Sylvia Rivera Changed Queer and Trans Activism Forever

The legendary activist pushed back against the white, middle-class LGBTQ+ establishment to fight for rights for all.
Sylvia Rivera
Harvey Wang

Sylvia Rivera would always be quick to redress those who thought she threw the first Molotov cocktail at the historic Stonewall riot on June 28, 1969. “I have been given the credit for throwing the first Molotov cocktail by many historians, but I always like to correct it,” she said in 2001. “I threw the second one. I did not throw the first one!”

Today, Rivera is revered as a legendary transgender activist. She vehemently fought for early legislation banning gender discrimination; sought to create safe spaces for queer homeless youth; and spoke loudly and powerfully that her community of transgender individuals, homeless and incarcerated among them, be fought for in the move toward equality. At the time, though, many gay rights activists regarded her as a mere troublemaker.

By the time Rivera became a full-fledged activist, spurred on by the Stonewall riots, she had been fighting for much of her life. She was born in the Bronx to a Venezuelan mother and Puerto Rican father, but her father had abandoned her and her mother had committed suicide. She was being taken care of by her grandmother, who would often beat her for her effeminacy. She shaved her eyebrows and wore makeup to school beginning in fourth grade, and by the time she was 10 years old left home and began life as a sex worker, hustling near Times Square. In a community she had found of street queens — as poor trans youth, some of whom performed sex work and/or were homeless, then identified themselves — she gave herself the name “Sylvia Rivera” in a ceremony attended by some fifty of her friends and peers. She also referred to herself as a drag queen, and later in life as transgender.

It was, by all accounts, an arduous life: Rivera and her peers were regularly beaten up by cops, johns, or even each other. Rivera would eventually serve 90 days on Riker’s Island, sent to a cellblock kept for perpetrators of “gay crimes,” as scholar, activist, and author Jessi Gan noted in 2007.

When Rivera threw that second Molotov cocktail at Stonewall, she was only 17. She was no stranger to demonstrations at that time, having also protested against Vietnam, for women’s rights and civil rights. But Stonewall incited a fervor in Rivera to keep going, to keep fighting for voices marginalized within the gay rights space. She became involved with the Gay Liberation Front, or GLF, and the Gay Activists’ Alliance, GAA, and challenged the way the predominantly white gay and lesbian community approached activism from a middle class perspective. Rivera wanted their activism to be more progressive, to include in their fight the rights of transgender individuals, including people of color, the homeless, and the incarcerated. But she challenged multiple communities through her activism, also working with Puerto Rican activist organization the Young Lords, hoping the Puerto Rican and Latinx communities would acknowledge the reality of gay and transgender people, says Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the departments of American Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women’s Studies.

But some other activists didn’t like the way she pushed. She was banned from New York’s Gay and Lesbian Community Center, for example, after she destroyed a desk in the lobby, enraged because she felt the center did not address the needs of transgender homeless youths who slept in front of it. At a gay pride rally in 1973, she got onstage amidst boos from the crowd. “I had to fight my way up on that stage...people that I called my comrades in the movement literally beat the shit out of me,” Rivera would say later. She stopped working with the GLF and GAA and the gay rights movement in general after three or four years because the organizations began to both publicly denounce and ignore her. She would return some 20 years later for the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, asked to participate by the pride parade’s organizing body. “The movement had put me on the shelf, but they took me down and dusted me off," she said in 1995. “Still, it was beautiful. I walked down 58th Street and the young ones were calling from the sidewalk, 'Sylvia, Sylvia, thank you, we know what you did.' After that I went back on the shelf. It would be wonderful if the movement took care of its own.”

La Fountain-Stokes, who is himself queer and Puerto Rican, believes there was a culture clash between Rivera and her other activist counterparts — she from a background as a trans, occasionally homeless person of color who also battled addiction, and they from a more middle-class, cis experience. “She had a radical perspective and a marginal background, and I think many of the people who were leading the mainstream organization did not appreciate that or perhaps were challenged by how to negotiate that,” says La Fountain-Stokes. “I think Sylvia felt very dramatically the simultaneous rejection and embrace from this complex and contradictory community.”

For example, Rivera had supported the passing of the Gay Rights Bill in New York, which would bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, because it had originally included support for the transgender community. But by the time the Gay Rights Bill passed in New York in 1986, 17 years after Stonewall, language denouncing gender discrimination had been removed. “They have a little backroom deal without inviting Miss Sylvia and some of the other trans activists...The deal was, ‘You take them out, we’ll pass the bill,’” she said in 2001. She felt the community she and her trans siblings had fought for all these years at Stonewall and beyond, been arrested for and beaten for, had sold them up the river.

But when Rivera felt the community that purported to include her wasn’t taking enough action, she took matters into her own hands. In 1970, with Marsha P. Johnson, she founded STAR, or Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, to provide safety and shelter for queer homeless youth. They got a building at 213 Second Avenue in the East Village, hustling to pay the rent so the young people didn’t have to. Rivera and Johnson were among the first to be vocal about and actually do the work of caring for this particular community, and they demanded their community be remembered in the pursuit of gay rights. “We would sit there and ask, ‘Why do we suffer?’” Rivera told iconic queer activist Leslie Feinberg in 1998. “As we got more involved into the movements, we said, ‘Why do we always got to take the brunt of this shit?’” STAR lasted two or three years, initially. Rivera reinvigorated it in June of 2000 to hold a rally and vigil after the death of Amanda Milan, a transwoman murdered outside New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. It had been over 30 years since Stonewall, but trans rights still had so much further to go. Today, they still do.

Though Rivera passed away in 2002, her legacy and dedication to her community still thrives. She is the only transgender person to have a portrait in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait gallery, and her legacy lives on through the laudable work of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, or SRLP. Founded in 2002 by trans activist Dean Spade, the organization provides access to social services, health services, public education, and legal services for transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming individuals, while also teaching them how to engage politically, building leadership and organizing committees and empowering them to take action. “Sylvia’s legacy does point us toward a much more radical vision of what it looks like to take care of each other,” says Adelaide Matthew Dicken, Director of Grassroots Fundraising & Communications at SRLP. “We would like to think that our work would create a society where we’re inclusive and we’re inclusionary in human rights,” says Kimberly Mckenzie, SRLP’s Director of Outreach and Community Engagement. “That’s something we always will continue fighting for, even once we get those rights.”

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