5 LGBTQ+ Leaders From the Stonewall Era

Who were the LGBTQ+ leaders of the Stonewall era? While the 1969 Stonewall uprising was a collective act of resistance rather than a movement led by any single figure, it helped elevate a generation of activists who would shape the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. Among the most influential were Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Craig Rodwell, Stormé DeLarverie and Marty Robinson, all of whom became advocates, organizers and powerful voices in the quest for gay liberation.

The June 1969 police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a dive bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village with a largely gay and transgender clientele, took many by surprise. While the NYPD commonly targeted gay bars under laws that banned the sale of alcohol to gay patrons—and treated any gatherings of LGBTQ+ people as “disorderly”—they often gave advance warnings to Stonewall’s owners, the Genovese crime family.

The response to the raid proved even more surprising. Patrons and nearby residents, frustrated by years of police harassment and social discrimination, refused orders to disperse and pushed back as officers forcibly arrested people. The confrontation sparked six days of protests and violent clashes with the NYPD outside the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, marking a turning point in the struggle for LGBTQ+ civil rights and public recognition.

“There was a shift in the political winds at the end of the ’60s that contributed to the explosion at Stonewall,” says Marc Stein, a history professor at San Francisco State University and author of the 2019 book The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. After years of modest gains for gays and lesbian Americans, many activists saw a move toward political conservatism in 1969 with Richard Nixon’s election and the defeat of reform-minded New York City Mayor John Lindsay. “Stonewall looks like a response to both local and national developments.”

The uprising helped usher a new generation of activists and reformers to prominence, many of whom would define the gay liberation movement for years to come. Here are some of the most notable:

Johnson, a Black drag queen originally from New Jersey, was already a well-known presence in Greenwich Village when the Stonewall uprising erupted. By her own account, she arrived after the confrontation with police had already begun. Still, she has often been credited with helping intensify the resistance, fed up after having endured repeated arrests for wearing dresses or makeup in public. (Johnson later claimed more than 100.) Accounts of her actions that night differ, but her impact afterward is undisputed. Johnson, who did not identify as “transgender,” co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and joined the Gay Liberation Front, becoming a leading advocate for homeless queer youth and greater legal protections for LGBTQ+ people.

Sylvia Rivera was a 17-year-old trans woman living on the margins of Greenwich Village when the Stonewall riots began. After running away from home at age 11, she survived through sex work and other means in the rough streets around Times Square. When the riots erupted around Stonewall, Rivera threw herself into the action. “I’m not missing a minute of this—it's the revolution!” she later recalled. Rivera joined Johnson in co-founding STAR, but often clashed with mainstream gay rights organizations that sidelined transgender people. When organizers denied her a speaking spot at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally, the forerunner of Pride celebrations, she stormed the stage and grabbed the mic to deliver one of the movement’s most memorable rebukes: “If it wasn’t for the drag queen, there would be no gay liberation movement. We’re the front-liners.”

While others threw bottles, Craig Rodwell printed flyers. During the riots, the Chicago native produced and distributed leaflets condemning the Mafia’s role in gay bars, denouncing police harassment and calling for LGBTQ+ rights. He had always had a literary bent: Two years earlier, he founded the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first East Coast bookstore devoted to gay and lesbian authors. His biggest impact came after the riots, when he helped transform an annual July Fourth gay rights demonstration into a commemoration of the uprising’s first anniversary. “It was gay liberation displacing the national birthday as the central protest for the movement,” says Stein, noting that the 1970 tribute soon evolved into the annual Gay Pride celebration. “That's what really cemented Stonewall’s status as the significant event in LGBTQ+ history, the fact that we reinforce it every June with commemorative marches and protests and events nationally and now internationally.”

Born in New Orleans to a Black mother and a white father, Stormé DeLarvarie made her name touring nationally and internationally with the Jewel Box Revue, a racially integrated drag troupe in which she performed as a tuxedo-clad drag king and emcee. A butch lesbian with a striking baritone voice, she frequently ran afoul of police enforcing laws that required people to wear at least three items of clothing associated with their supposed gender; officers detained her whether she wore a dress or a suit and tie. Historians continue to debate her exact role during the Stonewall uprising, but some witnesses credited her resistance to arrest with helping galvanize the crowd. In the years that followed, DeLarverie emerged as a guardian of Greenwich Village’s lesbian community and street youth, patrolling the streets, sometimes with a concealed rifle, confronting harassment whenever she encountered it.

On the second night of the rebellion, Brooklyn carpenter Marty Robinson stood at the front door of the Stonewall Inn alongside lesbian activist Martha Shelley and urged the assembled crowd to resist oppression. He spent the next several decades doing exactly that, becoming one of the movement’s most inventive strategists. Robinson helped found or lead several influential organizations, including the Gay Activist Alliance, the National Gay Task Force, GLAAD and, during the height of the 1980s AIDS crisis, ACT UP. He became known for the “zap,” a surprise public confrontation designed to force politicians or corporate leaders to address gay rights issues in front of the media. “He pioneered a new kind of strategic, media-savvy, direct-action approach to LGBT activism,” Stein says.