In addition to honoring and remembering Stonewall, we're featuring works that highlight changes that have occurred over the past 50 years since the riots, with comments by Tobin Low and Kathy Tu, hosts of the Nancy podcast from WNYC Studios, fierce and touching poems by trans artist Kay Ulanday Barrett, and a short story by Gary Eldon Peter, “The Wedding,” in which a gay man at a straight wedding imagines a possible wedding of his own. The story is performed by John Benjamin Hickey.
ACTORS & ARTISTS
Ivory Aquino made her television debut in the ABC miniseries When We Rise, earning her a nomination for Best Actress at the 2017 POZ Awards. Additional film and television credits include High Maintenance, The Fever and the Fret, When They See Us, Tales of the City, Lingua Franca, New Amsterdam, FBI: Most Wanted, and Lapsis. At Bryant Park Shakespeare, she has starred in Romeo and Juliet as Juliet, Measure for Measure as Isabella, and Macbeth as Lady Macbeth. As a first-generation immigrant and proud member of the LGBTQ community, Ivory dedicates her work to those who follow their dreams wherever they take them and “to anyone who feels different and out of place, but is truly special and one-of-a-kind.”
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. In 2018, they were a Lambda Literary Review Writer-in-Residence for Poetry, a guest faculty member at the Poetry Foundation, and were included in the “9 Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Writers You Should Know” in Vogue magazine. Barrett has received fellowships from VONA, Macondo, and The Home School. On stage, they have been featured at Lincoln Center, Princeton University, UC Berkeley, Chicago Historical Society, and the Brooklyn Museum. Their work has been featured on Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Poetry, Asian American Literary Review, NYLON, Buzzfeed, WBAI Radio, and NPR, among others. Barrett is the author of the poetry collections When the Chant Comes and More Than Organs, which was published earlier this year.
Kate Bornstein is a celebrated performance artist who has toured nationally and internationally for more than thirty years. Most recently, they co-starred in Straight White Men on Broadway, and performed their solo show, On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, at La Mama. Bornstein is the subject of the documentary film Kate Bornstein Is a Queer & Pleasant Danger, and appeared with Caitlyn Jenner on E!TV’s I Am Cait. Additional television credits include Saturday Church and The Blacklist. Bornstein has also written six groundbreaking books, including Gender Outlaw and Hello, Cruel World.
Perry Brass is an author and journalist who currently writes for the Huffington Post. He was a member of the Gay Liberation Front, the first radical gay organization founded after the Stonewall Rebellion, coedited the organization’s newspaper Come Out!, and co-founded the Gay Men’s Health Project Clinic, which still exists today as the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center. He has published more than a dozen books, most recently, The Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love.
Jayne County is a counterculture icon, best known for her work with the punk band Wayne County & the Electric Chairs. She is recognized as rock’s first openly transgender singer. County participated in the Stonewall riots, and her memoir, Man Enough to Be a Woman, describes the profound effect the riots had on her life and the central role “street queens” played in the action. In 2018, County debuted Paranoia Paradise, a visual art retrospective comprising five decades of work, and was featured in the docuseries Punk. She is the subject of the recently released biography Rock 'N' Roll Resurrection!!! Queenage Baby & Beyond.
John Benjamin Hickey won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in The Normal Heart. He has also appeared on Broadway in Cabaret, The Crucible, Mary Stuart, and Six Degrees of Separation. Most recently, Hickey starred alongside Vanessa Redgrave on the West End in London in The Inheritance, which won the Olivier Award for Best Play and premiered on Broadway in 2019. His screen credits include The Big C, Manhattan, Difficult People, Pitch Perfect, Get On Up, Truth, Barry, Mom, Hostiles, Forever My Girl, Mapplethorpe, Jessica Jones, The Good Wife and its spinoff series The Good Fight, and most recently, Sublet.
Denis O’Hare’s film credits include Garden State, 21 Grams, A Mighty Heart, Michael Clayton, Milk, Duplicity, HBO’s The Normal Heart, Dallas Buyers Club, Lizzie, and The Goldfinch. He won a Tony Award for his performance in Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out and a Drama Desk Award for his role in Sweet Charity. He is the co-writer, with Lisa Peterson, and star of An Iliad, which was performed at the New York Theatre Workshop and The Broad Stage in Santa Monica. He and Peterson also co-authored the play The Good Book, which premiered at the Court Theatre in Chicago. His television credits include American Horror Story, True Blood, The Good Wife, The Comedians, This Is Us, and Big Little Lies. He will appear in the forthcoming films Swallow and The Postcard Killings.
Gary Eldon Peter’s short stories have appeared in Queer Voices, Water-Stone Review, and Great River Review, among other publications. His work has been honored with the McKnight Artist Fellowship for Writers/Loft Award in Creative Prose as well as two Minnesota State Arts Board grants. His debut short story collection, Oranges, won the 2016 New Rivers Press Many Voices Project competition in Prose, the Midwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He currently teaches at the University of Minnesota.
Mark Segal is a gay activist and journalist, known for founding the activist group Gay Youth in 1969 and the newspaper Philadelphia Gay News in 1976. In his memoir, And Then I Danced: Traveling the Road to LGBT Equality, he describes the Stonewall uprising and the activism that arose in the wake of the riots, and provides the greater context of the LGBTQ riots that took place in the 1960s before Stonewall. Segal is the president of the National Gay Newspaper Guild.
Lucian Truscott IV is a novelist and journalist. He was on the streets outside the Stonewall during the initial raid, and followed the protests and resistance for the rest of the weekend. His account was published as “View from Outside” in the July 3, 1969, issue of The Village Voice, which covered the uprising. Truscott currently serves as a columnist for Salon.
Puerto Rican transgender actress and singer Holly Woodlawn (1946 - 2015) may be best remembered for starring in the Warhol films Trash and Women in Revolt, among numerous additional screen credits, including Alibi, The Lie, East of the Tar Pits, and Transparent. In her autobiography, A Low Life in High Heels, Woodlawn describes her experiences at the Stonewall as well as in the transgender Latinx community living in the Village at the time.
