Iconic LGBT-rights activist Stormé DeLarverie passed away May 24, according to The Huffington Post. She was 93, according to a Bronx LGBTQ Center blog.
A 2010 Huffington Post item said that DeLaverie "probably threw the first punch in the Stonewall Riot that sparked gay rights." She was also part of the Jewel Box Revuearguably the country's first gay communitywhich was a traveling troupe of impersonators that originally formed in 1939.
A statement from the Bronx LGBTQ Center read, in part, "Often referred to as the 'Rosa Parks' as the gay-rights movement, Stormé was a fierce woman who stood up for our community on countless occasions.
"Stormé was an amazing and warm individual who spent her life taking care of people. It didn't matter if they were lesbian, gay, straight, young, old, transgender, questioning, bisexual, Black, White, Latinoshe treated everyone with the same warmth, compassion, kindness, conviction, courage, strength of spirit, and love. This led her to be dubbed the unofficial mother of our community, especially by those who knew her."
A celebration of her life will take place Thursday, May 29, at Greenwich Village Funeral Home.
blog.bronxlgbtqcenter.org/2014/05/in-remembrance-storme-delarverie.html .
Response from 'Stonewall' author, Concerning the death of Stormé DeLarverie and Stonewall
After spending a decade of exhaustive research into every aspect of the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, I never found any evidence to support the contention that Stormé DeLarverie was a participant in that event. A number of persons over the last 20 years, including Ms. DeLarverie, have tried to suggest that she was the lesbian whose heroic fight with the police outside the Stonewall Inn on the first night played a pivotal role-and was perhaps the key flashpoint-in setting off the Stonewall Riots, but she could not have been that woman.
To cite only a few of the problems with the thesis that Ms. DeLarverie could have been that lesbian, DeLarverie's story is one of escaping the police, not of being taken into custody by them (as happened with the lesbian who fought with them), and she has claimed that on that night she was outside the bar, "quiet, I didn't say a word to anybody, I was just trying to see what was happening," when a policeman, without provocation, hit her in the eye ("Stonewall 1969: A Symposium," June 20, 1997, New York City), whereas at least one reliable witness account and other evidence has the altercation with the woman starting inside the club. DeLarverie was also an African-American woman, and all the witnesses interviewed by the author describe the woman as Caucasian.
Finally, there has been much speculation over the decades about who this woman could have been who helped ignite the Stonewall Uprising. Stormé was well known in the local lesbian community at the time of the Uprising and has remained so ever since, and it is highly improbable that this woman who was seen by hundreds of people in public on the morning of June 28, 1969, could have been a person of note in the community, else she would have been identified at the time or shortly thereafter.
David Carter
Greenwich Village
New York City, New York
Author, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (St. Martin's Press, 2004)
Consultant, PBS American Experience film, Stonewall Uprising (2010)
Researcher for and coauthor of the proposal to add the site of the Stonewall Riots to the National Register of Historic Places (1999) and to have it declared a National Historic Landmark (2000).