For my project, I used various sources to investigate the effect of non-gender conforming individuals (NGCI) on Stonewall Riots and gay rights movement that followed, with special focus on Greenwich Village.

My thesis is that he gay rights movement that followed the Stonewall Riots in the Greenwich Village held an institutional bias against gender non-conforming LGBT Villagers despite their critical role in the Stonewall Riots. By many accounts, it was a “drag queen” and a “stone dyke” who initiated a physical resistance against the policemen. These were minorities in the gay community, which distanced themselves from those who were thought to be conforming to society’s bigoted vision of the LGBT community. In doing so, however, they created an institutional bias of GNCI, which was manifested in policies major gay rights movement lobbied for. Provisions that directly protected hate crime against transgender individuals or individuals perceived to be transgender were often erased to ease the bill’s passage through legislative bodies.

Though this event is famous and well researched, there is no specific focus on the GNCI community in many literatures. Hence, I relied on WorldCat, JSTOR, and other search engines, first by searching for “stonewall” and searching again within the results for key words such as “transgender,” “transsexual,” “drag queens,” “queens,” “butch,” and “dyke”. I relied on the primary accounts of the event to reveal the outward appearance of individuals involved and whether they were possibly gender non-conforming. Because the word “transgender” is relatively new, it is nearly impossible to extrapolate whether the individuals who wore opposite-gendered clothes were actually identifying with their opposite sex from primary texts.

Then, I searched for important and politically active individuals within the largest NGCI sub-group: the drag queens. Key figures such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera appeared multiple times in the literature, and I used their names to search for literature as described below. I also learned of key opponents of the figures, such as Jean O’Leary. I read their biographies, paying specific information to their political stances. With that, I was lead to research more on gay-NGCI tension