12/19/2023 0 Comments Enemies with benefits movie gay![]() ![]() As early as 1973, noted Chateauvert, “Rivera had to fight to speak at the gay pride rally celebrating Stonewall because the crowd didn’t want to hear from a transgender sex worker.” As mainstream LGBTQ rights organizations gained respectability, these movements distanced themselves from their sex-worker pioneers. Yet the erasure of sex workers from Stonewall began almost immediately. In the years following Stonewall, Rivera and other sex workers united in the Gay Liberation Front and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, from which they launched organizing campaigns to combat discrimination, demand acceptance of gender and sexual nonconformity, and ultimately call for the overthrow of capitalism. “If they take me, they got to take me as I want ’em to take me.” “hen I go out to hustle I don’t particularly care whether I get a date or not,” Johnson remarked. Yet, for some, sex work could also be a means of asserting one’s personhood. According to Johnson, it was possible for trans women to hold down “straight” jobs at this time, but only if they hid who they were: “I think it will be quite a while before a natural transvestite will be able to get a job,” she once said, using the parlance of the time. The work was “the only alternative that we have to survive because the laws do not give us the right to go and get a job the way we feel comfortable,” Rivera once said. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera - two trans women of color who have both been credited with throwing the proverbial “first brick” at Stonewall and who are being honored for their activism with a new monument in New York City - had sold sex. But many of the queers who threw bottles, bricks and garbage at the police that night were hustlers, hookers and other sex workers. “The story of one June night in 1969 in Greenwich Village often doesn’t mention how the outlaws and outcasts who patronized the Stonewall Inn made their living,” the historian Melinda Chateauvert has commented. Trans women had remarkable trouble finding employment or housing in this era, which left them inordinately vulnerable to police harassment or abuse, forced many to sell sex at one point or another, and eventually led many of them to rebel. Though the group dissolved the next year, its members remained active in local campaigns to combat homophobia, transphobia and the mistreatment of sex workers, and they contributed to a revolutionary spirit and discourse in San Francisco during these years.Īs the historian Susan Stryker has argued, transgender women-among the most marginalized members of the queer community-were often the instigators of the uprisings. Many Vanguard members took part in the uprising at Compton’s Cafeteria. As the historian Laura Renata Martin has noted, for “Vanguard, resistance to the criminalization of sex work and police targeting of sex workers was woven in with resistance to harassment based on gender expression and sexual identity.” By publishing a revelatory newsletter, meeting with city officials and organizing actions, marches and speeches, members of Vanguard raised awareness about the conditions faced by those on the streets. In San Francisco, for instance, a group of street youth - largely trans and queer kids, many of whom sold sex in the Tenderloin - came together in 1966 to form a new organization called Vanguard. Indeed, they helped create the conditions that made such uprisings possible. Sex workers participated in nearly all of the iconic queer uprisings of the era. To the historian Mack Friedman, the Compton’s Cafeteria riot represented “an expression of pangender sex worker unity in the face of an affront.” Yet the role played by full- or part-time prostitutes is often forgotten in the thumbnail histories of these uprisings. ![]() ![]() Perhaps 50 or 60 patrons overturned tables and smashed windows and beat the police with heavy purses. One summer night, as the cops began manhandling a queen, she threw coffee in his face and a riot immediately broke out. Perhaps the most famous pre-Stonewall queer uprising occurred in 1966 at Compton’s Cafeteria, a 24-hour eatery in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Throughout the 1960s, queer people set up picket lines, engaged in sit-ins, marched down boulevards and rioted against police harassment in New York Philadelphia Washington, D.C. Riots like the famous one at Stonewall had an extensive genealogy. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter ![]()
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