Stormé DeLarverie, New York, NY

Singer, drag performer, bouncer, and LGBTQ+ activist, Stormé DeLarverie (1920–2014) was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to an African American mother and a white father. From the mid-1950s through the 1960s, DeLarverie was the master of ceremonies of the Jewel Box Revue, America’s first racially inclusive, traveling drag revue. She is also credited as having thrown the first punch against the police as they raided the Stonewall Inn in 1969, a gay club in New York’s Greenwich Village, sparking the Stonewall Uprising that transformed LGBTQ+ politics. For decades, she was a self-appointed guardian of the LGBTQ+ community and an active member of the Stonewall Veterans’ Association. Her papers are held by the Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.