Stonewall uprising veteran Stormé DeLarverie and her wife Diana met in 1943 at Smalls’ Paradise, a 24-hour nightclub in Harlem.
Stormé — a “stone butch gay woman” in the words of their “gay daughter,” trans singer Christy Henderson Jenkins — went on to be the “male impersonator” emcee for the Jewel Box Revue, a racially integrated drag show in New York, from 1955 to 1969. Diana was a showgirl and an excellent tap dancer with a troupe of Black dancers who played the clubs around the city. Both light-skinned, Black, and lesbian, thge couple lived together in Harlem at the tail end of its Renaissance heyday. Jenkins called them Mommy and Daddy, and her chosen family.
Related
In a moving first-person account of the pair’s love story, recently published on Autostraddle, Jenkins puts to rest a gay urban legend that had Stormé throwing the first punch at Stonewall — as told by Stormé herself.
“If you’re queer and online, you’ve likely heard of Stormé DeLarverie,” Jenkins writes. “Some people know her as the ‘male impersonator’ who emceed the Jewel Box Revue. Some recall her role as protector of queer bars in Greenwich Village. Many claim she played a key role in the Stonewall Rebellion. But I knew Stormé as my gay father, and I knew her partner, Diana, as my gay mother.”
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Their “deep devotion to each other,” Jenkins writes, “changed so many lives, including mine.”
Stormé arrived in New York in the early 1940s, Jenkins says, and performed briefly at the Cotton Club, where her light skin earned a pass. At the time, many performance venues across the U.S. had a “brown paper bag test” in which they banned on-stage performers whose skin was darker than a paper bag — a form of “colorism” whose bias lingers event today.
“They tried to make her into a second Lena Horne. She already loved one of Lena’s signature songs, ‘Stormy Weather,’ and in her earliest days of singing professionally she called herself Stormy Dale. When she moved on to Smalls’, she kept singing as a woman, but that wasn’t what she really wanted. Inspired by the drag queens, Stormé decided to start singing as a man.”
Diana supported the idea, and bought Stormé’s very first suit. “Stormé could never have become such an iconic entertainer and community protector without Diana letting her be free,” Jenkins says.
“Now, let me be very clear,” she adds. “Stormé did not like to be identified as a transgender man. It made him angry, even though he was polite about it. Stormé was a stone butch gay woman. But he loved trans women; he accepted everyone.”
“Mommy was what we call today ‘on the down low,’” Jenkins says. “When they were in public, Mommy and Daddy would just say they were friends. When Daddy had to go out to a straight place with Mommy, he’d dress as Viva — that was his birth name — and they’d be two beautiful women together. He had a woman’s wig, and I’d style it for him. He only cross-dressed when he could feel comfortable, in the right environments. I think Mommy actually preferred him to look like a man when they went out, because things were easier if they appeared to be a straight couple.”
“Sometimes they were hassled, though, because from a distance they looked like a white man with a woman of color,” Jenkins continued. “Daddy wasn’t proud of his light skin; in fact, he was ashamed. His white father had rejected him, and he resented him for it. He refused to accept himself as half white. He told me various stories about his life; he was always all over in his stories. ‘Chris, you know your Daddy Vee likes to exaggerate,’ Mommy would tell me with a smile. Or she’d say impatiently, ‘Daddy, stop that stuff, you know that ain’t right.’”
Stormé’s talent for entertaining yarns would later catch up with Stonewall history.
“In 1968, Mommy got very sick. She and Daddy never talked to me about what her illness was, but eventually it became clear it was terminal. Daddy quit the Jewel Box in September 1969 to become Mommy’s full-time caregiver. He was at her every beck and call,” Jenkins writes.
“And this brings me to Stonewall,” Jenkins continues. “People ask me all the time, ‘Was Stormé there? Did Stormé throw the first punch?’ I don’t want to offend anyone, but I didn’t see Daddy there.”
Jenkins would know. She was there herself.
“I didn’t feel welcome at the Stonewall club or go too often, but I put on an extra nice dress and went that night because I was invited to [pioneering trans nurse] Yvonne Ritter’s birthday party. I was arrested for breaking the masquerading law. I saw the other people who were taken to the police station, and Daddy wasn’t one of them.”
And around that time, he never claimed to be. “He didn’t say one word about resisting at Stonewall,” Jenkins says.
But that changed sometime in the 1990s, when “Daddy gave interviews about punching a cop outside the Stonewall during the rebellion. Sometimes he said he knocked the cop unconscious.”
“I have my suspicions about why he started that,” Jenkins wrote. “Now, I did once see him shove a cop in Harlem who called us queers as he, Mommy, and I approached a gay club. He got arrested and Mommy had to bail him out. I think it was a Puerto Rican cop, it wasn’t any white man.”
“And I once saw Daddy punch a man who was flirting with Mommy at a club and started disrespecting her. He was a tough guy. But he was no fool. Can you imagine what would happen to a Black person who hit a white cop in 1969? When I told that story to my cousins, they fell out laughing. Think about it! Use common sense! Daddy would have been beat down. There’s no way he would have taken that chance with Mommy sick at home,” Jenkins says.
“I feel in my gut and heart that Daddy wasn’t walking by a nightclub at two in the morning in June 1969. Mommy was very sick, and I think he was home with her. He was afraid to even leave her side around that time. He was afraid he was going to lose her,” Jenkins adds.
“When Mommy did die, Daddy was devastated.”
Stormé could take consolation, though, in a story that Jenkins had shared with her chosen family, not the other way around — and this one was true.
“When I was 13, the NAACP in our town in Arizona invited Dr. [Martin Luther] King to come speak about integrating the school,” Jenkins says. “My mother and I sang his favorite song for him, ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’ Afterward, my mom asked Dr. King in my presence, ‘Why does my son want to be a girl?’ He said, ‘Sister Viola, you are a praying woman. Whatever God intends for that child to be, you pray for that child and love that child.’”
“It was one of the highlights of my life,” Jenkins adds. “I told that story to Daddy and Mommy, because Mommy was a little bit religious and believed she was living against God’s will. Hearing what Dr. King said made her and Daddy feel better. It seemed to bring them even closer.”
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.