![]() ![]() Because it was only when I sat down to write this, to try to make sense of my unfolding relationship to this album, and to the album’s place in the universe of queer documentary history, that I realised how little I could find out about the people depicted-Chunga, Jackie, Eddie-and how little survives about the Jewel Box Revue itself against the long shadow it casts upon 20th-century American history. I can’t help but wonder if the empathy and familiarity I feel with some of these photographs-initially part of their seductiveness-is a problem as much as it is a thrill. They don’t look different from a lot of photos I’ve taken myself. Tucked away in its thick pages-60 in total-are newspaper clippings, letters, performance programs, professional photos, autographs, but also photos that could only have been taken backstage, or at a party, or on vacation, some of them blurry with the urgency and hilarity of the moment.Īt first glance these images contribute in their own way to the shape of queer culture today. The album is, first and foremost, a fragment of Terry’s own life as it intersected with the Jewel Box Revue, a travelling drag show which Stormé DeLarverie performed with, famously as the single “male impersonator” along with 25 other “female impersonators.” The friendships and correspondences captured in the album document Terry’s life before and after her marriage, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, and give a sense of the relationships she maintained with DeLarverie and other performers. While Terry herself remains a bit of a mystery, and an ongoing subject of research for me, I still wanted to share some of my “Archive of Feelings” about the album so far. Recently, one such artefact came into my life that enhances the scope of DeLarverie’s archive, personality, and influence, that adds a few brilliant little details to the bigger picture of an already epic life: a photograph album created and kept by a photographer named Nancy Terry from Toledo, Ohio. But how else might we continue to make meaning out of its contents- four boxes of material including her leather jacket and a motorcycle helmet-when what survives among them is so clearly pared down from the materials any human being accumulates over the course of their lifetime? Can we ever know enough, or collect enough? The magic of rediscovery is a driving force in the way we tell stories, and then tell them again from new perspectives. Much more can be made of those materials, however seemingly fixed Stormé’s star might seem in the universe of queer theory and queer history alike. Much more from the ‘archive’ of DeLarverie remains to be found and assembled as such, to be named. Maybe that’s just part of the momentum that allows it to survive in the first place.Įxample: when Stormé DeLarverie’s collection went to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture after her death in 2014, that was only the beginning, or more likely only the middle of a story. Each object collected multiplies in its meanings as it ages. Making connections across collections is part of the pleasure of finding and working with archival materials, the remnants of print, photographs, letters, books held in human hands, read and loaned to friends and lovers. ![]() Peter Frank of the Bronx LGBTQ Community Services Center called DeLarverie “a fierce woman who stood up for our community on countless occasions.”Ī funeral service was planned for May 29.Every archive is fragmentary, and deeply interpersonal, always reaching out as much as it draws contents in to itself. Supreme Court decision overturning parts of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, Cannistraci said. In recent years, DeLarverie suffered from dementia, but was still able to appreciate milestones including the advent of same-sex marriage in New York state and the U.S. Well into her later years, she worked as a bouncer at bars, including the one where she and Cannistraci met in 1985. “She was a very serious woman when it came to protecting people she loved,” Cannistraci said, adding that DeLarverie “just lived to be of service.” ![]() In the 1969 riots, she was among those who fought against a police raid at a Greenwich Village bar called the Stonewall. In the 1950s, she was part of a traveling drag show called the Jewel Box Revue, where she performed as a male impersonator. She was 93.ĭeLarverie died May 24 at a Brooklyn nursing home, said Lisa Cannistraci, a longtime friend and one of her legal guardians.īorn in New Orleans in 1920 to a Black mother and a White father, DeLarverie “was born into adversity and lived in adversity her whole life,” Cannistraci said. NEW YORK (AP) - Storme DeLarverie, a lesbian activist who took part in the New York Stonewall riots in 1969 that started the gay rights movement in the United States, has died.
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