Whether her act of rebellion 50th Anniversary Stonewall 1969 the first pride was a riot LGBT shirt although she was “almost indubitably among the first to be violent,” writes David Carter in “Stonewall,” his 2004 book about the police raid on a New York gay bar that became a historic moment. What is certain about Johnson’s role, at least for today’s transgender community, is that the stone she cast packed the most thunder. Johnson, along with a fellow transgender woman Sylvia Rivera, who was of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan heritage, became inspirational leaders of the movement born in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, when lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other queer people fought back against harassment. The months after Stonewall was a time of LGBTQ unity that would not last long. Gay men, mostly white, assumed leadership and ostracised trans women like Johnson and Rivera in the name of respectability, according to people involved in the movement at the time.
