‘It was a rebellion, it was an uprising — it wasn’t no damn riot.’

“It was a rebellion, it was an uprising — it wasn’t no damn riot.” Stormé DeLarverie spent fourteen years as MC of the Jewel Box Revue, the racially integrated drag troupe where she was the lone drag king among twenty-five queens, leaving in 1969 — the year of Stonewall, where her struggle with police outside the bar is one of several contested accounts of how the night began. She then worked the doors of Village lesbian bars as a state-licensed bouncer, and patrolled the neighbourhood on her own initiative into her eighties.