Shaun Dawson (00:02.798)
Hey y’all, you’re tuned into Assigned Sex: Unarchived.

I’m your non-binary cousin, Shaun Dawson and this is a safe space where we’re honest about what it means to show up as Black, trans, and genderqueer.

Today I want to talk about credit. When people tell the story of our freedom — Stonewall, Pride, “the movement” — whose names do we hear over and over, and whose work gets treated like it never happened at all?

I’m going to get into how our stories get cleaned up for TV and textbooks, why the same kinds of faces end up in the documentaries, and how we can start naming the people around us who actually keep us alive as part of the revolution too.

Let’s get into it.

Sylvia Rivera (00:45.742)
Y’all better quiet down. I’ve been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail that write me every motherfucking week and ask for your help and you all don’t do a goddamn thing for them!

Shaun Dawson (01:16.552)
That's Sylvia Rivera. 1973. She co-founded STAR House, fed homeless trans youth, helped make every Pride you've ever been to possible. And the crowd was booing her off her own stage. This episode is about how that happens. And how we stop letting it

Shaun Dawson (01:29.944)
When I think about queer Black history a person that sticks out to me is Bayard Rustin. He was the man that organized the 1963 March on Washington from scratch in about seven weeks. Permits. Transportation from 44 states. Security. Quarter of a million people in D.C. And this was all. pre internet.

Then days before the march, this dude destroy him. Can’t remember dudes’ name. But he called him a communist, a draft dodger, a homosexual, and brought up something he was arrested for 10 years earlier. So Martin Luther King’s inner circle debated cutting Bayard loose. Luckily, they ended up letting him stay. He read the demands to the crowd and he was literally standing a few feet from Martin Luther King when he gave his big “I Have a Dream” speech

Bayard Rustin (02:23.244)
The first demand is that we have effective civil rights legislation, no compromise, no filibuster, and that it include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, FEPC, and the right to vote. What do you say?

Shaun Dawson (02:51.566)
Now, I don’ remember hearing about that in any classroom. He was pretty much erased from history and thats wild. Because I know people that didn't even know who Bayard Rustin was until Colman Domingo played him in that movie that came out in 2023. It says a lot when a movement that will take all your labor and erase your face in the same breath.

Bayard Rustin (03:08.334)
Well, Mr. Randolph asked me if I would set up the logistics for the march, which I immediately began to do. And those logistics were to create a 200,000 people. We really got a quarter of a million. And to get every agency in America, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, intellectuals, labor movement, everybody involved, and to contain it so it was intensely nonviolent.

Shaun Dawson (03:37.408)
It says a lot when a movement that will take all your labor and erase your face in the same breath.

The architecture of the whole movement gets flattened into a respectable image and I don’t think thats a mistake. Somebody, somewhere, made a decision about who we’re allowed to see and who has to stay in the shadows to keep the story comfortable.

I think there’s this pattern where the more threatening a movement really is, the harder it gets sanitized. And it's definitely not “Oh, we forgot.”They want a hero thats not too gay, too angry, too poor, too Black, too trans, too sex worker. And that was why Bayard got left out of history. He was too gay.

Shaun Dawson (04:17.292)
When I think about Black and brown trans and gender fluid people who have been flattened I think of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

Sylvia Rivera (04:38.248)
Ya'll tell me to go and hide my tail between my legs. I will not put up with this shit. I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been thrown in jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment for gay liberation and you all treat me this way? What the fuck’s wrong with you all? Think about that!

I do not believe in a revolution, but you all do. I believe in the gay power. I believe in us getting our rights, or else I would not be out there fighting for our rights.

speaker-1 (05:14.446)
They were bringing people out of the bar and the drag queens were the ones that were getting busted. But I don't know if that's true. So maybe that's not right. don't know. You didn't get arrested at Stonewall.

Marsha P. Johnson (05:25.614)
There weren't that many drag queens in Stonewall.

Speaker-1 (05:29.39)
So maybe that's not right, I don't know.

Speaker-1 (05:29.806)
You didn't get arrested at Stonewall? Maybe they didn't.

Marsha P. Johnson (05:32.546)
No. I don't remember any drag queens getting arrested at Stonewall. They got so many wrong things. They can never all be corrected.

Shaun Dawson (05:46.001)
Most people only know that one line: "they threw the first brick at Stonewall." If you do a little bit of digging you’ll see that the internet has spent years fact checking that line. I also wanna point out that Marsha herself said she wasn't there when the riots started. So I feel like that one line has made the actual work Marsha and Sylvia did disappear. They were housing homeless trans youth, feeding them, advocating for them to city government, at a time when the mainstream gay movement wanted nothing to do with them at all.

So we turned these two superheroes into a trivia question about a brick, then argued the trivia to death while their housing work, their mutual aid, their political strategy got lost underneath it all of that.

speaker-2 (06:38.328)
Protests are set for today at the historic Stonewall National Monument. It follows changes by the U.S. National Park Service to the monument's website. The words transgender and queer have been scrubbed from the website along with the letters T and Q from LGBTQ.

Shaun Dawson (06:55.894)
Right now, I'd say these stories are getting cleaned up by y'all president. I’ll give a real world example.

The Stonewall Inn became a National Monument in 2016. So, it’s like “ooooh, we got a win” But look at how the story gets handled. Last year,, the National Park Service softens DEI-related language across multiple sites, including Stonewall.

speaker-3 (07:22.626)
You can already see on the National Parks website those changes, those references to trans and queer people are already removed, shortening the LGBTQ to LGB, lesbian, gay and bisexual. And this all comes after an executive order signed by the president on his first day in office.

Shaun Dawson (07:40.654)
So the site named for a riot led mainly by gender-nonconforming people becomes a place where the trans parts of the story are the first to go when the people in power get nervous. That's crazy.

Another example, I'm going to stick with Stonewall because I'm in my Stonewall bag today. This 2015 Stonewall film by a filmmaker, his name is Roland Emmerich. I'm not sure if I'm saying his name right. If I'm saying his name wrong, good. Anyway, the main character in this film is not a trans woman of color, not a local queen, it's this fictional white cis gay man from Indiana who throws the first brick. So I don't even have to tell ya'll that the film got dragged and basically it's been erased from memory by everybody. My point in giving this example is audacity. Nobody forced Hollywood to whitewash Stonewall. The appetite for a “safe,” white-centered story was already there and this filmmaker just fed it.

Shaun Dawson (08:47.818)
Let's flip it and talk about something a little bit more positive. So, while these institutions are busy cleaning the story up, there’s always somebody doing the opposite work.
For over 20 years, Tourmaline, a Black trans filmmaker and activist, has been trying to piece Marsha P. Johnson’s story back together. The real Marsha P. Johnson story.
Tourmaline has been digging through archives that barely saved anything about trans people and she's doing it without the kind of funding or institutional backing that usually decides whose history is “worth” keeping.
Back in 2018, she made Happy Birthday, Marsha!, which is a film that imagines the hours before Stonewall from Marsha’s perspective. And then last year, she published a book. It's called Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson. And that's the the first full-length biography ever written about Marsha P. Johnson.

Shaun Dawson (10:03.662)
Okay, so it’s time for a little Black trans and genderqueer history. Today, we’re centering the story of Stormé DeLarverie.

Stormé DeLarverie (10:10.862)
My name is Storm DeLarverie. I was with the Jewel Box 14 years. I joined in 1955 in January and I left on September 7, 1969.

Shaun Dawson (10:24.502)
Stormé was born in New Orleans in 1920, Black mom, white dad.. She grew up poor and aware that the world didn't have her back. Kids were on her head early; to the point where by the time she was a teenager, she already knew how to square up just to ensure she made it home in one piece.

Stormé DeLarverie (10:40.59)
The white kids were beating me up, the black kids were beating me everybody was jumping on me. it wasn't because of my father's money, was because of being a Negro with a white face. So he told me if I didn't stop running, I'd be running the rest of my life. And when I was 15, I stopped running, and I haven't run a day since.

Shaun Dawson (11:04.142)
As she got older, she left the South and went north into show business; On her own terms. She wasn’t interested in being anybody’s pretty little chorus girl. She became a drag king before that term was even a thing, performing at the Jewel Box, one of the first racially integrated drag shows touring the country. I want to make clear that this is 40s and 50s America, segregation is still the law of the land, and Stormé is on stage in a suit, tie, short hair, singing and moving in a way that made people think twice about what “a man” even looks like.

Stormé DeLarverie (11:36.598)
Men's jackets were loose, but the pants were skin tight. And if I ever took my jacket off on stage, the dirt was out. But you know, the strange thing is, I never moved any different than I had when I was wearing women's clothes. The only thing changed, they only saw what they wanted to see. And they believed what they wanted to believe.

Shaun Dawson (11:53.902)
The show was called “25 Men and One Girl” with Stormé as “the girl. That was the joke. Offstage, she kept the suits on. They weren't a costume she took off at the end of the night; it was how she moved through the world.

Stormé DeLarverie (12:08.376)
So I tried to do the proper thing, you know, wear men's clothes on stage and wear women's clothes on the street. I got picked up twice for being a drag queen.

Shaun Dawson (12:17.71)
People have used all kinds of words for her over the years: butch, stud, drag king, lesbian, gender‑nonconforming. She didn’t have terms like “nonbinary” or “transmasc” back then, but she also wasn’t playing along with what “woman” was supposed to mean. She dressed like a gentleman and people learned quickly to always treat her like one.

Stormé DeLarverie (12:37.026)
And the rest of it I knew. I grew up hard in New Orleans with my mixed blood.

So I was my own responsibility. And I had the day I kept a touch of glass. So I was my own responsibility and I kept the touch of glass. And it was very easy. All I had to do was just be me. And let people use their imaginations. It never changed me.

Shaun Dawson (13:02.936)
Then there was Stonewall. Different people tell the story different ways, because that night was chaotic. Some say Stormé threw the first punch, some say the first bottle, some say she was the one yelling at the crowd to stop just standing there. In most versions, officers are dragging and hitting her, when she looks out and tells the crowd to act. That shout is part of what turns a raid into what we now call the Stonewall uprising.

Stormé DeLarverie (13:26.636)
That was no riot. Everybody says a riot. It disobedience and then they started fighting back. It was a rebellion. And once they got the hang of it, they rebelled quite well.

Shaun Dawson (13:42.516)
After that night, she kept doing the work, but not as anybody’s official activist. In the Village, she was known as a guardian. For decades, queer folks, especially women and femmes, talk about seeing this older, sharp dressed, masc Black person roaming the neighborhood, working security at lesbian bars, walking people to their cars, and stepping in when a man would not let a woman go. There are stories of Stormé physically putting herself between people and harm.

Stormé DeLarverie (14:10.446)
Sometimes I feel half the universe is my family.

Shaun Dawson (14:15.01)
Her personal life stayed mostly quiet, but what we do know is she loved women and lived as an out lesbian. Add being mixed, being masc, and being visibly gender nonconforming in public every day, she caught it from white and Black queer spaces alike.

Stormé never called herself trans. She came up in a time when language was limited, and most people just put “lesbian” or “butch” on her and kept it moving. When you look at the photos, the way she talked about herself, and the way she insisted on moving through the world in a masc lane, it's clear. For Black trans and genderqueer folks now, especially the masc girls, studs, and transmasc folks who sit in that blur between “butch lesbian” and “boy,” Stormé is part of that lineage, whether the paperwork said it or not.

Stormé DeLarverie (15:01.179)
Some say sir, and some say ma'am, and that's way it is. I never change expression. It makes no difference to me.

Shaun Dawson (15:06.678)
Stormé passed away in 2014 in her 90s, after a lifetime of performing, fighting, and literally patrolling the block so other queer people could get home safe. When we talk about Black trans and genderqueer joy and survival, Stormé is in the background: that mixed race kid from New Orleans who grew up into a drag king, a Stonewall fighter, and the neighborhood auntie with the hands.

Stormé DeLarverie (15:29.848)
Somebody told me that I couldn't do it and that I would completely ruin my reputation and that people did not have enough problems being Black. I said I didn't have any problem with it. Everybody else did.

Shaun Dawson (15:52.546)
The official story is rarely about who did the work. It’s about who the storytellers are comfortable putting on the poster. And now that we're here in 2026, that editing process is still happening in real time, right in front of us.

Shaun Dawson (16:08.898)
Let's talk about pinkwashing. Pinkwashing is when a company or government leans on LGBTQ+ rights or imagery to look progressive while doing things that actually harm those same communities. It’s a marketing or political move that creates the superficial appearance of allyship.

Shaun Dawson (16:33.41)
I'll give you a recent example of pink washing. Let's go back to New York City Pride 2024. The theme is “Reflect. Empower. Unite.” The press releases center joy, liberation, community, blah, blah, blah, blah. So now let's Now line that up with who’s on the main stage and in the front of the parade. You’ve got financial giants like J.P. Morgan, pharma companies like Pfizer, You’ve got liquor giants anchoring sponsorships and getting prime visibility, using Pride to launder their brands and bring in LGBTQ talent and consumers. But if you go looking for organizations like the Audre Lorde Project or FIERCE, who’ve spent years doing grassroots work with Black and brown trans and queer folks. They’re either pushed to the back, underfunded, or they be holding separate community-centered events because corporate Pride doesn’t fit the work they do.

Shaun Dawson (17:21.614)
Then there's this whole fight over cops being a pride.

speaker-4 (17:34.958)
The Pride March is an annual celebration of self-acceptance. But now organizers say in an effort to be more inclusive, they have to keep law enforcement out.

Shaun Dawson (17:44.75)
Back in 2021, NYC Pride said police wouldn’t be allowed to march in the parade until at least 2025. That came after years of people calling out police violence against queer and trans folks. So on paper, it sounds like we made a little bit of progress but Pride still relies on thousands of armed officers to secure that event. So police are still actually controlling the space. They just can’t march in uniform.

speaker-5 (18:15.118)
Let's be clear. No one is asking for special treatment here. We are asking to be seen for who we are and what we've earned. We march to honor those who couldn't. We march for those who had to serve in silence. We march because being visible, especially in uniform, is still to this day an act of courage. And yes, we've heard the message being sent to us that we don't belong. But this is our answer. We are not going anywhere. We are not stepping aside. We are not stepping back. And we're not stepping out of uniform just to make someone else comfortable.

Shaun Dawson (18:56.81)
Meanwhile, the Gay Officers Action League and the NYPD commissioner are going on TV calling the ban “hypocritical” and organizing protests because they want to be visible in the parade.

It's important that we notice what the argument is really about. It doesn’t sound like safety. They want the image of policing inside an event that started as a protest against policing.
So now you’ve got corporations using Pride to clean up their reputation, police fighting for a place in the parade, and the people most impacted by both pushed to the margins.
That’s what pinkwashing looks like.

speaker-6 (19:36.706)
New York City Pride was born out of the Stonewall Uprising of 1969. We're right here. Law enforcement violently clashed with the LGBTQ plus community and critics say over time the Pride March has veered from its initial purpose.

Shaun Dawson (19:53.002)
As I’ve worked on this project, I’ve had the chance to really sit with the lives and work of a lot of Black trans and gender-nonconforming people. What I’ve learned so far about reclaiming our history is...first,
say where you got things from. So, if you're using a Black, trans, or gender-nonconforming person's idea, framework, strategy, you got to say their name, especially if they're not in a room. Second, put some money behind it. Don't pay with exposure because exposure don't pay rent. Third, we really have to change who we center. So when you're planning a panel, a podcast episode, a class, don’t only invite marginalized folks to talk about their trauma. And finally, stop pretending the proof isn’t there. Black trans and gender non-conforming folks have always been doing the work that moves things forward; we just rarely get visibility. The real question isn’t “who did the work?” It’s whether we’re still going to let the same institutions decide who gets remembered

Shaun Dawson (21:06.264)
So, that wasn't as simple as I thought it was going to be in the beginning. So I want to summarize. Honoring Black trans and gender‑nonconforming work means giving real credit, real resources, and real space, and taking control of how our history gets recorded instead of letting the usual institutions rewrite or erase it.

Shaun Dawson (21:40.076)
Alright y’all, thats all I got for today.

If you’d like details on the archival audio featured in this episode, check out the show notes.

If this episode dragged you a little bit or if it hugged you a little bit, please share it with someone you love. You can find me, your nonbinary cousin, Shaun Dawson on all platforms @iamsdawson. Ya’ll be safe out there.