Thread by @rdqb80

The History Behind that 1975 Statement or the real history immediately after Stonewall that the Transgender movement won’t talk about. - A Thread.

Lee Greer Brewster (1943-2000) was a gay man from Virginia who in the 1960s was fired from the FBI for being gay. He later moved to New York and became a full-time drag queen. There he opened up a “transvestite” shop called Lee’s Mardi Gras Boutique.

Lee’s boutique didn’t just cater to drag queens, it catered to heterosexual transvestites and transsexuals as well. From there he had an annual “drag ball” called Lee’s Mardi Gras.

After the Stonewall riots in 1969, Lee became a drag queen activist and formed an organization originally called “Queens”, which later became the Queens Liberation Front, whose main goal was to revoke laws against public crossdressing.

Now Lee believed that it was “transvestites” who led the riot at Stonewall and that Gay Liberation should include their platform. He marched in the first NY Gay Pride parade in 1970, but alongside a heterosexual transvestite named Bunny Eisenhower?

You see Lee created the movement not just for drag queens, but for heterosexual transvestites and even transsexuals. The main QLF panel included Lee, Bunny, a transsexual named Barbarella and “homosexual transvestite” named Kaye Gibbons.

It should be noted that the QLF also marched with another group for “transvestite” rights: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries or STAR. I’m sure you all know who were it’s founding members:

BTW, it should be noted that the QLF and STAR supported TV/TS prostitution. At least they called it for what it is back then: Male Prostitution.v

Now for the nascent Gay Liberation movement you can imagine that laws against crossdressing weren’t exactly the main priority. I mean, not when you could get fired, or thrown out of your residence, or even arrested for being gay.

Gay men in the 1970s didn’t exactly welcome drag queens with open arms, believe it or not. Although some were hypocritical about it, secretly going to drag balls and then talking smack. Drag queens resented it, however.

But the ones who were very much opposed were lesbian feminists, because well woman-face. And Lee was a sexist and misogynist gay man. His view of lesbians and feminism were just... 😬

In fact he is the one who got up on stage in the 1973 Gay Pride rally after Jean O’Leary’s speech against drag, called the lesbian feminists there the “b” word, and insisted that we all owed transvestites our rights. Sound familiar?

So you can imagine that there were lesbians and gay men in the 1970s who wanted to “de-platform” transvestite activism because of its narcissism, misogyny, sexism, internalized homophobia, etc. And that is where that 1975 statement comes in.

Now he also edited and published Drag Magazine, where I’m getting these images from. It was essentially a transvestite and transsexual haven. Complete with articles on hormone use:

The early days of “male-lesbianism”.

Transvestite (read autogynephilic) fiction:

TV/TS personals full of autogynephilia and gynandromorphophilia:

By the 1980s it de-evolved from a TV/TS political magazine to TV/TS porn rag, with covers that were pretty much the same as the guy who recently posted himself on Twitter jerking-off in the girls bathroom. I’d have to censor the covers, so why bother even posting?

So thank Lee for letting in the AGP/GAMP TV/TS through the back door, so to speak, which stayed on the periphery thanks to our early activists, but now have taken revenge. Now women’s spaces are being taken over and kids are involved.