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This past June, Cleis Press released The Right Side of History: 100 Years or LGBTQI Activism--an accounting of the LGBTQI rights movement told through a chorus of inspired voices. Edited by Adrian Brooks, the book astutely maps the intersection of the LGBTQI rights movement and progressive politics.
From the publisher:
The book shows how LGBT and Intersex folk have always been in the forefront of progressive social evolution in the United States: artistically, spiritually, and politically. It references such celebrated heroes and heroines as Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bayard Rustin, Harvey Milk, and Edie Windsor, all having played parts in the nation's steady advance towards full equality.
In the following excerpt, trans activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy recounts her experiences at the Stonewall Riots.
Ground Zero
by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy
?I was never a fan of Judy Garland until I heard that she'd died. But then they played some songs that she did, and they moved me to tears. I couldn't keep my nerves together so I went home, cried my heart out, then had a few drinks and decided, "I can't be in this house alone." And so I went down to Stonewall.
The girls and I called Sheridan Square "the meat rack." There you'd find the most beautiful boys in New York waiting, hoping to catch a john. Or they'd come back later, and you could scoop them up for soup and a sandwich and a warm bed. The Square was actually a long rectangle of heated anticipation for sexual activity with Christopher Street on both north and south sides. It was a sort of dog walk and meeting place.
But the Stonewall Bar was the one place we could go to relax, be ourselves, not have to explain who we were--if we still had all our parts and if they worked. Of course, there were drag queens, too, but there were more trans-oriented women because drag queens would go to gay bars and not have a problem. Transgendered people, like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and Bambi Lake, would be at Stonewall so you could score whatever you needed: sex, drugs, or boys. There were two floors: downstairs was where the bar was, and upstairs was where the activity was--cute...