Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall by Manuel Betancourt;

Author:Manuel Betancourt;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501355110
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Side 4

“Over the Rainbow”

That Judy Garland died on June 22, 1969, a few days before the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, immediately tied and consigned her to an imagined gay past. The altercations between the New York City Police Department and the patrons of the gay bar along Christopher Street began on June 28, just one day after Garland’s funeral in the Upper East Side.

In the fifty years since, Garland’s death and the violent protests that mark for many the beginning of the modern gay rights movement have all but coalesced. Their contiguity has been rewritten as causality. No sooner had Judy died than the very population who hid behind euphemisms borrowed from her most famous film (“friends of Dorothy”) rallied against the oppressive forces that in turn created the system that required such euphemisms in the first place. As RuPaul himself put it in a 2019 episode of his Emmy-winning reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, the LGBTQ community had “used their grief over Judy’s death to rise up and fight back.” 1

Long a champion of LGBTQ rights and comfortable in his role as mentor to a rising generation of drag queens (and queer members of the community), RuPaul was merely echoing a narrative decades in the making. The earliest example came courtesy of The Village Voice. In line with the flagrantly homophobic coverage the New York City weekly had offered about the late June riots that happened mere blocks away from the Voice’s offices, a July 10 story titled “Too Much My Dear” snidely connected the lavish Garland funeral with the angered response against a late-night police raid of Stonewall: “The combination of a full moon and Judy Garland’s funeral was too much for them, Dick Neuweiler said the other day, assessing the cause of the Great Faggot Rebellion.” 2

Writer Walter Troy Spencer helpfully let someone else’s words flippantly connect the grief many in the gay community felt about Judy’s loss with the anger members of that same community lashed at the NYPD in the days that followed. It kept the Voice contributor from having to factually make the connection himself. Just as people have clung to that image of tear-streaked theater queens raising hell for not being able to mourn in peace, historians and those actually involved in the four-day riots have pushed back on that all-too tidy conflation of arguably disparate members of the same community.

Sylvia Rivera, one of the preeminent LGBTQ advocates of that era, has called it a “myth,” 3 while historian David Carter, author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, has stressed the inadequacy of seeing the riots as being in any way caused by the funeral of a beloved entertainer. 4 Without needing to see a sense of causality, though, there’s no denying that the loss of Garland and the rising fight for LGBTQ civil rights in the United States together cleave twentieth-century gay history in two. There was a before and there was an after. And it was clear which one the Wizard of Oz star belonged to.

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