being green
by Douglas Messerli
Michelle Parkerson (director) Stormé: Lady
of the Jewel Box / 1987
We have to thank Michelle Parkerson for
capturing the important male impersonator and the sexual and social activist
described as “the Rosa Parks of the gay community,” Stormé DeLarverie on film.
Here she appears as an easy-going, intelligent force who in a brief moment with
photographs takes us back to the time when she literally ran the legendary
Jewel Box Revue, serving as its mistress of ceremonies in male drag—although
she declares several times that she behaved no differently on stage than she
did in actual life.
She became the only female performer who introduced the numerous male
drag impersonators of the Revue, basically managing its performances at the
Apollo theater and its other venues, Maksik’s Town and Country Club, and Loew’s
State Theatre. It was Stormé to whom everyone looked if there were any
problems, and from the 1940s through the 1960s she basically ran the
multiracial revue starring Lynn Carter, Robbi Ross, Leverne Cummings, Billy
Daye, Dodi Daniels, Kara Montez, Kim August, and numerous others who performed,
quite professionally and proficiently three to four performances daily,
attracting large mixed-raced audiences of families and celebrity individuals in
the days of segregation. The show, the forerunner of La Cage aux Folles, billed
itself as starring numerous males in drag (in this period all the drag figures
were referred to with their masculine honorifics of Mr.) with just one female,
asking audiences to guess which one. Generally, they were stumped, particularly
when Stormé added a moustache. In Parkerson’s film, Stormé observes that adult
audiences couldn’t determine who was who, although the children in the
audiences almost always perceived the gender difference, hinting perhaps that
gender difference is not simply something that is learned but possibly innate?
Stormé was particularly close to the headliner of the Revue, Lynn
Carter. When his death was announced, she was so overwhelmed that they
postponed the opening of the show for an hour, and even as she speaks about
Carter in the film, she tears up and asks to move on to other subjects.
Despite her reiterated strong sense of self-identity, at moments
DeLarverie hints of years of oppression as a bi-racial lesbian who looked more
like a man than woman, summing it up in a few words: “It ain’t easy…being
green.”
The
performer also briefly expresses her admiration and personal feelings for
photographer Diane Arbus, arguing that Arbus did not just frequent outsiders
and freaks, but was a genuinely kind and gentle force who became a good friend
of the singers. But no context is established the film, and it is never
explained how Arbus’ photographs of Stormé in everyday male attire, but also in
men’s three-piece suites and hats, had an enormous impact on gender-nonconforming
women’s fashion long before unisex styles came into being.
Unfortunately, the brief summary I have written above is more revealing
than Parkerson’s documentary, which simply presumes we all know what Stormé is
talking about when she mentions the Jewel Box Revue. Indeed, Parkerson’s
documentary is so superficial that after her brief memories of her musical
years, she immediately picks up with Stormé’s later life when she worked as a
bouncer for several lesbian bars in New York’s Greenwich Village, here showing
her working outside the doors of the famed Cubby Hole.
We
should also praise Parkerson for filming a full performance of the song “There
Will Never Be Another You,” the Harry Warren and Mack Gordon classic, sung by
DeLarverie, Even in her elderly years, the slightly waving baritone voice is
something of a wonder. Stormé elsewhere has described her inspiration as being
the singing of her friends Dinah Washington and Billy Holiday.
What is rather shocking about this documentary of 1987 is not only that
the director makes no real attempt to fill in on the details surrounding her
subject’s life activities and passions, but fails to describe one of the most
significant facts about Stormé DeLarverie, which one would imagine by the year
of this filming would have been legendary. Stormé was a major, if not the
central figures of the Stonewall Rebellion, as she describes it: “It was a
rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience—it wasn’t no
damn riot.”
Stormé’s The New York Times obituary summarizes the immediate
years before her job at the Cubby Hole:
“No one
questions whether Ms. DeLarverie was there on June 27, 1969, the night the
police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, setting off protests that helped
start the gay rights movement and are now commemorated during New York’s annual
Gay Pride Week. But was she the cross-dressing lesbian whose clubbing by the
police helped set the chaos in motion? Some witnesses have said yes, others no.
“Nobody knows who threw the first punch, but it’s rumored that she did,
and she said she did,” said Ms. Cannistraci, an owner of the Village lesbian
bar Henrietta Hudson. “She told me she did.”
Ms. DeLarverie was a member of the Stonewall Veterans Association and a
regular at the pride parade, but she rarely dwelled on her actions that night.
Her role in the movement lasted long after 1969. For decades she was a
self-appointed guardian of lesbians in the Village.
Tall, androgynous and armed — she held a state gun permit — Ms.
DeLarverie roamed lower Seventh and Eighth Avenues and points between into her
80s, patrolling the sidewalks and checking in at lesbian bars. She was on the
lookout for what she called ‘ugliness’: any form of intolerance, bullying or
abuse of her ‘baby girls.’”
The Wikipedia entry (relying on articles in The New York Times,
interviews with DeLarverie, and other newspaper sources of the day, provides us
with a more spectacular view of what that Stonewall night entailed:
“At the Stonewall rebellion, a scuffle broke
out when a woman in handcuffs, who may have been DeLarverie, was roughly
escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon. She was brought
through the crowd by police several times, as she escaped repeatedly. She
fought with at least four of the police, swearing and shouting, for about ten
minutes. Described by a witness as ‘a typical New York City butch’ and ‘a
dyke-stone butch,’ she had been hit on the head by an officer with a baton for,
as one witness stated, announcing that her handcuffs were too tight. She was
bleeding from a head wound as she fought back. Bystanders recalled that the
woman, whose identity remains uncertain (Stormé has been identified by some,
including herself, as the woman), sparked the crowd to fight when she looked at
bystanders and shouted, ‘Why don't you guys do something?’ After an officer
picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon, the crowd became a mob
and went ‘berserk’: ‘It was at that moment that the scene became explosive.’”
How
could a true documentarian dare make a film of this heralded gay icon without
even bringing this subject up, let alone her many years of living in the famed
Chelsea Hotel, or her later activities of working to benefit battered women and
children? It appears that Parkerson glommed onto Stormé without really knowing
her full story or even bothering to investigate further into her subject. While
we can thank Parkerson for the brief portrait of this legend, it is difficult
not to blame her for failing to fully engage her subject and fill in the
information that might help the viewer to understand Stormé’s significant
contributions to contemporary LGBTQ+ life. We might argue that Parkerson
reveals that as a documentarian she, in another meaning of that word, is also
“green,” totally inexperienced.
Los Angeles, July 18, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2023).
