Transphobic and Trans Revisionist Editorial by Metroline Editor Joseph DaBrow
ALERT: First HRC attempts to marginalize the Transgender Community and now Metroline is quick on their heels of Trans Oppression! The current issue of Metroline has an Editorial by the Editor Joseph DaBrow that revises Stonewall History (4th paragraph) by stating that at Stonewall “there were no drag queens there at all. It was gay human beings simply standing up for being who they were.” Has Mr. DaBrow and the publisher of Metroline John Crowley never heard of Sylvia Rivera or Marsha P. Johnson both well know and prominent Stonewall Veterans? Perhaps if Mr. DaBrow and Crowley attended our New England Trans Pride, they would have heard Miss Majors, a Stonewall Veteran, as well as many other speakers remember the critical participation of our Transgender (i.e. Drag Queens or Transvestites in 1969 vernacular) comrades at Stonewall. Or to learn that the theme of this first ever New England Trans Pride was: “Remember Stonewall? That was us!” Or perhaps they never listened to Pacifica Radio’s excellent audio documentary: “Remembering Stonewall.”
I can only assume this statement by a Metroline Editor is meant to deny any existence of Trans folks at Stonewall, and worse that we are not worthy of EQUALITY when it comes to LGBT liberation or putting our Trans bodies and lives on the line for Visibility and Acceptance. This patent revisionist view of LGBT History, as the facts show, is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE, and a personal affront to all Transgender peoples and their allies! It seems our trans sisters are good enough to entertain Gays and Lesbians at the bars which adverstise in their magazine but not good enough to be recoginized and remebered for putting their Transgender and Gender Expressive bodies and lives on the line for LGBT Equality!We encourage EVERYONE who reads this Alert to contact by phone (860-231-8845) or email both Metroline Editor Mr DaBrow editor@metroline-online.com and the Metroline publisher John Crowley johncrowley@metroline-online.com to express your outrage at this Editorial and its attempt to YET AGAIN erase our historical sisters and brothers from the Transgender Community who were pivotal at the Compton and Stonewall Rebellions! Please send you email now and then click on our poll inquiring How should we respond to the Metroline Trans Revisionist Editorial? as to what next steps our community and our allies should take!We cannot allow others, especially other Gays, to erase the pivotal and historic work that the full umbrella of Transgender people have given, including the lives!!!Click the FORWARD TO A FRIEND To send this alert to others!
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Thanks Jerimarie. I’d written to Richard about this earlier -
Quick story: back when Jim Hall was editor and I was trying to find community I thought it would be a good idea to volunteer to write for the Metroline. I found the store and went upstairs to talk with Jim and he greeted me–not by saying hello, but by telling me, “If you’re selling anything, I’m not interested.” I didn’t let that deter me and showed him some samples he appeared to find interesting but I never heard back. Forget an apology or recant, how about a new magazine?
We really need an alternative to the Metroline. I was just coming out and unaware of Metroline and the Metrostore in during the original 1998 controversy, but I remember the Log Cabin Republican wars in the early 2000s and that store is and has always been a hot mess incapable of servicing the entire community’s commercial needs. At this point the Metroline doesn’t need another reprimand, it needs to be out of business! I’m just wondering if that could be part of the conversation because that rag has become an embarrassment to the community anyway and we don’t need yet another retrograde male porn palace masquerading as a queer community pillar. The hustlers on West Service Road are probably more civil to their patrons than Crowley.
Maybe if True Colors and LMF commit to playing Saddam Hussein and start trading updates in euros (the alt pub.) rather than dollars (Metroline) we’ll have something to work with. The LGBT Commission, CTAC, QWB, Sara & Clean Slate and all the other community forces that the Metroline routinely neglects can provide enough content for a new pub to make the Metro look like the Health Collective’s 10 year old throwaway Rolodex - they’ve had the same advertisers for as long as I remember and I’ve never seen anyone leave the old community center or the Health Collective with a Metroline who wasn’t also carrying at least a Bay Windows, so the community wants it for sure. In fact, with the help of the Pride Committee’s connects to vendors, a new mag will have better ads than the Metro too.
Stonewall means fight back!
Thanks Jeri for leading the charge in this. As I told you this is not the first time that our community has had to go up against the Metroline. Back in 98-99 hateful letters to the editor began appearing against drag queens, the Trans community and bisexuals. One nasty letter attacked our dear friend and comrade Mucha who for many years was the mother of the House of Pleasure. Mucha was also the co-chair of the Ct. Coalition for LGBT Civil Rights. Mucha is a person who spent hours doing good works and fighting for many of the freedoms that we all enjoy today. A bogus survey that the Metroline published tried to get us to believe that the reason that people were not going to PRIDE was because there were too many drag queens. We all knew that was pure bull.
An article which I will have our archivist look up published during this period also rallied against the drag community. The battle spilled over into the Hartford Advocate when a former editor and member of the House of Pleasure who was a housemate of a person working at the Metroline not ony attacked Mucha but the Coalition as well. The fight got so bad during that period that The Connecticut Stonewall Foundation which held a congress each October brought Sylvia Rivera to town to speak about the rebellion at Stonewall. I gave the opening remarks to frame what our battle had been like during the past year. There was a film done of the event and I hope that QWB will show it sometime as a ourstory lesson.
This recent letter from the editor Mr. Joseph DaBrow once again attempts to distort our stories, to omit, deny, supress and erase our drag sisters and our drag kings. (on the 1st night of Stonewall Storme DeLarverie a drag King with the Jewel Box Review is quoted as saying, “The cop hit me, so I hit him back!” That said sums up the spirit of the age. One thing that is not thought about enough is that Stonewall wasn’t a one night stand. Fighting in the street went on until early July. On the night of and on the other nights of standing up and yellling no it is written that the crowds who gathered did what anyone in a revolutionary crowd did, they FOUGHT BACK!
QWB will continue to fight back when anyone be they a community member or an outsider try to revise, rewrite,erase any of our people from our stories. Be they a drag queen or a political leftist. Our sisters and brothers in the Trans community have long been in the forefront of the real fight for liberation. Our sisters and brothers have not been afraid to stand up, to fight back from Compton’s to Stonewall. QWB looks forward to once again work under the leadership of the Trans communtiy.
There are other problems going on at the Metroline. Alvin hit it right on the head with his comment. It is our duty to take this to heart and work from this point. I have been aware and was told like others in the community that the Metroline is now reverting back to a mens magazine. The advertisers want to see half naked young men on the cover. No politics on the inside. Even with all that one thing we can not allow is for the Metroline to give our youth a preverted sense of our stories. Remember we are under attack by some of our own, Stonewall means fight back.
HRC has challenged us after 07 to step up and educate, thinking we would be a no show.
We met that challange and offered to return. They said no. We were using their billion dollar baby to tell the truth. They have since decided revising history, holding staged “transgender” meetings, funding pupit trans groups and small time donations at key points would do instead of honesty.
From Workers World newspaper (1998). The first part of the interview is specifically about Stonewall and is reprinted below. The second part - you can follow the link at the bottom to read the rest - reflects the revolutionary nature of the “Gay Liberation” movement (as it was then called) in the Stonewall period:
Leslie Feinberg interviews Sylvia Rivera
‘I’m glad I was in the Stonewall riot’
Workers World Managing Editor Leslie Feinberg interviewed Sylvia Rivera. Rivera, a Puerto Rican drag queen, was a combatant at the Stonewall Rebellion in June 1969 that ignited the young gay liberation movement.
Sylvia Rivera and African American drag queen Marsha P. Johnson co-founded STAR: Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries in New York City in 1970. In this interview, which is included in Feinberg’s upcoming non-fiction book “Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue” (Beacon, Oct. 1998), Rivera describes memories of life on the streets of New York as a drag queen, the uprising in Greenwich Village, and the era that followed:
I left home at age 10 in 1961. I hustled on 42nd Street. The early 60s was not a good time for drag queens, effeminate boys or boys that wore makeup like we did.
Back then we were beat up by the police, by everybody. I didn’t really come out as a drag queen until the late 60s.
When drag queens were arrested, what degradation there was. I remember the first time I got arrested, I wasn’t even in full drag. I was walking down the street and the cops just snatched me.
We always felt that the police were the real enemy. We expected nothing better than to be treated like we were animals-and we were.
We were stuck in a bullpen like a bunch of freaks. We were disrespected. A lot of us were beaten up and raped.
When I ended up going to jail, to do 90 days, they tried to rape me. I very nicely bit the shit out of a man.
I’ve been through it all.
In 1969, the night of the Stonewall riot, was a very hot, muggy night. We were in the Stonewall [bar] and the lights came on. We all stopped dancing. The police came in.
They had gotten their payoff earlier in the week. But Inspector Pine came in-him and his morals squad-to spend more of the government’s money.
We were led out of the bar and they cattled us all up against the police vans. The cops pushed us up against the grates and the fences. People started throwing pennies, nickels, and quarters at the cops.
And then the bottles started. And then we finally had the morals squad barricaded in the Stonewall building, because they were actually afraid of us at that time. They didn’t know we were going to react that way.
We were not taking any more of this shit. We had done so much for other movements. It was time.
It was street gay people from the Village out front-homeless people who lived in the park in Sheridan Square outside the bar-and then drag queens behind them and everybody behind us. The Stonewall Inn telephone lines were cut and they were left in the dark.
One Village Voice reporter was in the bar at that time. And according to the archives of the Village Voice, he was handed a gun from Inspector Pine and told, “We got to fight our way out of there.”
This was after one Molotov cocktail was thrown and we were ramming the door of the Stonewall bar with an uprooted parking meter. So they were ready to come out shooting that night.
Finally the Tactical Police Force showed up after 45 minutes. A lot of people forget that for 45 minutes we had them trapped in there.
[to read the rest go to the link below]
Page printed from:
http://www.workers.org/ww/1998/sylvia0702.php
And what’s with that patriotic myth crap earlier in the article? If I tried to read that piece before that revisionist section was pointed out to me, I would have stopped reading earlier out of disgust that people are still claiming that war somehow maintains freedom.
Glad to see people are calling this writer out for not checking his facts.
Get a Job Mr. DaBrow. Anyone who is interested in the real story right from our mothers and fathers mouths just see www.stonewallvets.org. You’re there. Give a click on Stonewall: The Era— then click on The people. Who do you see but Daria Modon in 1969. The Vets have some really good stuff on their site. They also publish lies of Stonewall and then the real deal story. Check them out. QWB will be working with CTAC and do a community forum on this.
The Metroline isn’t the only one that needs some education as I have just read some very confused remarks and off statements about Stonewall and what followed with the GLF,GAA and the the power loss of the Mattachine Society and their “give me a smile nice, and sweet” “we have got to get along crap” very quickly after the rebellion.
The Mattachine did everything in its power to try to put down us youth at that time and to stop and derail the new “gay” movement. Hardly a friend of the rebels and they hardly had our best intrests at heart.
Kerri
Thanks for pointing out that fact too. Can our anti-war allies take Mr. DaBrow to task over his statement on the war? Would be another good point to bring up.
Where oh where is the Metroline’s answer to all our letters etc? The late June issue in which they promised us, (after Mr. Da Brow’s research on the matter) “a article that would unify our community.” never made it to the “newsstands” or on line. Oh, boy, do they like a lot of people have their assimilationist heads screwed on the wrong way. Bottoms up heads down? I e-mailed to Mr. Da Brow this am and asked him where oh where has that little dog gone. They play as usual. Maybe someone has to go to a bar and see if late June is there. After all the bars are the big sponsors of the Metroline who tell DaBrow and Crowly what and who to put on the cover and in the pages of that bar rag. Must be someting to be owned by such people.
Where are they???? Hiding or maybe closed down. Maybe they just didn’t know how to answer such an uprising of community voices. Everyone from the liberals to the radicals. Maybe they are too shy to admit they are wrong and should most likely stick to skin flick bar rag mag.
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