Stormé DeLarverie | performer of the Jewel Box Revue 1940s-1960s

being green

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michelle Parkerson (director) Stormé: Lady of the Jewel Box / 1987

 

We have to thank Michelle Parkerson for capturing the important male impersonator and the sexual and social activist described as “the Rosa Parks of the gay community,” Stormé DeLarverie on film. Here she appears as an easy-going, intelligent force who in a brief moment with photographs takes us back to the time when she literally ran the legendary Jewel Box Revue, serving as its mistress of ceremonies in male drag—although she declares several times that she behaved no differently on stage than she did in actual life.

      She became the only female performer who introduced the numerous male drag impersonators of the Revue, basically managing its performances at the Apollo theater and its other venues, Maksik’s Town and Country Club, and Loew’s State Theatre. It was Stormé to whom everyone looked if there were any problems, and from the 1940s through the 1960s she basically ran the multiracial revue starring Lynn Carter, Robbi Ross, Leverne Cummings, Billy Daye, Dodi Daniels, Kara Montez, Kim August, and numerous others who performed, quite professionally and proficiently three to four performances daily, attracting large mixed-raced audiences of families and celebrity individuals in the days of segregation. The show, the forerunner of La Cage aux Folles, billed itself as starring numerous males in drag (in this period all the drag figures were referred to with their masculine honorifics of Mr.) with just one female, asking audiences to guess which one. Generally, they were stumped, particularly when Stormé added a moustache. In Parkerson’s film, Stormé observes that adult audiences couldn’t determine who was who, although the children in the audiences almost always perceived the gender difference, hinting perhaps that gender difference is not simply something that is learned but possibly innate?

     Stormé was particularly close to the headliner of the Revue, Lynn Carter. When his death was announced, she was so overwhelmed that they postponed the opening of the show for an hour, and even as she speaks about Carter in the film, she tears up and asks to move on to other subjects.

     Despite her reiterated strong sense of self-identity, at moments DeLarverie hints of years of oppression as a bi-racial lesbian who looked more like a man than woman, summing it up in a few words: “It ain’t easy…being green.”

     The performer also briefly expresses her admiration and personal feelings for photographer Diane Arbus, arguing that Arbus did not just frequent outsiders and freaks, but was a genuinely kind and gentle force who became a good friend of the singers. But no context is established the film, and it is never explained how Arbus’ photographs of Stormé in everyday male attire, but also in men’s three-piece suites and hats, had an enormous impact on gender-nonconforming women’s fashion long before unisex styles came into being.

   Unfortunately, the brief summary I have written above is more revealing than Parkerson’s documentary, which simply presumes we all know what Stormé is talking about when she mentions the Jewel Box Revue. Indeed, Parkerson’s documentary is so superficial that after her brief memories of her musical years, she immediately picks up with Stormé’s later life when she worked as a bouncer for several lesbian bars in New York’s Greenwich Village, here showing her working outside the doors of the famed Cubby Hole.

     We should also praise Parkerson for filming a full performance of the song “There Will Never Be Another You,” the Harry Warren and Mack Gordon classic, sung by DeLarverie, Even in her elderly years, the slightly waving baritone voice is something of a wonder. Stormé elsewhere has described her inspiration as being the singing of her friends Dinah Washington and Billy Holiday.

     What is rather shocking about this documentary of 1987 is not only that the director makes no real attempt to fill in on the details surrounding her subject’s life activities and passions, but fails to describe one of the most significant facts about Stormé DeLarverie, which one would imagine by the year of this filming would have been legendary. Stormé was a major, if not the central figures of the Stonewall Rebellion, as she describes it: “It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience—it wasn’t no damn riot.”

      Stormé’s The New York Times obituary summarizes the immediate years before her job at the Cubby Hole:

 

 “No one questions whether Ms. DeLarverie was there on June 27, 1969, the night the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, setting off protests that helped start the gay rights movement and are now commemorated during New York’s annual Gay Pride Week. But was she the cross-dressing lesbian whose clubbing by the police helped set the chaos in motion? Some witnesses have said yes, others no.

     “Nobody knows who threw the first punch, but it’s rumored that she did, and she said she did,” said Ms. Cannistraci, an owner of the Village lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson. “She told me she did.”

      Ms. DeLarverie was a member of the Stonewall Veterans Association and a regular at the pride parade, but she rarely dwelled on her actions that night. Her role in the movement lasted long after 1969. For decades she was a self-appointed guardian of lesbians in the Village.

       Tall, androgynous and armed — she held a state gun permit — Ms. DeLarverie roamed lower Seventh and Eighth Avenues and points between into her 80s, patrolling the sidewalks and checking in at lesbian bars. She was on the lookout for what she called ‘ugliness’: any form of intolerance, bullying or abuse of her ‘baby girls.’”

      The Wikipedia entry (relying on articles in The New York Times, interviews with DeLarverie, and other newspaper sources of the day, provides us with a more spectacular view of what that Stonewall night entailed: 

 

“At the Stonewall rebellion, a scuffle broke out when a woman in handcuffs, who may have been DeLarverie, was roughly escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon. She was brought through the crowd by police several times, as she escaped repeatedly. She fought with at least four of the police, swearing and shouting, for about ten minutes. Described by a witness as ‘a typical New York City butch’ and ‘a dyke-stone butch,’ she had been hit on the head by an officer with a baton for, as one witness stated, announcing that her handcuffs were too tight. She was bleeding from a head wound as she fought back. Bystanders recalled that the woman, whose identity remains uncertain (Stormé has been identified by some, including herself, as the woman), sparked the crowd to fight when she looked at bystanders and shouted, ‘Why don't you guys do something?’ After an officer picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon, the crowd became a mob and went ‘berserk’: ‘It was at that moment that the scene became explosive.’”

 

     How could a true documentarian dare make a film of this heralded gay icon without even bringing this subject up, let alone her many years of living in the famed Chelsea Hotel, or her later activities of working to benefit battered women and children? It appears that Parkerson glommed onto Stormé without really knowing her full story or even bothering to investigate further into her subject. While we can thank Parkerson for the brief portrait of this legend, it is difficult not to blame her for failing to fully engage her subject and fill in the information that might help the viewer to understand Stormé’s significant contributions to contemporary LGBTQ+ life. We might argue that Parkerson reveals that as a documentarian she, in another meaning of that word, is also “green,” totally inexperienced.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).