![]() Gay people in New York were often harassed and abused, especially in gay bars, which were frequently raided by police. It was here that she would make her largest mark on the world. She was always a butch lesbian and travelled widely as part of an all-black revue, leading the proceedings as MC in male drag.īy the late 1960s, she was living in New York City and active on the Greenwich Village gay scene. She acknowledged that she was a lesbian at the age of 18 and performed as a singer, initially as a woman but later as a male impersonator. Though the family were not poor (her father had servants, and indeed her mother was previously employed in the household), Stormé was subject to much abuse as a child. Stormé DeLarverie was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1920, to a mixed race family – her father was white, her mother black – and from the start, her life was harsh. Stormé DeLarverie is known as the Rosa Parks of the gay community, and not without good reason: she was active in the growth of the LGBT liberation movement from its very beginning with the Stonewall riot of 1969 – though, as the quote above shows, she was far from happy for the incident to be referred to as a riot. If there is one thing that we’ve learned from the last few women featured on this list, it is that the struggle for female equality often inseparable from other liberation struggles: whether that be campaigns against racism, economic inequality or, in the case of Stormé DeLarverie, homophobia. ![]() “It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience – it wasn’t no damn riot.” Stormé DeLarverie
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