There are dozens more examples of such raids: Turkish Baths (New York City, 1929), Cooper’s Donuts (Los Angeles, 1959), Gene Compton’s Cafeteria (San Francisco, 1966), and Black Cat (Los Angeles, 1967), among others. La Paloma, for example, soon reopened and, according to its manager, offered “spicier entertainment than ever.” One of the new skits rehearsed for its reopening was a satire of the Klan’s raid at its club, including performers wearing the white hooded robes.Īlthough wildly different, the reason the events at Stonewall and La Paloma share some general overlapping threads is that queer joints have historically been key sites of resistance, change and even revolution. In the end, these raids, and several that occurred before and after, proved ineffective in silencing queer voices and experiences. In fact, given the history of the KKK at that time and place, it is even possible that some of the authorities may have also worn the hood or known the identities of some of the Klansmen who raided the establishment. Local law enforcement conducted its own raid of La Paloma less than two weeks later. In this way, the Klan claimed its actions at La Paloma and elsewhere represented its commitment to saving white homes, families, women and traditions. This proved especially true both during and immediately after Prohibition in Miami, where articulations of so-called immorality took shape through a prism of licit and illicit vice, changing gender and sexual norms, immigration from the Caribbean and elsewhere, and a laissez-faire tourism industry that promoted numerous forms of transgression. The Klan became a visible and influential source of power in Miami during the 1920s when its members employed violence and fear-including lynchings, bombings and parades-to silence and purge challenges to white supremacy and urban authority. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. As one contemporary observer recalled, “Homosexuals in evening gowns, trousered lesbians, and prostitutes” were among those who forged community in spaces like La Paloma.įor your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Gender and sexual non-conforming people not only staffed the club, they also represented a part of its clientele. Performers then known as “female impersonators” entertained paying customers, and effeminate men (or “pansies”) made crude sexual jokes to the audience’s delight.
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At La Paloma, women performed stripteases on stage. They had been trying to shut it down for some time.
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They then stormed La Paloma, roughed up staff and performers, and ordered the nightspot closed. Instead, nearly two hundred women and men from the Ku Klux Klan-wearing long, white hooded robes that both concealed their identities and struck fear-burned a fiery cross on public property and inducted several dozen new members that night. Unlike at Stonewall, law enforcement was not behind this Miami-area raid.
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15, 1937, a raid took place at La Paloma nightclub in an unincorporated part of Dade County (modern-day Miami-Dade County). Past moments of resistance created a solid foundation for its unfurling, and future examples would follow.Įighty years ago this month, on Nov. While Stonewall has come to represent a revolution, in which queer and transgender people fought back against the state and a society that participated in or had become complacent to the violence against them, it did not happen in a vacuum. However, while those events helped strengthen and consolidate the more radical impulses of previous movements for gender and sexual non-conformists, the description above was not written with Stonewall in mind. The “Stonewall riots” have been at the center of the queer imagination in the United States and abroad for decades.
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While lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) history is still only rarely taught outside of specialized courses in colleges and universities (although that is beginning to change), many Americans might think they know when and where this raid happened: June 1969, at New York City’s Stonewall Inn. The club became a site of resistance against the city’s conservative forces. It ultimately helped build community among those whom law enforcement could harass and arrest for wearing clothes not associated with their sex, for vagrancy, for lewd and lascivious behavior, or for any other of the broad charges they used to criminalize queer people during the era. In the long run, however, the raid had unintended consequences.