“It was a hot June night, and the police did what they did: they came in for their payoffs, they came in to raid the bars. They took the drag queens and dunked their heads in buckets of water and smeared their makeup on their faces and reminded them that the sentencing could be carried out that night in the backseat of a police cruiser or on the cold cement floor of a precinct cell and baited them for being limp-wristed sissies. And basically what happened, by most reports, is that someone who the crowd identified as being a butch lesbian was being dragged out by the police, and she fought. She fought back and struggled and they tried to get her from the bar into the police cruiser and she like, got her feet up against the car and wouldn’t get in and was kicking and got away and got back into the bar. And the police went back in and dragged her out and she fought again and some of the drag queens said to the crowd, ‘Do something!’ And of course, who started it? Who led it? Those who had the least to lose and the most to gain from fighting back. It was mostly the homeless youth who were transgender and gay and lesbian. They were mostly black and Latina and white. Some of them had lived homeless on the streets of New York as transgender youth since they were ten, eleven, twelve years old, they knew all about what it meant to be arrested. They still bore the wounds, their bodies and their psyches and their personhood. And they began rocking the police van. They said to the cops, “You can’t take our friends away, we’re not gonna let you!” And they took their precious pocket change—people who hadn’t eaten that day, they took their pocket change and threw it at the police. They said, “You want your payoffs? Here’s your payoffs!” And they found bottle caps and bottles and stones, and the police began to retreat—the police who were so well-armed and so aggressive began to retreat back into the very bar they had raided, because the youth that night taught the police that a stiletto high heel in the hands of an enraged transgender youth is a formidable weapon against police repression.”
— Leslie Feinberg