Heroes of Stonewall: Jackie Hormona

I wish this article was going to be longer, but I have honestly scoured the internet for more information on this person, and I have almost nothing. Nevertheless, Jackie Hormona contributed the Stonewall riots — and he should be acknowledged for what he did.

Rumors flurried about who began the actual riots outside the bar. Legend has it that a queen threw the first brick, right after Stormé Delarverie was forced into the back of a police wagon. In the confusion, eye witnesses recounted three different queens in that action — Marsha P. Johnson became the most popular of these names — probably because she was already the most well known, but by her own recounting of the event she wasn’t there yet. The other two were Jackie Hormona and Zazu Nova.

It’s honestly proven very difficult to get any other information about these two. Jackie Hormona’s birth name might have been Jack Daniel Whitehall (I say that because I saw that written not very definitively on a not a very reliable website, but it’s the only other name I’ve found.) Jackie was a sex worker who regularly hustled on Christopher Street. Though Jackie used a drag name, Jackie wasn’t exactly a drag queen — he wore subtle make up to enhance his looks. He had a reputation for being much more level-headed than the other queens — and moral. He would break up fights, he would stop the street workers from stealing from each other, but he also stood up against the police when they harassed the local street queens. But Jackie also had a reputation as being kind of a loner and keeping a distance from the rest of the queers on the streets of Greenwich Village, which is why there’s not a lot more information I can find.

Jackie was definitely at the riots on the first night. We know this because he appears in a very famous picture that I guarantee you’ve seen. In fact, it’s already been on this site once!

I will say, I don’t personally think Jackie Hormona was the one who threw the “first brick” (if that’s even a thing that happened and not just legend that came out of this) because most witnesses who were there and saw it claimed it was a drag queen. And while Jackie was certainly associated with drag queens, street queens, and transgender women, he would have been hard to actually mistake for one if you saw him throwing a brick. I think his reputation for standing up to the police led some people to believe, when they saw him there, that he must have started things off. Which is not unreasonable. Even if that’s not the case, though, I’m quite sure he jumped right in.

Jackie also became quite involved with the Gay Liberation Front that formed after the Stonewall riots. There are two pictures of him with GLF banners (both in this article!). After that I can’t find much of anything except that he may have been one of the victims of the AIDS epidemic.