CHRISTY HENDERSON-JENKINS
- August Bernadicou
- 4 hours ago
- 8 min read
STONEWALL VETERAN
Less than 60 years ago, Christy Henderson-Jenkins was arrested on the first night of the Stonewall Riots on June 28, 1969. After her arrest, her life was changed. She spent 17 months in a mental hospital, where they attempted to cure her of being transgender. They blasted her with electroshock as the first line of treatment. We need to remember that this was really not long ago. She told me the story in her own voice. The trauma that changed her life still endures. The recent past can come back to haunt us in the form of the future. There is a time machine effort in the United States to make LGBTQ+ people invisible. Cure them and erase them from society.
Christy left her home at a very young age to join other queer and trans street youth in New York City. She formed a strong relationship with Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and many other activists in the early gay liberation movement. Throughout her life, she has dealt with police harassment, homelessness, and racism. Today, she speaks openly about her survival, her history, and the importance of keeping the stories of LGBTQ people from the past alive through firsthand accounts.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“I was born in Philadelphia. My mother and my stepfather decided to move to Arizona. I lived in Arizona, but I would always go back to Philadelphia or New York, where I have family. I would run away every summer when I could. My mother had a hard time accepting my lifestyle. Even though early on she dressed me as a little girl, when I came into my own truth, she tripped out. It was an unhappy home, and so I ran away to the east coast when I was 12 or 13. I would get on the road as a little girl and hitchhike all the way to New York or Philadelphia, and turn tricks. I'm not very proud of it, but I turned tricks all the way to get where I had to go. It's nothing to be glorified, because I was very ashamed that I had to be a prostitute. That's not something I'm proud of, but in those days, that's all trans people could do. No one wanted to hire you. I was discriminated against because I was Black and trans.
I never learned the word ‘gay’ in my household. I always heard the word ‘faggot,’ that's how my mother addressed it. So, you know, being a victim of molestation by my own father, which is very difficult to talk about, my mother considered my father and me faggots, that's how she related to gay.
Of course, I was drafted to serve in the army in Vietnam, and I, of course, dressed as the girl that I am. They kept calling ‘Chris Henderson Jenkins’; that's my name, Chris Henry Jenkins. I said, ‘I'm here,’ and he's looking all over. I stood up. I have never seen somebody stamp 4-F so fast. 4-F is how they classified you if you were gay. ‘Get out of here,’ he said. I actually wanted to go into the military. I thought trans people should be allowed to go into the military and serve their country.
I didn't really get into gay terminology until I went to New York, and I learned, ‘Oh, gay, okay, I'm happy and different.’ So that is how I really discovered it when I got to New York—around trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, and all the gay guys and gay girls. I learned that gay meant being different, being happy, being free to be who you express who you are, but I didn't really learn much about before I got to New York.
Being gay was quite an experience for me, and I was so happy that I was able to bond with Rusty Rose, Marsha, and Sylvia. I felt somewhat at home. Finally, I had a home. Gay people were my home, and it hurt me when gay people betrayed me, and when I say betrayed, I mean no support, even at the STAR House, where Marsha, Sylvia, and I lived. The STAR House was a communal shelter and organizing space created by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera around 1970 through their group, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.
We had no support. That's why we couldn't keep it going. So it's been very hurtful for me over the years, how the gay community has treated me. I don't like you because you're gay, or I don't like you because you're Black. I've experienced all of that, and it's very hurtful to me, because I strongly believe that if you do not take care of your home and love your gay family, how are you going to expect people to love you? How do you expect people to accept you if you don't accept your family? And what I mean by family, I mean all gay, straight, drag queens, lesbians: we're all a family, and we need to act as such. I mean, yes, I love putting on makeup and hair and glamour, but that doesn't make me any different from any other gay person. I'm just expressing who I am.
There has been so much untrue stuff, and I have been silent for many years because people have tried to silence me. I am one of the original pioneers of Stonewall, and so is Rusty Rose, and people have tried to keep us out of the limelight because we certainly know the truth. We're the very first ones there, on the very first night. And let me be very clear with you, August, I can only talk about the first night, because that's all I know about Stonewall. The first night. Anything beyond that, I don’t know, because I was arrested.
I'm not here to discredit anyone or put anyone down who was in Stonewall. I'm only here to tell my truth, and what I know about Stonewall, and Rusty Rose is remarkable. What is the truth? Well, I think the truth should come from the pioneers who were actually there, who actually experienced Stonewall. Now, let me say this to you: how Stonewall really got started. Mayor Lindsay of New York wanted to clean up the city for the election that was coming up, so he attacked all the gay clubs to harass them. However, Stonewall decided to fight back that night; Rusty was attacked first, and then everybody else joined in.
I was there, and what they asked me was, ‘What are you, a man or woman?’ They were very nasty. They had undercover cops there, and she grabbed me and asked me. We weren't called transgenders, by the way, we were called more or less drag queens or gay. We were all lumped in the same category; you were gay, whether you wore a dress or not, that's just how it went in those days. So this new transition of transgender just came about in the last few years, but we were all considered gay. Oh, a gay man that dresses up was how they referred to you—you had female breasts, or whatever, they saw you as just gay, so let's get that clear—back in those days, that's how people viewed you, but I have to say that the experience that I had was very traumatic.
I was arrested in Stonewall and later transferred to a mental institution. At one point, Arthur Bell and Sylvia Rivera wrote an article in Gay Flames titled ‘CHRIS: Gay Prisoner in Bellevue.’ They tried to fight to get me out of the hospital and jail. Well, Marsha P. Johnson came to the jail the next day. I was considered her baby sister, and that is one of the reasons I have not come forth for many years. You must understand: I tried to live a down-low life. I had a husband who didn't want me to expose myself, and, you know, that's how I went in those days, but I always knew I should tell my story, and I've been left out only because of my own reasoning.
I was treated terribly because I cross-dressed, and I got arrested because of that, and it was against the law. In those days, you had to have three articles of male clothing on at all times, or you could be arrested. Honey, I wouldn't put on any male clothing. I'm totally going to dress as a total woman. That was one of the reasons they arrested me: I broke the three-strikes law. I had nothing, honey. I was all woman, so they arrested me because they refused to bend to that rule, and so I was picked up many times for that before Stonewall. I was picked up because, you know, I was dressed as a woman, and when I did get arrested at Stonewall that night, they mainly booked me because I broke the law, the three-strikes law.
Can you imagine what I went through, being African American in 1969 and 1970? I was already discriminated against because of my color. Can you imagine I added the trans, the drag queen life on top of that?
At jail, they packed us all in, treated us like we were some kind of nasty disease, spraying us down like we were cockroaches every five minutes, and some of them didn't want to touch you; they felt you were a nasty disease. It was horrible, and we're all grouped up, but I'm—I got sick while I was there. I'm totally an asthmatic. I got very sick, and my appendix burst in jail, so they rushed me immediately to Bellevue Hospital. I was in Bellevue for 17 months. Then I woke up in a mental institution. They put me in the psychiatric ward because they thought I was crazy. After all, I wanted to be a girl, a woman. The conditions were horrible.
I received electroshock therapy. Can you imagine someone putting something down in your private area and administering a shock treatment in that particular sensitive part of your body? It was horrible. It was like the most painful experience I've ever had. I'll tell you how I dealt with it. I thought of myself as a slave on a plantation. They did all kinds of horrible things to slaves, and I put my mentality to think that I'm a slave girl, and the master is mistreating me. If that makes any sense—that's how I coped with it. I had to be very strong. I watched my uncle when I was only six years old being hanged in a tree in the South for speaking to a white woman, so I took it as if I was a slave being mistreated, and I had to be strong, and that was the only way I could cope with that. I know it may be a different scenario, but that was my way of coping. I was a slave girl being abused by the master, which gave me strength.
Nobody cared about trans people. I'm telling you that the gay movement was basically for gay men, and not being funny, it was about gay men, and maybe some lesbians. Some people had a heart, but overall, they didn't support trans people. Some gay people even thought we were sick. We got it from both ends. I just have to be honest—I don’t want you to think that I don't love gay men.
When I was in Bellevue, Marsha P. Johnson kept calling my mother to convince her I wasn’t sick, that I should be let out. My boyfriend, Cantrell, whom I met in jail, also campaigned for me. He went and got Sylvia, and all of them fought for me. So Marsha was very, very much a positive force, because she had been a patient there herself, so she knews how they treated you there. Finally, they convinced my mother to release me to Cantrell and Marsha’s care, and that's how I got out.”
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The LGBTQ History Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit preserving the lives and legacies of LGBTQ+ activists from the first wave of gay liberation through oral histories, archives, and the QueerCore Podcast.
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