queer voices
by Shelley Loree
Embedded Files
Who should we remember? The question rings clearly in a time during which forgotten parts of history are now being recovered, and an effort is being made to remember those we have already forgotten. I’m going to take a long time to answer this question, because it’s complicated and my answer is as well. We can’t remember everyone all at once, so where do we begin? A place to start is within ourselves, what part of our identity do we wish we knew more about? Is it your race? Culture? Disability? Gender? For me, it was queerness. I identify as a bisexual woman, and I wanted to explore the root of the “Gay Rights Movement” and find within it the figures that are usually hidden in the background. The non-white, non-male, non-cisgendered members of the queer community who have paved the way for me to be able to hold my girlfriend’s hand in New York City with no fear or reservations.
Student rendering of monument proposal.
First, I explored the idea of monumentalizing Marsha P. Johnson and Syvlie Rivera, friends and trans activists during the time of the Stonewall uprisings in New York City, and pioneers of queer mobilization. I knew that there was a Marsha P. Johnson park in Brooklyn and a fountain in the West Village, but while I believed that these inanimate objects were beneficial and important, I didn’t believe they were enough, they still silenced the stories and images of these heroic figures. However, through my research, I discovered that in 2021 these two trans women of color would have statues in NYC and be the first trans bodies remembered in public statues. This was great news for me, but then I asked again. Who should we remember?
I turned my thinking to the essay by Thomas Dunn, Whence the Lesbian in Queer Monumentality?. Dunn writes about the absence of lesbian figures in not only queer monuments but queer history and memories. This led me to wonder, where were the lesbians at the Stonewall uprisings? I had assumed they were there, but in retellings and stories I had heard, I realized I didn’t know any specifics, or much about the history of queer women at all. I realized that most of what I had learned in class, read, or seen on shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race frames queer history as a male history. I also realized that being a queer woman myself, I had still accepted this and allowed “gay culture” to be male-centered in my mind.
In 2019, Polly Thistlethwaite, a graduate student at CUNY, wrote an essay called Where Were the Lesbians in the Stonewall Riots? The Women’s House of Detention & Lesbian Resistance. This not only answered my questions, but unlocked an entire history of queer woman in New York City in the 60s that I had no idea about. The Women’s House of Detention was a 1960s art-deco prison lauded as a “luxury experience” equipped with windows in each cell and an open layout for prisoners to interact. This facade hid dark stories of abuse, racial discrimination, and mistreatment that eventually led to the prison being closed after activist Angela Davis took up a mission to expose the prison in the 70s. The detention center was a block away from the Stonewall Inn, and housed almost all queer women that were arrested in New York City. As a disclaimer, I would like to note that although this was a women’s detention center, we can’t be sure that all of these people identified as women, and many of them were butch, androgynous, and may have had their own gender identifying terms, although transgender was not yet a universal concept or term.
These women were jailed simply for being queer. These lesbians and queer woman were jailed for prostitution simply because they were standing on a street corner. They were jailed for entering a mafia controlled queer bar. They were jailed for hanging out in groups. They were jailed for drug use without proof, and perhaps the most egregious injustice, they were jailed for not wearing the required 3 items of gender-conforming clothing. The fact that the last crime was a law in NYC as recently as the 60s is insane to me.
While these women were jailed, they still found power. The aforementioned windows in the cells proved to fuel the prison as a hotspot for female resistance and defiance. Stories would be yelled from the high windows to the streets. The lovers of the prisoners would gather on the sidewalk below, and words of admiration were exchanged throughout the night performatively. What these women were jailed for whispering was now yelled, and thus the lesbian visibility movement was born of confinement. People that lived in the area reported screaming from the windows every night throughout the night. These women were demanding to be heard. Audrey Lourde called it the cultural center and the heart of queer women in New York.
How does this relate to the Stonewall movement? During the uprisings, the imprisoned women fueled the protesters below with energy and strength. The women screamed from their windows, cheering the marchers on and throwing flaming toilet paper from above. Almost every lesbian on the ground arrested at Stonewall was taken to the Women’s House of Detention. Shouting from their windows they were the “nerve center" of the rebellion.
Proposed location for monument.
Now that I’ve laid out that background, onto the monument. I want to honor these women whose voices were muted and stories were forgotten, and who so badly tried to have their stories heard. In Christopher Park, there is a “Gay Liberation” monument to commemorate Stonewall across from the Inn. The monument is 4 people, all white in normal clothes, 2 women and 2 men. The women are in a pair, as are the men. To me, the moment is binary and vague and doesn’t represent the diverse group of queer people who combined to create the Stonewall uprising.
My monument would be in the same park, which could be seen from both the Stonewall Inn and the detention center if it still stood. My monument would pull upon references from antiquity in its marble material and acknowledge a history of sex workers and female oppression. The floor of the monument would be mirrors, and then there would be three marble statues of women. The women would be dressed diversely, without 3 items of gender conforming clothing, and all screaming, just like the women in the prison. It would’ve been ideal to put the statues in windows above, but since the area around are all privately owned it may be impossible. The mirrors serve to allow onlookers to see themselves among the women, to relate to them, and to be part of the movement.
Along with the monument, there would be an interactive plaque that reveals the hidden history of the women of the detention center, along with stories of queer women throughout history. There could be names of imprisoned women, and a place for people to put their own stories. This allows for the plaque to be a place that people can scream their own stories into, and then they can be shared with passerbys. Messages or drawings that you submit via a hashtag can be projected on the plaque when it is not in use. For the design, I would want queer artists from New York to submit their designs and invite people to share other forgotten queer history in the space created by it.
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