Donald Davenport, a Virginia-based LGBT pioneering activist who was present as a teenager at the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York that are considered the launching pad of the modern LGBT rights movement, died last Monday after a lengthy illness, according to his long-time partner, Chuck Unger.
Davenport was a long-time member of the LGBT Democrats of Virginia, who came to Falls Church in 2019 to speak at a forum marking the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots sponsored by the Falls Church News-Press and the Social Justice Committee of Falls Church.
The following is a transcript of Davenport’s compelling remarks from that day, soon to be published in a new book by the Falls Church-based BCI Books.
I was born in occupied Austria after World War 2. I’m an Army brat. My father was an American soldier. My mother was an Austrian national. We had to leave Austria when the occupation ended. My father was restationed in Germany, where we lived until the early ‘60s. My next move was to the States, where we settled in Richmond, Virginia.
I realized early that I was “different,” and that’s when I started living two lives. I had some friends that were “different,” too. Eventually my parents found out what was going on, and my father punched me and threw me out of the house. “No son of mine is going to be queer and live in my house,” my father said. Little did he know that was just what I wanted anyway. I was free to live as I chose.
I stayed with friends and kept going to school. I was 16 in high school, doing well and working a part time job as a busboy at a gay restaurant in Richmond. A week later, I was arrested at school for being a deviant and a runaway. My parents had reported me to the police. I was sent to a juvenile detention center where I was stripped and put into solitary confinement.
A week later, I saw a psychiatrist who showed me inkblots, asked me questions, and finally told me there was nothing wrong with me. They gave me my clothes back and led me out to the common area. After several weeks with nothing happening, I wrote a letter to my parents and told them that I changed my ways and I would like to come back home.
They signed me out. I went back home, where I stayed just long enough until I had bus money to buy a ticket to New York City. I left without telling them. I wasn’t going to take the chance of losing my freedom again. I called home when I got to New York and I told them I was okay: I had a job, an apartment, and would keep in-touch. None of which was true, but I knew in my heart that I could do this.
It took me several days to find a job, waiting tables, and the cook had an extra room where I could stay until I could find a place. Two weeks later, I had a place in the West Village and a new job as a waiter at Aldo’s, a gay restaurant, which was one block from my three-floor walkup studio apartment. That week I celebrated my 17th birthday and all was well.
I was making good money in Aldo’s and started sending money home to my parents (by the way, did I tell you they already had ten kids, soon to be 12, after which they adopted another?). I think my parents liked babies but didn’t know what to do with them once they could think for themselves. Anyway, I would go to work in the early evening, get off at midnight, go to the Stonewall Inn nightclub and hang out with friends until about 5 a.m., go to breakfast at the Pink Teacup (purest Southern cooking), and then go home and get some rest; to get some sleep so I could start all over again.
Now, let me tell you about the New York City gay scene. Most gay restaurants, bars, nightclubs and bathhouses were run by the Mafia, the Mafia paid the cops protection money so they could run their business without interruption. Occasionally, the cops had to raid the nightclubs that operated after hours.
The cops would tell the club that the raid would happen at a certain time and the clubs would make sure that there was no money or illegal booze out where it could be seen. The cops would check a few IDs, maybe write a ticket for a fine and then leave. After that I was back to business as usual.
This might happen a couple of times a year. As long as you paid the money to the cops. So this was 1969. It was an election year. Elections have consequences. The incumbent candidate had to show that he was taking care of the “homosexual issue” and fighting mafia crime. The game plan was to hit the Mafia hard, and along with them take down the homosexual, the drag queens and the transsexuals.
How could there be a problem with that? When it came to those pansy men with the Mafia, no one would care. Everyone would be impressed by the cops, about the job the cops were doing. It was June 27, 1969. After I got off work, I stopped at the Triangle Park in front of the Stonewall to talk to a friend. The park was a hangout for hustlers and drag queens that didn’t have money to get into the Stonewall.
Everybody there was hustling something and whenever I saw a friend there, I would bail them out. The price of entry got them a couple of drinks and from there they were on their own. It was a slow night at the bar, but we knew it would get jumping later in the evening. Suddenly there was a commotion in the bar. Then there was screaming, the lights came on. The music stopped.
Then I realized that there were plainclothes cops over at the bar. They were grabbing bar stools and pushing patrons to the front of the building. The Stonewall’s business permit said it was a bottle club, which meant that people brought their own bottle, and the club sold them ice and mixers. This was a sting operation and they were in the club all evening watching everything that went on.
They knew that the club was selling alcohol to the patrons, which was illegal. That’s when I panicked. I was still 17 and if caught I would be sent back to my parents. I could not deal with that happening. They pushed us into a line at the front wall. I kept looking further back in line, trying to figure out what my options were.
Up at the front of the line. Some uniformed cops had arrived. There were a couple of female cops who were taking drag queens into the restroom, checking to see whether or not they were female. If not, they were arrested for impersonating a female. In New York City, you had to have at least three pieces of gender specific clothing on, or you could be arrested.
As you may have guessed, most of the drag queens were being arrested. I made my way back to the end of the line where I found one of the bartenders who worked at the front bar. He told me that we could get out of the building through the door that we were standing next to. The door, the wall, the window were all painted black, which made them all blend together and easy to miss.
The door had two by fours nailed across it, and he told me that they were not that well-nailed. Apparently, when the cops staked out the place, they didn’t see it. If they did, they didn’t see it as a threat. As we began to pull the boards loose, the cops noticed and started to run towards us, appearing to move mountains but before they got to us, the boards were off and the door was open. He went out first and as I started out the door, I felt the hands on my shoulders.
My thoughts at that moment were that I’m going to be arrested and sent back to my parents. If they found out that I was arrested in an illegal gay bar, they would never let me leave alone again. I realized then that I was outside. The hands on my shoulders with a handful of people who had gathered outside and they pulled me to freedom.
As I look back, there were more of them blocking the cops from going out. I went towards the middle of the crowd where I saw Marsha, one of the older drag queens. She was always like a mother to the younger queens. We watched them loading the drag queens from the bar into the paddy wagon. One of the cops forcibly pushed one queen into the wagon, and then it hit her with his club.
I heard Marsha yell, “Oh, hell no!”
She picked up what I think was a beer bottle and threw it at the cop. That’s when the crowd went wild. Drag queens started throwing anything they could find. The cops had to retreat to the inside of the building. Drag queens were rocking parking meters until they broke off and then threw them through the front window.
Someone lit a trash can on fire and threw it into the building. The inside caught fire and the cops were hunkered down praying for reinforcements. The fire department arrived in time to put the fire out, but when the busloads of cops arrived, the crowd did not let them out. They started rocking the buses until more cops arrived. We finally had to run.
That was the end of the first day. There were outbreaks and protests over the next several days. Most were spontaneous, and all were effective even though we had no idea what would happen next.
The LGBT movement had been born.