Previously unreleased police reports show that a woman was involved in fighting back. And some of the tools of the resistance? Biting and rolled-up newspapers! That’s right. You use what you have to when you’re fighting for your life!

From OutHistory:

To honor the 40th anniversary celebration, in June 2009, of the Stonewall Riots, OutHistory.org is, for the first time, publishing nine pages of New York City Police Department records created early on the morning of the rebellion’s start, June 28, 1969.

Reproduced in facsimile with transcriptions, these sometimes hard-to-read but historic documents provide an immediate sense of what the police called an “Unusual Occurrence” at the Stonewall — the rebellion that has come to symbolize the start of the modern, militant LGBTQ movement for civil rights and liberation.

The NYPD records include new, important, and striking details.

Officer Charles Broughton of the 1st Division arrested Raymond Castro, Marilyn Fowler and Vincent DePaul, charging that they “with each other did shove and kick the officer.” This is the first time that Fowler and DePaul have been named and documented as rebellion participants. Fowler’s name is extremely significant, since no other woman’s arrest has so far been documented, and numbers of witnesses attributed the intensification of the riot to the arrest and resistance of an unnamed butch lesbian. (Castro is named as a participant in David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. See also: Raymond Castro Interviewed by Jonathan Ned Katz: June 16, 2009.)[1]

Police officer Charles Holmes of the 6th Precinct was treated at nearby Saint Vincent’s Hospital after being bitten on the right wrist by a Stonewall rebel. Biting has not earlier been documented as a Stonewall resistance tactic.[2]

Read more reports at a href=”http://www.outhistory.org/wiki/Stonewall_Riot_Police_Reports%2C_June_28%2C_1969″>OutHistory.