Stonewall is not here, by Neon Cunha

By Neon Cunha**

The Stonewall Riots were a series of violent and spontaneous demonstrations by members of the LGBTQIA+ community. They were triggered in the early hours of the morning of June 28, 1969, by the New York Police Department in response to a raid on the Stonewall Inn bar in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, United States. These riots are widely considered to be the culminating event in the formation and strengthening of the LGBTQIA+ rights movement. Within this context, it is necessary to bring special visibility to the women who participated in this process. These are women of various gender identities, ethnicities, and sexual orientations, and who played fundamental roles in this defining confrontation in the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights.

We can name five of these women. Together, they help to compose a kind of chronological line of events. Stormé DeLarverie, “the guardian of the lesbians”, is the person who first reacted to the raid, starting the revolt by punching one of the police officers. Marsha P. Johnson, recognized today as a trans woman, and who was also one of the best-known drag queens in New York, was one of the first to start the fight, right after DeLavrie. It was Sylvia Rivera, a bisexual transvestite, who first threw a bottle at the police, from among the crowd that watched the police action inside the Stonewall Inn from the sidewalk. Rivera founded activist organizations, notably the group STAR – Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, created with Marsha, her friend. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, one of the leaders in the clashes with the police, was arrested, having her jaw fractured while in custody. Today, Griffin-Gracy serves as the executive director of a group that helps incarcerated trans people.

Finally, we have Brenda Howard, a cis bisexual woman. It was her idea to celebrate LGBTQIA+ pride as we know it today, in the form of parades. The importance of the events that took place during this period and place, as well as of these and many other women involved, led then-US President Barack Obama to officially declare the main stage of the uprising, the Stonewall Inn bar, a national monument on June 24, 2016.

But, even though Stonewall is an indisputable landmark, not everything is just history from the Northern Hemisphere. In Brazil, the same situations that culminated in the revolts were happening there. Brazilian police officers carried out systematic patrols to threaten and arrest trans women, transvestites, gays and lesbians, arresting 1,500 people in the city of São Paulo alone. Defenders of morality and good customs, who still persist in public and political figures, endorsed the police operations that systematically persecuted the LGBTQIA+ population in downtown São Paulo, between the end of the 1960s and the mid-1990s, since the first of these patrols dates back to 1968, due to the official visit of Queen Elizabeth II to the city.

The military saw LGBTQIA+ people as particularly undesirable, to the point that prejudice and discrimination became not just publicly announced statements: the nature and degree of persecution against this population, whether through action or inaction by the State, became institutionalized.

The police wanted to clean up the city center. In statements to newspapers at the time, police chief Wilson Richetti made no attempt to hide this objective. He stated that it was necessary to “cleanse the city of muggers, prostitutes, drug dealers, homosexuals and the unemployed,” echoing the voices of people like Jânio Quadros, mayor of São Paulo in 1986. With the advent of HIV/AIDS, transvestites were even cutting their wrists to get out of prison faster or to avoid it altogether.

During the days of imprisonment, many went without food and were forced to clean the prison, going so far as to attempt death by suicide. The Military Police, with support from the Civil Police, organized some operations to remove transvestites and trans women from the center of São Paulo, such as “Operação Tarântula” and “Operação Arrastão”.

The population complained that the number of these people had increased significantly in the central region and also in some other peripheral regions of the city, fleeing areas considered dangerous or even extermination points. The dilemma became whether to flee the critical points and fall prey to operations organized by the police. In some parts of Greater São Paulo, it has reached the extreme of young middle-class people practicing target shooting or beatings. Petitions are also constantly being filed with the Military Police. In addition to the blitzes on the streets of downtown and upscale neighborhoods of São Paulo, there were also “raids” on nightclubs with the justification of searching for suspects.

Cissexism (a neologism used to condense two colonizing ideas, where one operates as a governmental norm (cisgenderism) and the second acts as a character of domination, hierarchy, inclusion and difference (sexism). These two concepts will act on processes of exclusion on the body that escapes the norm. The belief that the gender of cisgender people is somehow more legitimate than that of transgender people, combined with misogyny, are important markers in the erasure of the engagement of the trans population in the achievements of LGBTQIA+ rights.

The recognition of Brazil as the country that most murders and violates people who escape (cis-hetero) normalization, added to intersectionality and touched by the analytical category of race, class and gender, constitute a combination of factors that increase levels of exclusion and precariousness of many lives.

The way in which trans women and transvestites are deprived of social recognition for their achievements and in confronting violence against the Brazilian LGBTQIA+ population is not dissociated from the oppression produced by the invisibility of those who cannot hide who they are, and denounces that while Marsha, Silvya, Stone, Miss and Brenda are celebrated, our Brazilian and Latin American women, for the most part, are erased.

*Original text published in full in: Debate point 21: A “cis” vacuum in history and the emergence of the trans body, by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

**Neon Cunha is a black, Amerindian, transgender woman – in that order of importance. “My first training was cleaning, with my mother,” says Neon, who has become one of the most important LGBTQIAPN+ voices in the country. In 2016, Neon asked the Brazilian court for the right to assisted death, if she was not allowed the right to change her name and gender in her registration, without being subjected to the abusive processes that were required until then. Her process paved the way for every transgender person to do the same. Advertising and art director, Neon is an independent activist, being the first transgender person to speak at the OAS – Organization of American States, the UN’s arm in the Americas, at the invitation of Geledés – Black Women’s Institute. He entered the public service at the beginning of his adolescence, as a survival strategy, at the same time that he witnessed the extermination operations against his peers in the center of São Paulo, in the 1980s. Whether in fashion, where he collaborates with the brand Isaac Silva and with the Instituto Casa de Criadores, or in her political career, having been a candidate for state deputy in 2022 and obtaining 35 thousand votes, her trajectory is marked by the search for humanity and utopias as rights and possibilities for all people. “A place of inspiration is belonging, and it is not a border. This place, dreams are bigger than fears, is the non-limit of being a black woman”, said Neon in a statement to Itaú Cultural, when nominated for the Milu Vilela award, in 2022.

By Ezatamentchy