Content area
Full Text
FAERIES, MARIMACHAS, QUEENS, AND LEZZIES: THE CONSTRUCTION OF HOMOSEXUALITY BEFORE THE 1969 STONEWALL RIOTS
+ The term marimachas is Mexican slang for lesbians. The gay male counterpart is maricon which is a play on the term Maria, a typical woman's name throughout Mexico and Latin America. Macho is a term that is used to describe hypermasculine behavior. Thus the term marimacha suggests "woman with masculine tendencies."
INTRODUCTION
The Stonewall Riots erupted on a hot night in June 1969 in New York City, when an unlikely group of revolutionaries, a few Black and Puerto Rican drag queens and butch lesbians, turned a routine bar raid into a street fight with the local police. The latter had just taken a payoff from the unlicensed bar owners and arrested the most obvious looking homosexuals. 1 A motley crew of effeminate queers resisted what would otherwise have been a routine raid on a bar that catered to gay people. 2 The conflict attracted an angry crowd of onlookers and supporters who fought into the night with coins, beer bottles, and sticks, and whose struggle ultimately came to symbolize the overthrow of decades of official harassment, repression, and degradation. A simple street fight on June 27th, 1969, changed history and breathed life into the then dormant and internally conflicted homophile movement. 3
1 For a general description of the events, see John d'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 231-33 (1983) [hereinafter Sexual Politics]; Paul Berman, Democracy and Homosexuality, New Republic, Dec. 20, 1993 at 23-24. See also infra part III.A.3. for discussion on the practice of "gayola" (accepting bribes from "gay" bar owners in return for lax enforcement of vice or health and safety laws).
2 Sheerly out of convenience, I will at times intentionally collapse several terms used to identify the diverse membership of the non-majoritarian sexual population into either "gay," "queer," or "gay people."
3 See Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 233.
In recent years, gays and lesbians have staked out their deserved place in the annals of American legal, social, and political history 4 with a growing body of social and historical accounts of the Stonewall Riots 5 and of the pre-Stonewall gay world. 6...