Joseph DaBigotBrow.
What earned him this award, named for the self-proclaimed right-wing lesbian who, ten years ago, was given a platform at Pride time by Queer Channel Media to proclaim ‘Trans Issues Are Not What Pride is All About’?
Well, DaBrow gave the world this bit of Fox News-style historical analysis in Metroline, which claims to be New England’s “Oldest Gay & Lesbian Publication”:
Stonewall was not simply an activist protest where they went home afterwards and partied. They were beaten and dragged away to jail by the police. It was a time when fag bashing was an accepted method of controlling homos and keeping them out of the neighborhood. There were no drag queens there at all. It was gay human beings simply standing up for being who they were.
As I remarked over at Pam’s House Blend, there is much room for historical debate and analysis about Stonewall, what it represented, what it represents and, of course, who all actually was there and participated. But, there is no room for Stalinism-esque historical re-writing (I can’t bring myself to use the term of art ‘revisionism’ to describe DaBrow’s nonsense, as ‘revisionism’ can also accurately describe historical interpretations that right past interpretative wrongs.)
I was four years old and in Texas at the time of Stonewall, so I can’t offer a first-hand account to disprove DaBrow, but I can say that, even among all of the anti-trans, gay conservative historical revisionists who seek to de-emphasize Stonewall as a gay milestone and/or minimize the quantitative and qualitative significance of trans-participation there, I can’t say I’ve ever seen one make that bald of an intellectually reckless, historically insupportable and culturally defamatory assertion. Even Dale Carpenter isn’t willing to erase the drag queens from the historical record of Stonewall:
Outside of New York, according to Stephen Murray in his book American Gay, gay activists initially paid little attention to Stonewall. Only through the annual pride parade commemorations that began a year later and spread significantly in the mid-1970s did Stonewall take on the singular importance in gay history it now enjoys. At the time it happened, however, the event simply did not carry the incredible motivating force we now attach to it.
Second, the centrality of transgenders to Stonewall is probably exaggerated. Eyewitness accounts of what happened that night vary, as they usually do, and we have no videotape of the event and very few pictures.
But one thing is clear. It is wrong to characterize the Stonewall Inn as having been a sanctuary for genderqueers (unless that term encompasses non-transgendered gay men). Murray writes that “men familiar with the milieu then insist that the Stonewall clientele was middle-class white men and that very few drag queens or dykes or nonwhites were ever allowed admittance.”
But don’t take Murray’s word for it, consider what Sylvia Rivera herself told the historian Eric Marcus for his book, Making History: “The Stonewall wasn’t a bar for drag queens. Everybody keeps saying it was. … If you were a drag queen, you could get into the Stonewall if they knew you. And only a certain number of drag queens were allowed into the Stonewall at that time.” The night of the Stonewall riot was the first time Rivera had ever even been to the bar.
If Rivera is right, it seems likely the Stonewall patrons who rebelled that June night in 1969 included many (perhaps mostly) middle-class, non-transgendered, gay white males. It’s possible that the few drag queens present provided all (or most of) the rebellion while the others cowered. But there is no reason to make that assumption unless we indulge stereotypes about the timidity of gay men. So a description of the riot as an uprising of drag queens may be more politically correct, but as history it seems partial.
Make no mistake, I’m not endorsing Carpenter’s straight-gay-male-centric view of history. However, it should cause DaBrow to make note of a rather simplistic mathematical axiom: Few > no.
Now, I do tend to view those who write of Stonewall utilizing only the words “gay” and “lesbian” and those who never say anything about the trans people who were there as committing the same crime that DaBrow committed - but to a far less serious degree.
Think ‘criminally negligent homocide’ as opposed to ‘first degree murder.’
But did DaClownBrow really think he could get away with this? Did he think that no one wuld recall that even the first published gay account of the riots - penned by Dick Leitsch of the never-all-that-fond-of-anything-trans Mattachine Society - was entitled “The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World” for a reason?
I’m hoping that even some of the more intelligent, yet still sadly anti-trans, folks out there, such as Carpenter, will be willing to call him out as being so far off the mark that he should consider leaving the gay writing game to do Iraq War prognostication for William Kristol.
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