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- At the time, everybody was fighting to get their rights. The Blacks wanted theirs. Women wanted their feminist rights done. Everybody wanted to be dealt with as human beings. Do you know what I mean? And so just the gay culture was no different than anybody else.

Up until then, the police in every city rules the gay community bars and stuff. They go up to there, and they take those nightsticks, and hit the door jam. And you're supposed to step away from a partner of the same sex if you're dancing with them. If you're at a table, you're supposed to move apart, and sit and be casually talking within so many feet away from each other.

For whatever reason, I have no idea what that was, no one can tell you definitively, well this is what it was, and this is why it happened. There is no what it was and why it happened. It was just the right time and the right place. Because when they came to get us out of there, nobody moved. They started chanting, don't arrest the girls. Don't arrest the girls. And something happened. Either something like a boom, I don't know if it was a firecracker, they say someone threw a beer bottle. Someone else did-- one of the girls took her heel and broke a plate glass window.

I don't know what the hell it was. All I know is that all of a sudden everybody was fighting. And I had learned from being in jail that if you're in that kind of situation, the thing to do is to piss the police off, so he knocks you out, then you don't get hurt. You know, because if you stand there and fight them, they will break every bone in your body. So I got knocked out early. I came to as they were dragging me, dragging me and putting me in the back of some car.

And then we went to court and they let everybody go. And so it happened that next night. Three nights this went on. It changed things forever. And to today, we still, as transgender people, do not get the respect from the gay and lesbian community that we deserve. It gets annoying that these gay people were like, oh, Stonewall, and faint and all of this shit. So what about the transgender people? What about the folks that were there that were fighting?

We were there. Acknowledge that. I'm glad that I finally got to an age where I can just tell them to fuck off. And they can't say shit to me. She's old. Just leave her alone. That's right. I'm old. I'm bitter. I'm annoyed. I'm angry. Y'all didn't treat us right then. You're not treating us right now. So I don't have time for that.

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