Stonewall Was Named for a Riot
Transgender Participation at Stonewall and the Argument for LGB+T Solidarity in the United Kingdom and the United States
Abstract
In April 2026, the United Kingdom charity Stonewall, named for the 1969 New York City uprising that launched the modern queer-rights movement, announced a new chair whose first interview praised an author whose money has bankrolled the legal cases reshaping British trans rights. The appointment came one year after the United Kingdom Supreme Court issued For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers (2025), a ruling that reinterpreted “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 to mean biological sex assigned at birth. Drawing on archival, governmental, and journalistic sources, this paper argues that the historical record makes it indefensible for any organization bearing the Stonewall name to retreat from transgender rights. Trans women, drag queens of color, and butch lesbians, including Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Stormé DeLarverie, were on the front lines of the 1969 riots. Trans organizers helped found the Gay Liberation Front, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, and ACT UP, and worked alongside gay and lesbian volunteers in service organizations like God’s Love We Deliver during the AIDS crisis. The British movement that defeated Section 28 had its own roots in the 1984 alliance between Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and the National Union of Mineworkers. The paper closes by responding to a writers’ prompt from the Prism & Pen Medium publication, calling on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people to tell stories of unity rather than ceding ground to a backlash that has never recognized those distinctions in the first place.
Keywords: Stonewall, transgender history, LGBTQ solidarity, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, ACT UP, Equality Act 2010, For Women Scotland, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners
Last week I gasped. The United Kingdom charity Stonewall named its next chair, and her first interview praised an author whose money funded the legal case that has reshaped British trans rights over the past year (LGBTQ Nation, 2026). Four days of public outrage produced a written apology and a clarification that trans inclusion remains “at the heart of Stonewall’s strategy” (Pink News, 2026). I am not writing this paper to litigate that one statement, and I am not going to write the new chair’s name in my prose. Her name appears in the citations for any reader who wants to verify what was said.
I am writing since the moment cracked open a question that has shadowed our movement since Sylvia Rivera grabbed a microphone at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally and told a booing crowd, “Y’all better quiet down” (National Women’s History Museum, n.d.). The question is whether the rights and dignity of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people can be separated from the rights and dignity of transgender people without breaking the whole thing in half.
This paper argues that they cannot, not historically, not strategically, and not morally. The Stonewall charity is named for a riot that trans women, drag queens of color, and butch lesbians set in motion. The American movement born from that riot was sustained, in many of its most fragile moments, by trans organizers who refused to walk away from gay men dying of AIDS. The British alliance that broke the back of Section 28 began with a gay socialist and a lesbian-and-gay solidarity collection bucket at a 1984 Pride march for striking miners (People’s History Museum, n.d.). Our coalitions have always been queer plural. Pulling one thread unravels the rest.
A Charity Named for a Riot
Stonewall Equality Limited, the British charity that trades publicly as Stonewall, was founded in London on May 24, 1989, by activists organizing against Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, the law that prohibited local councils from “promoting” homosexuality (Stonewall, n.d.). Founders included Ian McKellen, Lisa Power, Michael Cashman, Matthew Parris, Olivette Cole-Wilson, and others. The name was a tribute to the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, the multi-night uprising that historians treat as the spark of the modern lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender liberation movement (HISTORY.com, 2025). Naming a British charity after a New York riot was a statement of lineage. We come from this, the founders said, and we owe it.
The lineage matters. The Stonewall charity is named for an event in which trans women, drag queens, and butch lesbians of color were on the front lines. To name an organization Stonewall and then de-prioritize the people who were beaten at Stonewall is, at minimum, a problem of historical literacy.
The 1969 Uprising: A Trans-Led Rebellion
On the morning of June 28, 1969, plainclothes officers from New York City’s Public Morals Division raided the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, a Mafia-run gay bar that welcomed drag queens, runaways, butch lesbians, and queer people of color who were turned away from more “respectable” establishments (HISTORY.com, 2025). What began as a routine raid turned into a six-night uprising when patrons fought back. Three figures recur in nearly every credible eyewitness account of the first night.
Marsha P. Johnson, a Black self-identified drag queen who would today most likely identify as a transgender woman, was 23 years old (National Women’s History Museum, n.d.-a; Smithsonian Institution, 2021). Whether she threw the first projectile or arrived shortly after the chaos started, multiple eyewitnesses placed her at the front of the resistance. Activist Robin Souza, citing fellow Stonewall veterans Morty Manford and Marty Robinson, later told historian David Carter that Johnson had hurled a shot glass into a mirror, screaming “I got my civil rights,” in what Gay Activists Alliance members later called “the shot glass that was heard around the world” (Carter, 2010).
Sylvia Rivera, a 17-year-old drag queen of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent who later identified as transgender, was a self-described frontliner (Britannica, 2026b; Biography.com, 2025). “We were the frontliners,” Rivera said in a later interview. “We didn’t take no shit from nobody. We had nothing to lose” (Biography.com, 2025). Some historians question her presence on the very first night. Mattachine Society member Randy Wicker reported that Marsha P. Johnson had told him Rivera was asleep uptown that evening, and Bob Kohler, who was there, told historian David Carter that he could not corroborate Rivera’s later claims about throwing a Molotov cocktail or a brick. What is not contested is that Rivera was visible across the six days of unrest that followed and that her organizing work in the subsequent decade made her one of the most influential trans rights figures of the twentieth century.
Stormé DeLarverie, a biracial butch lesbian and drag king performer who had finished a show at the Apollo Theater earlier that evening, came down to Greenwich Village in stage clothes (Lo, 2021; National Park Service, 2025). Multiple witnesses identified her as the cuffed lesbian whose scuffle with police, including her shouted demand that the crowd “do something,” appears to have been the moment bystanders became participants (National Parks Conservation Association, 2025; Village Preservation, 2022). DeLarverie herself called the event a rebellion and a civil rights disobedience, and rejected the word riot.
The composition of that front line matters. Trans women, drag queens, and butch lesbians, primarily people of color, were the patrons with the least to lose. They had been beaten by police, denied apartments, denied jobs, and prosecuted under New York’s so-called three-piece clothing law that criminalized cross-dressing (Village Preservation, 2022). The Stonewall uprising did not happen in spite of trans participation. It happened in part since trans people refused to comply.
After Stonewall: STAR, the Gay Liberation Front, and the AIDS Crisis
The riots galvanized a generation. Within a year of Stonewall, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera had co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, known as STAR, providing food, clothing, and the first STAR House for unhoused trans youth in Greenwich Village (National Women’s History Museum, n.d.-a; Smithsonian Institution, 2021). Both joined the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance. Both were soon pushed to the margins by white, middle-class gay men who saw drag queens of color as obstacles to respectability politics (Smithsonian Institution, 2021). Rivera was booed off the stage at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally for defending drag queens against feminist activist Jean O’Leary, who later regretted her stance (National Women’s History Museum, n.d.-b). Mainstream gay organizing tried to throw trans people under the bus by 1973. Trans activists kept showing up anyway.
The pattern repeated when AIDS arrived. The Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center was incorporated in July 1983 and acquired its permanent home at 208 West 13th Street in Manhattan in December 1984 (NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, 2017). In March 1987, after the playwright Larry Kramer gave a speech there, about 300 people met to found the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (Britannica, 2026a). ACT UP turned out to be one of the most effective protest movements in American medical history, forcing changes in FDA drug approval, AZT pricing, and Medicaid coverage (ACLU, 2023). The Smithsonian Institution lists Marsha P. Johnson as a member of ACT UP, alongside her work in STAR and the Gay Liberation Front (Smithsonian Institution, 2021). The movement that won life-saving treatment for gay men dying of AIDS was, from its founding, a movement that included trans women fighting alongside cisgender gay men.
God’s Love We Deliver, founded in 1985 by hospice volunteer Ganga Stone and her roommate Jane Best after Stone visited a man dying of AIDS who could no longer cook for himself, has now delivered over 40 million medically specialized meals across New York City (God’s Love We Deliver, n.d.). The organization is non-sectarian. It does not collect demographic data on volunteer gender identity, and the historical record on the volunteer corps is incomplete by design. What is documented is that the volunteers who built the early organization came from the same Greenwich Village and Lower East Side queer networks that responded to the AIDS crisis as one community, not as separate constituencies. Volunteers, many themselves living with HIV, delivered food at a moment when it was politically toxic to be associated with people who had AIDS at all (Visible Network Labs, 2022). They did this since they were a community.
