I was one of 11 children, and third from the eldest. How was your family about you being trans? I had found out there were doctors experimenting with black market hormones. I had already let my hair loose, and taken hormones and said, “This is what I want to be.” I transitioned before Stonewall during high school. I said, “No, this is not me.” He met me in a mini-skirt, and tried to change me. He didn’t want me to be in drag, he wanted me in regular-guy clothes. It was just an uplifting feeling of freedom.įrankie and I stayed together another six months. Nobody was ashamed to be out and be themselves. As we were marching, more and more people joined the parade. They gave us half the street, and we marched all the way up to Central Park. I remember at first around 50 people gathering at Bleecker and Christopher Streets. You went to the first Pride march the following year in 1970? People reorganized, and we went back on the second night and it was more violent. He brought back a Stonewall bar sign with the prices of drinks. The bar called Frankie to go in the next day. There were more bricks, cops, and batons. He didn’t want to get arrested, and get sent back to Canada. My then-boyfriend Frankie was illegal here, from Canada.
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Then we saw people with Molotov cocktails setting cars on fire and I thought, “This is getting too much.” The cops were chasing us, then we were chasing the cops. We went north on Seventh Avenue, then on to 10th Street, then back to Waverly Place, then back to the Stonewall again. When more cops came, they started chasing protesters. I think they were more astonished than we were. People used parking meters to bang on the doors.
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Someone threw a brick, and cracked the windows. The crowd threw pennies at them and called them “pigs.” Then all hell broke loose. People starting coming out, the cops were beating up a lesbian (some say this was Stormé DeLarverie, but accounts vary). We heard bottles breaking and mirrors smashing. But I could see the cops were from another precinct. I saw the paddy wagons pull up at the Stonewall and thought it was another raid.
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People couldn’t take it any more, so they fought back. The night of the Stonewall Riots, people were fed up: the abuse, the verbal abuse, the physical abuse, the pushing, the shoving, the name calling. There were very few clubs around and most of them used to get raided. You could go there and be yourself and dance with whoever you wanted. I was 22, and identifying as butch/femme drag queen back then. In 2012, Cruz received the National Crime Victim Service Award from then-Attorney General Eric Holder. Johnson, trying to solve the mystery of Johnson’s 1992 death. She was present at the Stonewall Riots in 1969, the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day March, and was a close friend of Sylvia Rivera.Ĭruz is 73, and lives in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and appeared in David France’s 2017 documentary, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Victoria Cruz is a longtime trans activist and LGBTQ+ campaigner, and a senior domestic violence counselor and advocate for the Anti-Violence Project (AVP). But the Stonewall genie was out of the bottle being out and visible at marches and demonstrations was the LGBTQ+ rights movement’s most public statement.īelow, participants and organizers of America’s first ever dedicated LGBTQ+ marches in 1970 talk to The Daily Beast about the era, why they marched, the drama and color of the day, how they feel the movement has evolved since, what they would like to see in the future-and what advice they have for the next generation of activists. To organize and attend those marches was brave this was an era in which being LGBTQ+ and being out brought considerable personal risk. That weekend there were also the first Pride marches in Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco-although in their first iteration “Pride” was not in their names. But on June 27 and 28, 1970, one year after the riots, New York City wasn’t making history alone. This year saw the 50th anniversary of the city’s first Pride march, known as the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. The 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City was marked in June 2019.