Kickass Women in History: Sylvia Rivera

The movie Stonewall, directed by Roland Emmerich, premiers September 25, 2015. This movie has been the center of controversy regarding its cast and trailer. While the jury is still out on the finished product, the trailer and plot synopsis focuses on a white, cisgender man. Transgender people and people of color, if included at all, seem to be relegated to supporting roles. Notably, famous Stonewall participant Sylvia Rivera isn’t listed in the IMBD page at all. This is enraging to many members of the LGBT community, because drag queens, transgender people, and people of color were at the forefront to Stonewall and the subsequent protests. One of these people was Sylvia Rivera.

Sylvia Rivera was an activist not only for the Gay Rights Movement but for the people most often left behind in the movement – homeless youth, people of color, and people who are transgender. Sylvia is most famous for her role in the Stonewall riots, but she was an activist until her death from liver cancer in at the age of fifty. Her life story is full of pain, pride and purpose.

NB: While her story is an important one, it involves EPIC trigger warnings for child abuse, suicide, rape, sexual abuse of children, and discrimination. I don’t want to glide over those parts of her story, because so much of her activism was motivated by her life struggles. Sylvia used her life experience to reach out to all the adults and kids who were having similar experiences. She fed them, she guided them, she fought for their rights, and she lived alongside them. In a video interview embedded at the bottom of the post, she says, ” I can go home at the end of the day and say ‘At least I tried to make a difference.'”

A note about terminology: after some thought, I’ve decided that when it comes to terminology, I will tell Sylvia’s story using words she used. If she says she was a drag queen who turned tricks, then those are the terms I’m using. I intend no offense to any group or individual, not do I intend to minimize the extensive abuse that Sylvia faced is intended.

Sylvia was born Ray Riviera in 1951. Her mother was Venezuelan and her father was Puerto Rican. When Sylvia was three, her mother drank rat poison and attempted to get Sylvia to drink it too by mixing it with some milk. Sylvia didn’t like the taste and didn’t drink much, so she survived, but her mother died. Sylvia went to live with her grandmother. Her grandmother, who was a light-skinned Venezuelan woman, hated Puerto Ricans, hated people with dark skin, and hated that Sylvia was already wearing make-up. At age ten, Sylvia ran away from home and survived by “turning tricks.” She was mentored and protected by some older drag queens (they are the ones who named her ‘Sylvia’) and became part of the drag queen community.

Sylvia was active in the African-American Civil Rights Movement, the Feminist Movement, and the Anti-War Movement. On June 28, 1969, Sylvia was at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, when police raided it. This was not an unusual event, and it generally followed a set routine. But on that night, people refused to hand over their IDs and submit to checks, so the police decided to arrest everyone. A crowd gathered, and when a woman who was being loaded into the police wagon yelled, “Why don’t you guys do something?” the riot was on. It lasted for several days.

Sylvia Rivera was at Stonewall with her best friend, Marsha P. Johnson, a black transgender woman. Sylvia remembers the riots being largely spearheaded by those who had the least to lose – the drag queens, the transgender people (not all drag queens identify as transgender), people of color, and the local homeless youth. She is famous for having yelled, “I’m not missing a minute of this! It’s the revolution!” In an interview with Worker’s World, she said,

It was street gay people from the Village out front – homeless people who lived in the park in Sheridan Square outside the bar – and then drag queens behind them and everybody behind us.

The Stonewall Riots are often credited as having kickstarted the LGBT rights movement, but this is a bit misleading. According to Dissent Magazine, in 1951, a group of gay men in Los Angeles founded the Mattachine Society, and four years later a group of lesbian women founded the Daughters of Bilitis. The focus of these groups was on establishing networks and pressuring politicians to stop refusing jobs to people identified as homosexual. Meanwhile, there were riots in 1959 and 1966 at businesses that were raided by police. All this paved the way for Stonewall.

While they weren’t the first riots, the Stonewall Riots were certainly the most visible and galvanizing. Following the riots Sylvia got involved with two new movements: The Gay Activists Alliance and, a little later, the Gay Liberation Front.

From her essay, “Queens in Exile: The Forgotten Ones”:

I enjoyed the Gay Liberation Front better because we concentrated on many issues for many different struggles. We’re all in the same boat as long as we’re being oppressed one way or another, whether we are gay, straight, trans, black, yellow, green, purple, or whatever. If we don’t fight for each other, we’ll be put down. And after all these years, the trans community is still at the back of the bus.

In 1970, Sylvia and Marsha founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR – later they replaced the word ‘Transvestite’ with ‘Transgender’). This was an activism center and homeless shelter for homeless drag queens, transgender youth, and young people of color. Sylvia referred to them as her children, and when money was tight she and Marsha would work as prostitutes to prevent the ‘children’ from having to prostitute themselves. Sylvia struggled with opposition from the feminist movement, which saw drag queens as insulting, and the mainstream gay rights movement, which saw drag queens as embarrassing and also tended to overlook the needs of people of color.

At New York Pride in 1973, Sylvia took the microphone to deliver a blistering speech in which she pointed out that trans people and people of color were the vanguard of the movement again and again – and were left by the wayside in terms of support and political gain again and again. Here’s her speech – NSFW because of language and enough blistering rage to possibly damage your monitor.

 

After 1973, Sylvia went in and out of activism. She struggled with feeling betrayed by the movement and she struggled with alcoholism. She spent a lot of time homeless, which only strengthened her commitment to help people she thought needed help. Sometimes she opted to remain homeless even when she had other opportunities, because she was “mother” to the gay encampment along the river: “If I can’t see them off the street, why should I seek shelter for myself?”

Sylvia was devastated when Marsha died under mysterious circumstances in 1992, but she eventually became sober with the help of her partner, and re-opened STAR. She was recognized for her role in the Stonewall Riots and continued to fight for transgender rights, even meeting with representatives from Empire State Pride Agenda in the hospital during the last weeks of her life to secure a role in that organization for transgender people. Sylvia was adamant that trans contributions to the Gay Rights Movement not be ignored, and that the needs of trans people not be neglected as organizations such as The Human Rights Campaign focused on marriage equality and inclusion in the military.

Sylvia always lived on the very edge of society, often homeless, often drinking and using, and often raising money through sex work. From this experience, she developed a deep rage on behalf of other marginalized people, and a deep compassion and caring for them. She had no interest in respectability politics and she refused to sit by while transgender issues were ignored. In her relatively short life, she left a huge legacy of activism on behalf of those too often forgotten. In this twenty minute long documentary, she is interviewed about her life, and her friends discuss her last years during which she ran a food pantry and advocated for transgender rights.

 

 

Above all, Sylvia was deeply, always, openly, and unapologetically herself. In “Queens in Exile” she says,

People now want to call me a lesbian because I’m with Julia, and I say, “No. I’m just me. I’m not a lesbian.” I’m tired of being labeled. I don’t even like the label transgender. I’m tired of living with labels. I just want to be who I am. I am Sylvia Rivera. Ray Rivera left home at the age of 10 to become Sylvia. And that’s who I am.

I highly recommend Sylvia’s essay “Queens in Exile: The Forgotten Ones,” from the anthology Voices Beyond the Sexual Binary. It’s hard to read because she lists a lot of awful things that happened to her. It’s also a very powerful read and a fascinating look at Gay politics in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

Here are some other articles I referenced:

“Gay Rights Before Stonewall”, by Michael Kazman, for Dissent Magazine

“5 Pre-Stonewall Events that Shaped the LGBT Community: Trailblazers” by Dan Avery, for NewNowNext

“Leslie Feinburg Interviews Sylvia Riviera: I’m Glad I was in the Stonewall Riot” for Worker’s World

“Meet the Trans Women of Color Who Helped Put Stonewall on the Map” by Jamilah King, for Identities.Mic