![]() ![]() Audience members would 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 a tailored suit. In 1955, began touring as the MC and the only drag king in the Jewel Box Revue - the first racially integrated drag show, appearing regularly at the Apollo Theater. DeLarverie carried a photo of Diana with her for the rest of her life. She entered into a relationship with a dancer named Diana, who she was with for about 25 years until Diana’s death in the ’70s. In her teenage years, she joined the circus - getting a job riding jumping horses for Ringling Brothers Circus, until she was injured in a fall and was unable to resume the work.ĭeLarverie realized she was a lesbian around the age of 18. (I’m not sure why you’d pick that if you’re given a choice, but I guess we can’t all have June birthdays…) As a kid, DeLarverie was bullied constantly. DeLarverie’s exact date of birth was never exactly known, so she celebrated it on December 24. “She was not to be messed with by any stretch of the imagination.Sometimes called “the Rosa Parks of the gay community,” Stormé DeLarverie was a butch lesbian who’s arrest is often credited as the moment that sparked the Stonewall Riots - despite being quite adamant that “it was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience – it wasn’t no damn riot.”ĭeLarverie was born in 1920 to a white man and a black woman - who worked as a servant for her father’s family. “She literally walked the streets of downtown Manhattan like a gay superhero,” Ms. But she regarded the whole neighborhood as within her jurisdiction. She made her living working security at the Cubby Hole and later for Ms. DeLarverie had earlier lived at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan for decades. Zalopany helped move her to another center in Brooklyn, where they said she got better care and had more freedom. DeLarverie had endured years of problems - legal, housing, mental health - that ended with her admission to a nursing home in Brooklyn. DeLarverie’s guardians a few years ago, after Ms. Cannistraci and another longtime friend, Michele Zalopany, became Ms. DeLarverie had always carried her photograph. DeLarverie had told her that she had lived for 25 years with a dancer named Diana, who died in the 1970s, and that Ms. One of the show’s stars was Lynne Carter, a female impersonator who later performed at Carnegie Hall. of the Jewel Box Revue, billed as “an unusual variety show.” She dressed as a man the rest of the cast members, all men, dressed as women. There was a long period in Chicago, where, she told friends, she was a bodyguard for mobsters. Captured on tape at nearly 90, she still sounded smooth singing “Since I Fell for You.” For a while she sang in a jazz group and performed in Europe. She said in interviews that she had begun performing as a singer by her late teens, first as a woman and later dressed as a man. 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.” “No people even pull it around me that know me. “I can spot ugly in a minute,” she said in a 2009 interview for Columbia University’s NYC in Focus journalism project. Identity, for her, had been especially complicated, and she did not want others persecuted for theirs. DeLarverie had grown up in the South, of mixed race, and spent part of the first half of her life singing and performing as a man. She was on the lookout for what she called “ugliness”: any form of intolerance, bullying or abuse of her “baby girls.” DeLarverie roamed lower Seventh and Eighth Avenues and points between into her 80s, patrolling the sidewalks and checking in at lesbian bars. Tall, androgynous and armed - she held a state gun permit - Ms. For decades she was a self-appointed guardian of lesbians in the Village. Her role in the movement lasted long after 1969. DeLarverie was a member of the Stonewall Veterans Association and a regular at the pride parade, but she rarely dwelled on her actions that night.
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