Sex Workers’ Forgotten Role in Stonewall Revisited By ‘Time’

With nationwide celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, the three-night riot that took place in New York City June 28 throigh July 1 of 1969 and is considered the key event in sparking the LGBTQ rights movement, one group that played an important role in the protests has never received proper recognition, according to a historical essay published online Friday by Time Magazine.  “Many of the queers who threw bottles, bricks and garbage at the police that night were hustlers, hookers and other sex workers,” wrote historian Scott W. Stern in his article for Time. In fact, Stern notes, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera—the two trans women of color believed to have thrown the “first brick” in the Stonewall riots, had themselves earned a living as sex workers.  Rivera later said that sex work was “the only alternative that we have to survive because the laws do not give us the right to go and get a job the way we feel comfortable,” according to Stern’s history of the event. But, Stern says, “the erasure of sex workers from Stonewall began almost immediately.” In 1973, just four years after the uprising, Rivera “had to fight to speak at the gay pride rally celebrating Stonewall because the crowd didn’t want to hear from a transgender sex worker,” according to historian Melinda Chateauvert.  “Gay liberation groups were reluctant to support people like Rivera or to accept sex workers and transgender people into the movement,” Chateauvert wrote in her 2015 book, Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk. “When sex work is mentioned, it is a source of shame that has been overcome.” The acceptance of sex workers into the LGBTQ rights movement, with advocacy of sex work decriminalization, has been a recent phenomenon, “only in the last couple years,” Stern wrote in Time. “Modern LGBTQ right activists owe sex workers a debt,” Stern wrote. “Repaying it will mean making sex-workers’ rights a policy priority, making sure that today’s organized activism is inclusive of their presence, their needs—and their history.” Photo By Rhododendrites / Wikimedia Commons