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Sylvia Rivera: Transgender Activist

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You can’t talk about Marsha P Johnson without talking about Sylvia Rivera. The two friends were passionate activists for transgender/non-gender conforming rights and were advocates for LGBT youth, especially the homeless. Sylvia was inspired during the Stonewall riots by the thought of revolution. She thought the revolution was happening and she wanted to be there for it. While there is still inconclusive evidence that Sylvia was at Stonewall during the riots, what is important to remember is what she did after the riots and during her lifetime that matters.

Sylvia was born Ray Rivera in New York City on July 2nd, 1951. Sylvia had a tumultuous youth growing up in the Bronx as her mother dealt with two difficult and often dangerous marriages. Her stepfather threatened to kill them when she was three. Unfortunately, she would lose her mother soon afterward to suicide. She tried to kill Sylvia too by offered the rat poisoned laced milk she was consuming to her too. Sylvia survived the poisoning but her mother did not. She was sent to live with her maternal grandmother. This new living arrangement was not quite an improvement on her life.

Being half Puerto Rican and half Venezuelan made life with her Venezuelan grandma, Viejita, challenging. Her grandmother didn’t like the dark skin she inherited from her equally dark-skinned father. Viejita also didn’t like her effeminate mannerisms. It also didn’t help when her father took Sylvia’s half-sister Sonia away, leaving her grandmother with the grandchild she didn’t want. She still took care of Sylvia but in a very strict environment, often resorting to beating Sylvia in a desperate attempt to normalize her. She went to all white Catholic schools, to a Catholic boarding school when her grandmother fell ill, and shuffled around to other homes of friend and relatives. She started wearing makeup to school in the 4th grade and dealt with some teasing at school, but the most abuse came from people in the neighborhood. She finally ran away from home at age 10.

Sylvia wound up on 42nd street and relied on sex work support herself. She was already no stranger to sex work as she had previously hustled with her uncle. She was taken in by the local drag community and changed her name to Sylvia. Her years in Times Square started in 1961, a tough time to be gay much less trans. She was also homeless and struggled with addiction. She often went to jail where beatings and sexual assault were common. Later in the 60s, Sylvia started to feel the draw to activism and more openly identified as a drag queen. Sylvia was just 17 during the Stonewall riots. She knew it was time to stop taking the harassment, beatings, and abuse. It was time to fight. She joined the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance; both organizations formed after Stonewall. Unfortunately, she found a reluctance to support cross-dressers and transgender people.

After the Weinstein Hall sit-in, Sylvia and Marsha P Johnson started the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in 1970. STAR helped young drag queens and trans youth with food and shelter. Sylvia spent her time helping the poor, the homeless, the people of color, and the gender non-conformists. She and Marsha looked after street kids struggling to survive around the Christopher Street docks. They put them up in their hotel rooms and even tried using an abandoned tracker trailer until the owner recovered it with the street kids still inside. Eventually, they rented a house owned by the mafia that became known as STAR House. STAR House had lasted two years before they were forced to leave. In that time they fed and housed as many people as they could. She and Marsha hustled on the streets to make money to provide for them so they could stay off the streets. They ran STAR as a collective with everyone helping to provide food and supplies. By 1973, with no place to house anyone, STAR was disbanded.

Being a trans into poor sex worker, Sylvia increasingly felt left out of the mainstream-leaning early gay rights movement but continued to find ways to fight. She was the only person arrested while gathering signatures for a proposed gay rights bill, a bill that eventually took out all mention of transgender rights in an attempt to please lawmakers and increase the possibility of it passing. It took 15 more years to pass, and trans rights were still left out. Sylvia even had to force her way to the microphone to speak during Pride. A group led by Jean O’Leary found men dressed as women offensive and tried to deny her access to the stage. Well, she did get there and had some enlightening words to share about the divisiveness of the gay rights movement.

All this was too much for Sylvia after a while, and she tried to commit suicide in 1974. She moved to Tarrytown where she worked a regular job, went to Pride events, and stayed under the radar for a while. She moved back to New York in early 90’s but tried to kill herself again in 1995 by walking into the Hudson River. Marsha’s body had been found in the Hudson River 3 years before, and despite writing a beautiful obituary for her, Sylvia felt Marsha was never appreciated for her work. Surviving this suicide attempt, she reignited her passion for activism. In 1999, Sylvia was invited to speak the World Pride Celebration in Italy and restarted STAR in 2001, changing transvestite to transgender. She also was an advocate for Amanda Milan, pressing for an investigation into her murder and helping with the funeral.

Sylvia passed away in 2002 from liver cancer. She lived the last years of her life at Transy House Collective, a house in Brooklyn run in the spirit of STAR house, and run by a former STAR resident. Her legacy lives on with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, an organization that assists transgender, intersex, and gender variant people. Also, the corner of Christopher Street and Hudson Street is named Sylvia Rivera Way in her honor. She’s often called The Rosa Parks of the Modern Transgender Movement. She and Marsha were almost forgotten but thankfully their work for the community is now remembered and celebrated.

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Stonewall Riots

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By Another Believer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

By Another Believer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The 60s were a turbulent time. We exited the era of the conservative nuclear family where you fit in at all costs into a decade where people were done with being something other than their authentic selves. Rights movements brought out firebrands for several marginalized communities. There was an overall feeling among groups that had been oppressed and abused that they were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Soon after the Stonewall riot, we would see the rise of the gay rights movement.

In 1969, The Stonewall Inn was a well-known gay bar on Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village. It was a haven for the poor and extremely marginalized transgender and transvestite community, as well as prostitutes and the homeless. The gay community didn’t have many public places they could go to socialize much less be out about their sexuality. At the time it was illegal, as was serving gay patrons. It was also illegal to dress in clothing not assigned to your gender. You couldn’t even dance without getting arrested. A few bars catered to the community but the police raided them often.

These bars operated without a liquor license, they were denied due to the illegal proclivities of their patrons. The mafia was often involved and a dance of scratching each other’s back would involve payoffs to police to prevent the business from being closed down. Cops would raid the bars, line up patrons to check IDs, send some on their way or others to the waiting police wagon. The cycle would repeat when the bars would reopen the following night. They sent anyone without proper identification or dressed in clothing of the opposite sex to jail. The rule was men couldn’t look like women and women needed at least three pieces of feminine clothing. If rich and influential patrons were found during the raid they were often blackmailed so their little secret didn’t get leaked to the public. Fear kept the community from fighting back but that would not last.

At 1:20am on June 28th, eight police officers lead a surprise raid at The Stonewall Inn. The police would find this raid was not business as usual. Instead of dispersing, people started to gather outside. Inside, the patrons had had enough of the injustice and harassment so they fight back. Tensions rose, as did anger and frustration. Stonewall wasn’t just a gay bar but a safe place for the drag community to gather. Queens and crossdressers weren’t accepted even among the queer community at this time so the raid was a threat to one of their few safe havens. It was also a place that homeless youth under the drinking age, then 18 instead of the modern 21, could hang out for the price of a modest $3 admission. When the Stonewall was raided, they would lose one of the few places they could go to stay warm and safe rather than sleeping out on the streets.

During a raid, usually bar patrons would be line up by the police then either go home or go to jail. This time instead of a few smart mouths and some back talk, the police started getting more resistance. The police decided to arrest most of the 200 people in the bar but there was a glitch. The police wagons had not arrived yet. During the wait, the group got more violent. Outside more people had gathered along with some of the patrons who had been released to go home. Instead of going home they stayed. By the time the arrested bar patrons were being put into police wagons and police cruisers, the crowd had grown tenfold. When a woman was roughed up and hit with a billy club the crowd surged in anger. The crowd pelted the cops with coins, then bottles, even used a broken parking meter as a battering ram. Soon a small-scale riot had started and the Tactical Patrol Force was called in. They would pin the police down as they continued to push forward; efforts to quell the fray were met with even more resistance. The crowd even tried to flip the police wagon and firebomb the Stonewall Inn.

Even after everyone was violently dispersed, people returned from all over the city the next day. One raid turned into a week of protests. For six days there were chants, kicklines, leaflets handed out, and smashed windows. In true 60s protest fashion fire hoses would be used to disperse the crowd. The protests were a call for freedom and “Gay Power.” While things calmed down eventually, a need to take action had begun. A need had been brewing since the beginning of the 60s and was ignited at this West Village bar. The coming year would see big steps forward in the fight for gay rights, the Gay Liberation Front would be formed which would lead to the Gay Activist Alliance. The battle for gay rights had been around before the events at Stonewall. What could have been just another raid at this unlicensed bar turned makeshift community center for the marginalized among the marginalized became a turning point for gay activism. The gay right movement would no longer fight in the shadows but become a loud voice that demanded to be heard.

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