Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight was a lesbian whose scuffle with police was one of the defining moments of the Stonewall riots, spurring the crowd to action. Some have referred to her as "the gay community’s Rosa Parks".  During the 1950s and '60s she toured the black theater circuit as the only drag king of the Jewel Box Revue, America’s first racially integrated female impersonation show. Today's Out Spotlight is Stormé DeLarverie.

Stormé DeLarverie was born on Christmas Eve, 1920 in New Orleans to a white father and black mother

“It ain’t easy…being green” was the favorite expression of Storme DeLarverie whose life flouted prescriptions of gender and race.

During the 1950’s and 60’s she toured the black theater circuit as a mistress of ceremonies and the sole male impersonator of the legendary Jewel Box Revue, America’s first integrated female impersonation show and forerunner of La Cage aux Folles. The multiracial revue was a favorite act of the Black theater circuit and attracted mixed mainstream audiences from the 1940s through the 1960s, a time marked by the violence of segregation.

Friends say she worked for the mob in Chicago. She was photographed by fame photorgrapher Diane Arbus. She carried a straight-edge razor in her sock, and while some merely walked to and from the gay and lesbian bars in the Village, friends said, she patrolled.

Some writers believe DeLarverie may have been the cross-dressing lesbian whose clubbing by the police was the catalyst for the riots (the woman has never been identified). While others are adamant that it wasn't her, no one disputes that she was there that day, and no one doubts that the woman who had been fighting back all her life fought back in the summer of 1969.

She did fight the police that day in 1969 at the historic riot at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village that kicked off the gay rights movement. The first gay pride parade in 1970 was not a parade at all but a protest marking the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and DeLarverie was there.

In 1987 Michelle Parkerson made the movie Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box about DeLarverie and her days traveling with the drag troupe.
Parkerson found her in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, now working as a bodyguard at a women’s bar and still singing in her deep silky voice with an “all girl” band. Throughout the 1980s and '90s Stormé worked as a bouncer for several lesbian bars in New York City. From 2010 to 2014, she lived in a nursing home in Brooklyn.

On June 7, 2012, Brooklyn Pride, Inc. honored Stormé DeLarverie at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture. Parkerson's film Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box was screened. On April 24, 2014 Stormé was honored alongside Edie Windsor by the Brooklyn Community Pride Center, and received a Proclamation from the Public Advocate of the City of New York, Letitia James. She died of a heart attack on May 31, 2014 in Brooklyn.