Via Right Wing Watch:
The police officers who raided the Stonewall Inn in June 1969 were “trying to rescue a young boy who identified as transgender,” claimed Diane Gramley, the head of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Family Association, on a recent broadcast of the “Stand in the Gap” radio show produced by the American Pastors Network.
“He was being used sexually and the police were trying to rescue him,” Gramley claimed. That remarkable, and utterly false, bit of historical revisionism came during a conversation about what host Gary Dull called “the menace of Gay Pride month.”
Gramley said that the “real goal” of Pride celebrations “is to indoctrinate and they are seeking to promote their deviant sexual behavior.” She has been to Gay Pride celebrations in Philadelphia several times, she said, “just to document who was supporting it, take some pictures of what was going on.”
So the AFA Just sat on that bit of information for 50 years? Riiiiiiiiiiight.
We already have enough fake Stonewall history flying around with the stories about Sylvia Rivera and Marsha Johnson thank you very much. We don’t need more.
It just gets worse and worse; the layers of bullshit and jive that have been piled upon this important historical event will never be peeled away at this point.
In 1969 there were cross dressers, draq queens and a few ‘sex changes’ but there were no transgenders, and the NYPD were too busy on the take to do any white knighting for them or anyone else.
Thank You!
I heard Peter LaBarbera make this same claim when he appeared on the anti-gay VCY America radio program about a week ago. He attributed the claim to “a gay historian.” I have never heard this claim from any historian.
One reason why there are so many lies and false tales about Stonewall – from trans activists, from radical “queers” and from the Christian Right – is because we LGB people have allowed Stonewall to gain an outsized importance. Every scammer with an ideological agenda thinks he can score some victory in 2019 by creating some new myth about an event from half a
century ago. We need to stop treating Stonewall like a religious event, where the details are given cosmic, perpetual significance.
Yes, it was a noteworthy event. But it was not the be-all and the end-all. It was not the start of the gay rights movement. Prior to Stonewall, there were gay rights organizations on both coasts and in multiple countries. The UK had decriminalized gay sex and Canada was finalizing decriminalization. In the US, Illinois had decriminalized and the groundwork had been laid for decriminalization in 5 other states. Gay people had won a big case at the US Supreme Court over access to the US Postal Service. There were gay rights magazines, newsletters and even a radio program. If Stonewall had never happened, history would have played out much the same, albeit on a longer time scale. So really, whether Sylvia Rivera was there or whether the Apollo astronauts were there or whether the police were there to rescue a trans teen or whether they were there to arrest Amelia Earhart – none of this should have anything to do with the lives of LGB people today.