![]() “She was not to be messed with by any stretch of the imagination.Stormé DeLarverie is one of the most important lesbian activists of the second half of the twentieth century. ![]() “She literally walked the streets of downtown Manhattan like a gay superhero,” Ms. But she regarded the whole neighborhood as within her jurisdiction. She made her living working security at the Cubby Hole and later for Ms. DeLarverie had earlier lived at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan for decades. Zalopany helped move her to another center in Brooklyn, where they said she got better care and had more freedom. DeLarverie had endured years of problems - legal, housing, mental health - that ended with her admission to a nursing home in Brooklyn. DeLarverie’s guardians a few years ago, after Ms. Cannistraci and another longtime friend, Michele Zalopany, became Ms. DeLarverie had always carried her photograph. DeLarverie had told her that she had lived for 25 years with a dancer named Diana, who died in the 1970s, and that Ms. One of the show’s stars was Lynne Carter, a female impersonator who later performed at Carnegie Hall. of the Jewel Box Revue, billed as “an unusual variety show.” She dressed as a man the rest of the cast members, all men, dressed as women. There was a long period in Chicago, where, she told friends, she was a bodyguard for mobsters. Captured on tape at nearly 90, she still sounded smooth singing “Since I Fell for You.” For a while she sang in a jazz group and performed in Europe. She said in interviews that she had begun performing as a singer by her late teens, first as a woman and later dressed as a man. At some point her father married her mother, and the family moved to California. Her mother, who was black, was a servant in the house of her father, who was white. ![]() 24, though she told people that she was not certain that that was the actual day because of the circumstances of her birth. Storme DeLarverie (her first name sounds like stormy her last name is pronounced de-LAR-ver-ee) was born in 1920 in New Orleans. They’ll just walk away, and that’s a good thing to do because I’ll either pick up the phone or I’ll nail you.” “No people even pull it around me that know me. “I can spot ugly in a minute,” she said in a 2009 interview for Columbia University’s NYC in Focus journalism project. Identity, for her, had been especially complicated, and she did not want others persecuted for theirs. DeLarverie had grown up in the South, of mixed race, and spent part of the first half of her life singing and performing as a man. She was on the lookout for what she called “ugliness”: any form of intolerance, bullying or abuse of her “baby girls.” DeLarverie roamed lower Seventh and Eighth Avenues and points between into her 80s, patrolling the sidewalks and checking in at lesbian bars. Tall, androgynous and armed - she held a state gun permit - Ms. For decades she was a self-appointed guardian of lesbians in the Village. Her role in the movement lasted long after 1969. DeLarverie was a member of the Stonewall Veterans Association and a regular at the pride parade, but she rarely dwelled on her actions that night. Cannistraci, an owner of the Village lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson. “Nobody knows who threw the first punch, but it’s rumored that she did, and she said she did,” said Ms. But was she the cross-dressing lesbian whose clubbing by the police helped set the chaos in motion? Some witnesses have said yes, others no. DeLarverie was there on June 27, 1969, the night the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, setting off protests that helped start the gay rights movement and are now commemorated during New York’s annual Gay Pride Week. Her death, following a heart attack on Friday, was confirmed by Lisa Cannistraci, one of her legal guardians. Storme DeLarverie, a singer, cross-dresser and bouncer who may or may not have thrown the first punch at the 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, but who was indisputably one of the first and most assertive members of the modern gay rights movement, died on Saturday in Brooklyn.
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