Sylvia Rivera

• Sylvia Rivera
• Born: July 2, 1951
• Died: February 19, 2002

Was a gay rights and transgender rights activist who was at the forefront of the modern gay rights movement. She was present at the famous Stonewall Inn on the night that started the Stonewall Riots and she continued to advocate for the marginalized, even within the LGBTQ community.

Sylvia Rivera was born Ray Rivera to a Puerto Rican father and a Venezuelan mother in New York City. The Rivera family’s home life was violent and unstable. Her stepfather threated to kill her mother in front of her when she was just three years old and her mother committed suicide soon after. Shen then moved in with her grandmother who disliked Rivera because of her dark skin and her actions, which she thought were too effeminate for a boy. In fourth grade, Rivera began wearing makeup to school. She was bullied and ridiculed, so she left school and her grandmother’s house in the sixth grade. At only age eleven, Rivera found herself homeless in New York and turned to sex work. Before then, her uncle used to prostitute her while she still lived with her grandmother. Eventually, she was taken in by a group of drag queens and she gave herself the name Sylvia, as she identified as a woman.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the term transgender was not in wide usage. If someone born male identified as a woman, they were often called a drag queen or transvestite. Today, drag has taken a different shape and is not necessarily a synonym for transgender. Transvestite is an anachronistic term that came to be associated with a derogatory implication.

On the night of June 28, 1969, New York police from the Morals Division raided the Stonewall Inn, a well-known gay club at the time. The raid was, ostensibly, part of a crack-down on bars operating without liquor licenses, but it was actually a targeting of gay clubs because city officials did not issue liquor licenses to bars that served the gay community at the time. Earlier, gay bars like the Snake Pit, the Sewer, the Checkerboard, and the Tel-Star had been raided and closed. That night, officers marched into the Stonewall Inn and began arresting customers who fought back. Rivera was present at the start of a small uprising that grew into six days of skirmishes in the streets.

Many historians have wondered why, after so many other bars were closed, the Stonewall Inn was the site of protest and resistance. The Stonewall Inn’s clientele was home to the growing LGBTQ community in the city. Most transgender individuals at the time were barred from many gay clubs, because they were seen as unrespectable and questionable. They were derisively called “drags” or “queens.” LGBTQ youth were able to frequent the Stonewall Inn by paying the small $3 cover charge and could stay all night in the club without being harassed. For many, the Stonewall Inn was a place of refuge, the only place they could go in a hostile city. Nonetheless, the marginalized transgender community had had enough and decided to fight back. The Stonewall Riots sparked the modern gay rights movement and it spread across the nation.

In New York, a new organization called the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) formed in the weeks after the Stonewall Riot in 1969. In the 1970s, the GAA pushed the city of New York to pass a Gay Rights Bill. Rivera was an early member of the GAA and was militantly devoted to their cause. One evening, Rivera hit a politician on the head with a petition when the politician hesitated in supporting the gay rights ordinance. In another protest, Rivera climbed through a window in a dress and heels to hear the New York City Council debate a gay rights bill behind closed doors. In order for the bill to be passed, the GAA made some concessions that removed language protecting transgender individuals. Activists for the gay and lesbian community were often at odds with the transgender and gender non-conforming community. For mainstream gay activists, the transgender community was too alien and unacceptable. In addition, since most transgender individuals were excluded both within and outside of the gay community, they tended to be desperately poor, often homeless, and many were people of color. Rivera, a poor, transgender Latina who had lived on the streets and participated in sex work was not the image of the gay community more conservative activists wanted to present. Rivera spoke out against the conservative activists in the GAA and helped found the Gay Liberation Front. Rivera’s activism in the 1970s was widespread. She marched in the original Christopher Street Liberation Day March in 1970. She co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), an organization that worked to shelter queer homeless youth. STAR closed in 1973 due to a lack of funding.

Sadly, Rivera attempted suicide in 1974. She was homeless many times throughout her life and she struggled with drug addiction. All of it began to take its toll. She left New York City in the 1980s for Tarrytown, New York, where she worked in food services with the Marriott Corporation. While her activism had waned, she still sponsored drag shows and pride parades in the small town. In the early 1990s she moved back to New York City and found herself homeless once again.

In 1994, Rivera was given a place of honor in the march commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. In 1995, she once again attempted suicide. In 1997, she joined Transy House, an organization that provided counseling, financial support, and shelter to transgender youth. In 2000, she, with the help of others, re-started STAR. The organization aimed to have a more inclusive approach in the gay community that stressed inclusion for trans people.

Before her death, Rivera was working to make sure that the transgender community was included in New York legislation aimed to protect LGBTQ rights. She was concerned that the transgender community would once again be excluded in a compromised bill. In her later years, she had become a member of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York and was the director of their food service program. Rivera died of liver cancer in 2002. She was only fifty.

Sylvia Rivera was an early gay rights activist who believed that the gay rights movement had to go beyond sexual orientation and include issues of class, race, economic systems, and poverty. For Rivera, gay rights had to be more than a middle-class movement for acceptance. Gay rights needed to be gay liberation, a social revolution that challenged the structures of exclusion and discrimination. It had to center on the most marginalized in order to create a truly equal society.

For further reading on the Stonewall Riots see Ann Bausum, Stonewall: Breaking out in Fight for Gay Rights (2015), David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (2010), Martin Duberman, Stonewall (1993). For transgender history see Susan Stryker, Transgender History (2008). An obituary for Sylvia Rivera appears in The New York Times (February 20, 2002).