“No eyewitness account of the riots written at the time by an identifiably gay person mentions Judy Garland,” argues David Carter in Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter Even the 2017 Magnetic Fields song “69: Judy Garland” starts off, “The first brick the drag king threw / To draw blood from the boys in blue / Said ‘Here lies Judy Garland’ on it / It flew through historic air.”īut experts on LGBTQ history say there isn’t enough to prove that Judy Garland’s funeral specifically fueled the Stonewall uprising. One of the several controversial aspects of the 2015 movie Stonewall was the fact that it promoted the idea that Garland’s funeral led to the Stonewall uprising. On June 27, 1969, when the trans activist Sylvia Rivera heard about the funeral, she became “completely hysterical,” she recalled to the historian Martin Duberman in his 1994 account of the uprising, Stonewall.īut did the timing of the funeral actually have anything to do with the fact that this was the night Stonewall patrons fought back?Ĭharles Kaiser’s 1997 book The Gay Metropolis has been credited as one source that popularized the theory that heightened emotions over Judy Garland may have contributed in a significant way to the outcry at Stonewall Inn hours later, “No one will ever know for sure which was the most important reason for what happened next: the freshness in their minds of Judy Garland’s funeral, or the example of all the previous rebellions of the sixties - the civil rights revolution, the sexual revolution, and the psychedelic revolution, each of which had punctured gaping holes in crumbling traditions of passivity, puritanism and bigotry,” he wrote. But she did it in her songs, and with them she brought along anyone who similarly dared to care too much.” She couldn’t do it in her real life, of course, and neither could her fans. She was “the Elvis for homosexuals,” Barry Walters wrote in the LGBTQ news outlet The Advocate, “a symbol of emotional liberation, a woman who struggled to live and love without restraint. Her problems were no secret, including drug addiction and suicide attempts, and she channeled her sorrow into creative outlets. In a 1967 review of a performance she gave, TIME mockingly noted her popularity within the gay community and quoted Manhattan psychiatrists who surmised that she might be admired as a model of resilience. By the time she died, Garland was a well-known icon to the LGBT community at the time.
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