I don’t have a problem with anything you say here. I wrote the “hissy fit” comment five years ago and nobody has ever pointed it out as potentially transphobic before. (Certainly the lesbian and gay man who edited the column didn’t catch it.) I will try not to use that term to refer to drag queens or MTF transgender people again. I assure you the slight was unintentional. It reminds me of my professor who described the reaction of the African-American theme house at Stanford when a racist poster was found on the wall: Ujamaa went ape.

He may have had racism in his unconscious when he said that, but there were a few African-Americans in the room and even haters and bigots rarely insult blacks to their faces. When the, er, diction problem was pointed out to him he was completely mortified and apologized actually a little too much for everyone’s comfort.

Entrapment in a potentially lethal situation is certainly a bit disproportionate for a tasteless slogan. It’s even disproportionate for a punitive police raid where passers-by had already been hauled in and beaten by the police, so I don’t defend that particular bit. But a riot in response to unjust laws arbitrarily enforced? Why the hell not?

‘Are you saying that people should be allowed to drink at an unlicensed, Mafia-run bar without any legal consequences because it was a haven for gay people?’

Yes and no. I’m saying that gay people should, morally, be able to have a place to drink with each other, and if the business model for legitimate gay bars is problematic because the police keep raiding them as a proxy for enforcing unjust sodomy laws, then I’m prepared to cut gay people who drink at unlicensed or Mafia-run bars a bit of slack.

‘I don’t follow how you know I was “sneering” at the drag queen because she was in drag rather than because of her inappropriate violence. ‘

Fair point – I don’t know. I can tell you why I got that impression though: because you’d just finished describing the violence as a hissy fit.

I complained that the sign was homophobic because “sissy” has long been a term of contempt for effeminate and gay men, and preposterously I was told, “This is not a gay gym. We have to be here for everyone.” Everyone including anti-gay bullies? I convinced a local gay newspaper to write an article about it and we called the company’s headquarters but the sign stayed up until the national campaign ended.

Peaceful efforts had come to naught. Would it have been reasonable therefore to throw full bottles of beer at the heads of the personal trainers at the gym? Should we have locked the manager and other employees inside the gym, doused it with lighter fluid and tried to set the building on fire?

Are you saying that people should be allowed to drink at an unlicensed, Mafia-run bar without any legal consequences because it was a haven for gay people? What other illegal acts should gay people get the “special right” to violate?

I don’t follow how you know I was “sneering” at the drag queen because she was in drag rather than because of her inappropriate violence. Descriptions of Stonewall tend to talk more about drag queens (and that’s the term they usually use) than any other group. Even if drag queens were a minority of the Stonewall rebels (and I don’t know that they were) why can admirers of Stonewall who are experts at gay history mention the drag queens, but opponents of Stonewall who are also experts at gay history not do so? I do not understand.

Trivially they could if, like many of the younger generation, it’s just a legend of a far-off time and place. But they could also reasonably believe it if they’d read up on it a bit. After all, the raid that sparked the riot was an aggressive throwback to the bad old days that appears to have been ordered by the Mayor John Lindsay to burnish his law and order credentials and get reelected after he’d lost the Republican primary. Whereas indeed gay right groups had mostly beaten back the raids to sporadic and largely token affairs in the early evening, with the bar reopening the same evening, this one was an aggressive one in prime business hours and many were arrested from the very beginning. So the rebels might very reasonably have thought that peaceful efforts had come to naught.

‘Preposterous – a drag queen throwing a beer bottle at a cop is no Rosa Parks.’

Your sneering contempt for drag queens makes me all the more certain that we did settle on the right symbol after all. My partner was in drag when I met him. Of course, for him it’s a once or twice a year bit of fun rather than something existential, but that doesn’t make him either better or worse than those for whom it is.