfathers of the modern gay community.
By 1955, DeLarverie, who had perfected her Drag King persona, was a regular part of the cast as a “male impersonator,” touring the black theater circuit as the MC. The revue regularly played the Apollo Theater in Harlem, as well as to mixed-race audiences, something that was rare and dangerous as the United States was still deeply entrenched in segregation and Jim Crowe laws.
One of her regular acts was where she would have the audience members attempt to “guess the girl,” ultimately being surprised during a song entitled “Surprise with a Song” that the girl was actually DeLarverie, who was often sporting a mustache and tailored suit.
DeLarverie was strikingly handsome in her masculine attire. While her Jewel Box contemporaries mostly appeared in drag only during performances, DeLarverie donned her suits around New York as regular streetwear, beginning the trend of lesbians of the time wearing clothing that had previously been considered only menswear.
“I was doing it, and then [other lesbians] started doing it!”
She caught the eye of acclaimed photographer Diane Arbus, whose 1961 portrait of her, “Miss Storme de Larverie, the lady who appears to be a gentleman,” has appeared in multiple Arbus retrospectives including an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
As blogger Eleanor Medhurt states in a 2020 piece, “There is no question that Delarverie in a suit exemplifies butchness, but I believe that as she sat on that park bench for Diane Arbus’ lens she was not playing a role. What is extraordinary to some is for others just reality. Delarverie’s suits were not a parody of the white, heterosexual man’s sartorial language but a claiming of it.”
DeLarverie spent decades living, working, and traveling with Danny and Doc’s troupe. During this time, she entered into a long-term relationship with a dancer named Diana. They were together for 25 years until Diana’s death in the 1970s. DeLarverie carried a photo of Diana with her for the rest of her life.
And DeLarverie was there for history, working at the Stonewall Inn on June 27, 1969, the night the police raided the mafia-owned gay bar.
Prior to that night, the cops would pick up a weekly payoff from the owners – the Genovese crime family – in exchange for them looking the other way as they served drinks without a liquor license and for not leaking the names of their more influential clientele to the press. The money the cops pocketed in return for their flexibility was known as “gayola”.
Usually, the cops would tip off the bar before carrying out one of its semi-regular raids, but this time refrained from doing so; it’s said because the mobsters had begun to extort rich customers, particularly Wall Street traders, after realizing there was more money to be made doing that than just slinging drinks. Well, in doing so, they fucked over the dirty cops, prompting them to shut down the bar out of spite, because enforcing the law only when it benefits you really lends well to gaining the trust of the public you’re supposed to protect and serve.
So the jackbooted thugs with badges showed up thinking this was going to be an easy takedown, but their attempts to line up and frisk the patrons they intended to take into custody was met with unexpected resistance.
SURPRISE: The patrons of Stonewall were fucking OVER it.
DeLarverie was on shift as a bouncer when shit started to go down. The cops dragged her out from the bar and through the crowd outside several times, but she kept breaking free, at least once by punching an officer, which is believed to be the first punch thrown – setting in motion the protests that launched the gay rights movement and are now commemorated every year during Pride, especially in New York City.
Riot veteran and gay rights activist Craig Rodwell says: “A number of incidents were happening simultaneously. There was no one thing that happened or one person, there was just… a flash of mass anger.”
At some point, one of the cops beat DeLarverie over the head with a baton and, as she began to bleed from the wound, she looked to the crowd and implored, “What are you DOING? Why are you just standing there? Why don’t you guys do something???”
At this point, the police officers picked her up and tossed her into the back of the paddy wagon — and the crowd erupted.
It was at this moment that the legendary “first brick” (or stone or shot glass, the minor details are clouded by chaos but clear as a fucking bell in their significance) was thrown by trans woman of color, Marsha P. Johnson (except by Marsha’s own words, she didn’t get down there til 2am and “the place was on fire, it was a raid already” so fuck…but we know shit went down and it went down HARD).
And the rest is history.
Detective Inspector Pine, one of the assholes on scene, later recalled, “I had been in combat situations, but there was never any time that I felt more scared than then.”
Good. Seriously? Fucking GOOD.
ANYHOO…
While she rarely dwelled on her actions that night, the riots transformed DeLarverie. She became a fierce activist and a protector of the LGBTQ+ community afterwards. She had a state gun permit and was known to patrol the lower Seventh and Eighth Avenues and all points between around lesbian bars looking for intolerance or, as she described it, “ugliness,” i.e. any form of bigotry, bullying or abuse of her “baby girls.”
As she said in a 2009 interview with Columbia University NYC, “I can spot ugly in a minute. No people even pull it around me that know me. They’ll just walk away, and that’s a good thing to do because I’ll either pick up the phone or I’ll nail you.”
As Lisa Cannistraci, longtime friend and eventual legal guardian of DeLarverie, as well as owner of Henrietta Hudson – America’s longest-running lesbian bar – puts it:
“She literally walked the streets of downtown Manhattan like a gay superhero. She was not to be messed with by any stretch of the imagination.”
DeLarverie regarded the whole neighborhood as under her watch, patrolling regularly until she was 85 years old. DeLarverie was a member of the Stonewall Veterans Association, holding several offices there including Chief of Security and Ambassador. She also served as Vice President from 1998 to 2000.
She was a regular staple at the Pride parades and rallies that followed after Stonewall, and acted as a bouncer at several lesbian bars. She also continued to perform, putting on benefits for abused women and children. She volunteered for queer organizations and charities as well.
She lived at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan for decades before eventually moving into a nursing home in Brooklyn due to health issues that left her unable to live alone.
On June 7, 2012, Brooklyn Pride Inc. honored her at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture. Two years later on April 24, the Brooklyn Community Pride Center honored DeLarverie “for her fearlessness and bravery.”
DeLarverie died in her sleep on May 24, 2014 following a heart attack on Friday. She was 93.
“It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience— it wasn’t no damn riot.” – Stormé DeLarverie
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Thank you for reading what I think is a pretty important installment of #BBBB!
