Sylvia Rivera: Freedom Means Leaving No One Behind

Sylvia Rivera (wikipedia)

Sometimes I come across a person I knew almost nothing about before, and afterward I seriously wonder: Why had I not heard about her much earlier? That is exactly how I felt about Sylvia Rivera.

The more I read about her, the more interesting her story became to me. She was one of the early voices for trans people. But above all, she represented something that still feels remarkably relevant today: A community is only truly strong if it does not leave its weakest and most inconvenient members behind. Sylvia Rivera fought for exactly that practically her entire life, and with a fierceness that is rarely reflected in today’s friendly Pride narratives. [1]

Who Was Sylvia Rivera?

Sylvia Rivera was born on July 2, 1951, in New York City. Her father was from Puerto Rico, her mother from Venezuela. [1] Her childhood was marked by loss and violence: her father was absent, and her mother died by suicide when Rivera was three years old. She grew up with her grandmother, who rejected her feminine presentation and beat her because of it. After Rivera was attacked in the schoolyard in sixth grade, she was also suspended from school for a week. [1, 3]

At the age of eleven, she left home and lived on the streets. In the area around 42nd Street, she was sexually exploited, something most biographies soften with the term sex work, but when it involves a child, it is simply exploitation. [1, 3] At the same time, she found a place among a scene of queer and gender-nonconforming people that became the first functioning social structure in her life.

In 1963, she met Marsha P. Johnson, a Black activist and self-described drag queen who had experienced similar forms of exclusion. Rivera later said Johnson had been like a mother to her. [1] Their relationship became one of the most consequential political partnerships of the early US liberation movement.

An important linguistic caveat is necessary here. Rivera used different terms for herself over the course of her life, most often drag queen, and later also transgender. Today, she is predominantly described as a trans woman, and that is appropriate in substance, but our current terminology cannot be seamlessly applied to people who were active decades earlier. The Smithsonian explicitly notes in the case of Marsha P. Johnson that she never used the term transgender for herself because it only became established after her death in 1992. [2] The terminology has changed. Unfortunately, the struggle behind it has changed far less.

Stonewall and the Problem With Founding Myths

When you read about Sylvia Rivera, you quickly arrive at the Stonewall uprising of 1969. After years of raids and harassment, patrons of the Stonewall Inn and people from the surrounding neighborhood resisted another police raid during the night of June 28, 1969. The clashes continued for six days. [2]

Numerous legends have grown around that night, most notably the question of who threw the first brick, the first bottle, or the first Molotov cocktail. Rivera herself said in interviews that she did not throw the first but the second Molotov cocktail, and that she did not go home for six nights. [1]

At this point, historical accuracy matters, even when it is uncomfortable. Rivera’s presence on the first night is disputed among historians. David Carter, author of what remains the most detailed reconstruction of the uprising, found no reliable eyewitness testimony confirming her participation on the first night. He reports that Marsha P. Johnson could not remember Rivera being there. Stephan L. Cohen, meanwhile, quotes Rivera’s longtime friend and Stonewall veteran Bob Kohler, to whom Rivera reportedly admitted in private that she had not taken part. [5, 6] Martin Duberman, by contrast, places her directly in the events of the first night in his 1993 account. Johnson herself also repeatedly emphasized that she did not arrive until the uprising was already underway. [2, 6]

I do not see this uncertainty as a problem, but as an opportunity. The fixation on the first brick tells the wrong story anyway. It turns a collective, chaotic event shaped by homeless youth, drag queens, butch lesbians, and bar patrons into a heroic founding myth with a starring role. And it shifts Rivera’s significance onto the one night she may not even have been there, instead of the thirty years that followed, during which her work for the rights of the community is well documented.

STAR: Activism That Did Not End at the Demonstration

In 1970, Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or STAR. [2, 7] The Museum of the City of New York describes STAR as the first organization in the United States explicitly organized around trans rights and gender self-determination, at a time when the term transgender was still barely in use. [9]

This is where Rivera’s understanding of activism becomes especially interesting to me, because Rivera and Johnson did not simply want to formulate political demands. They took care of people practically no one wanted: homeless queer youth, trans and gender-nonconforming people, people without money, and people without a safe place to live.

This was not a symbolic gesture. Rivera’s own description from 1998 is correspondingly matter-of-fact: she and Johnson had decided to help one another and the other kids, to feed and clothe people, keep the building running, and work the streets to pay the rent. [4] Although Rivera herself was only nineteen years old, she became a key support person for many of the residents. [1, 4]

Rivera did not view social problems in isolation from one another. In her analysis, poverty, homelessness, racism, gender identity, criminalization, and economic exclusion were interconnected. Today, we would probably call such a perspective interdisciplinary. Rivera did not need a technical term for it. She lived the idea.

213 East 2nd Street

The concrete heart of this work was the STAR House. After Rivera and around two dozen young people had temporarily lived in an abandoned truck trailer in Greenwich Village, Rivera and Johnson rented a run-down tenement at 213 East 2nd Street in the East Village. [7, 8] From around November 1970 until July 1971, the house served as a refuge for homeless trans youth and is considered the first shelter of its kind in the United States. [7, 9]

The conditions were terrible. Rivera recalled in 1979 that it consisted of four rooms and that the landlord had shut off the electricity. [7] In July 1971, only eight months after moving in, the residents were evicted for unpaid rent. The building was later demolished. A newer building stands on the site today. [8]

Eight months. That is the actual lifespan of a project now cited as a milestone in virtually every Pride speech. This discrepancy between symbolic admiration in hindsight and material support in the present is exactly where Rivera’s criticism began.

The Break Within Her Own Movement

Perhaps the most important part of Sylvia Rivera’s story for me is something other than Stonewall or STAR. She did not only fight against a society that discriminated against gay, queer, and trans people. She also fought within her own movement.

As the movement gained political influence, a conflict emerged over who should be visible and which demands were considered politically achievable. The Gay Activists Alliance, founded after Stonewall, repeatedly rejected the role that trans people, and trans people of color in particular, had played in the uprising. [1, 4] The Smithsonian puts it clearly: as a Latina and trans woman, Rivera experienced discrimination from established organizations that were predominantly led by white men. [2]

The Sylvia Rivera Law Project later described her as a tireless advocate for all those who were marginalized as the gay rights movement became more mainstream. [13] For me, her position can be summarized roughly like this: We cannot demand equality while at the same time discarding those whose lives are too uncomfortable for mainstream society.

It is very easy to demand solidarity as long as solidarity costs nothing. It becomes interesting only when solidarity has a political price, when including the most inconvenient group reduces everyone else’s chances of achieving a quick partial victory.

June 24, 1973: A Voice That Refused to Be Silenced

This conflict became most visible at the fourth Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally on June 24, 1973, in Washington Square Park. The organizers had excluded drag queens from participating, so Rivera and Johnson walked ahead of the official march. [2] On stage, lesbian activist Jean O’Leary, founder of Lesbian Feminist Liberation, argued against including drag queens and trans women in the movement. [10]

Rivera fought her way to the microphone and delivered an approximately four-minute speech to a hostile, booing audience that is now known as “Y’all Better Quiet Down.” [10, 11] She spoke about incarcerated queer people who wrote to STAR because they had no one else. She spoke about sexual violence in prisons, about poverty, and about the cost of gender-affirming medical care. And she accused the audience of being a white middle-class club. [11]

From today’s perspective, it seems almost paradoxical. A woman who would later be celebrated as a pioneer of queer history had to fight within that very movement simply to be heard. History is rarely as tidy as we later tell it.

Withdrawal, Return, Transy House

Rivera’s life did not follow the perfect arc of a historical heroine’s biography. Periods of intense activism were followed by withdrawal and personal crises. Poverty, homelessness, and addiction were not abstract political issues for her, but part of everyday life. After a suicide attempt, Johnson took her to the hospital and helped her recover. Rivera then withdrew from New York and from activism for an extended period. [1]

She returned to New York in 1992 after Marsha P. Johnson died. In 1994, Rivera was given a place of honor in the march marking the 25th anniversary of Stonewall. Speaking about that day to the New York Times in 1995, she said in essence that the movement had put her on a shelf, then taken her down again and dusted her off, but that it was still beautiful because young people on the sidewalk had called out that they knew what she had done. [1]

In 1997, she founded the Transy House in Park Slope, Brooklyn, explicitly modeled on the STAR House. [1] In early 2001, she revived STAR, among other reasons to draw attention to the murder of trans woman Amanda Milan and to campaign for New York’s Transgender Rights Bill. [12]

She did not speak about people on the margins because they were an interesting political subject. She repeatedly belonged to those margins herself and still came back.

SONDA: The Conflict That Stayed With Her Until the End

Rivera’s last major struggle was also the most illustrative one. It concerned the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA), a New York law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation that had been introduced repeatedly since 1971. Rivera publicly and sharply criticized the fact that the bill did not include gender identity or gender expression. [13]

Sylvia Rivera died on February 19, 2002, at the age of fifty at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan from complications of liver disease. Her partner Julia Murray was with her. [1] Even from her deathbed, she met with representatives of the Empire State Pride Agenda to negotiate the inclusion of trans people in their political agenda. [12, 14]

Ten months later, on December 17, 2002, SONDA was passed and took effect on January 16, 2003. Gender identity and gender expression were not included. [15] Another sixteen years passed before that gap was closed: only with the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) of January 25, 2019, were gender identity and gender expression added to New York’s anti-discrimination law. [14, 16]

Rivera had been right... the promise that trans people would be included later became a seventeen-year wait in New York, and Rivera herself did not live to see the outcome. Decades earlier, she had already experienced how quickly “later” turns into “maybe someday.”

An Afterlife in Names and Institutions

In August 2002, six months after her death, attorney Dean Spade founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. The organization works to ensure that all people can freely determine their gender identity and gender expression regardless of income or racialized classification, and without harassment, discrimination, or violence. [13, 17] It was founded explicitly from the observation that poverty and mass incarceration prevent political participation in trans communities of color, and in 2003 it was transformed into a collective whose core structure is majority people of color and trans people. [17]

In 2005, the intersection of Christopher Street and Hudson Street in Greenwich Village was given the additional name Sylvia Rivera Way. In 2015, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington added a photograph of Rivera to its collection, making her the first trans activist represented there. [1, 4] The monument to Rivera and Johnson announced in 2019 as part of the She Built NYC initiative was originally scheduled for 2021, was halted by the pandemic, and had still not entered the planning phase when the program was officially relaunched in March 2024. [18]

That too is a twist Rivera probably would not have let pass without comment: a monument to the woman who warned that recognition always comes later has now been waiting more than seven years to be realized.

What I Take Away From Her Story

The longer I spent learning about Sylvia Rivera, the less I felt that her legacy was exclusively a story about trans rights. For me, it is about a more fundamental question: How do we treat the people within a community who have the least power? Do we bring them with us, listen to them, or eventually explain that unfortunately their problems do not fit our strategy right now?

That applies to political movements, it applies to societies, and frankly, it applies to almost every community. Solidarity is not revealed by how we treat the most popular, strongest, or easiest people. It is revealed by what happens when someone becomes inconvenient, needs help, or does not fit the image perfectly.

The current political debate makes this question more urgent, not less. When people today argue about whether trans rights stand in the way of broader queer acceptance, that is exactly the same argument Rivera faced in Washington Square Park in 1973 and that became law in New York in 2002. So we already know the outcome of this experiment.

Perhaps Rivera’s position can therefore best be summarized for me in one thought: Freedom has not been achieved as long as it does not belong to everyone. This is deliberately not a historical quotation, but my own summary of what I take away from her story.

And perhaps that is exactly why I am glad I stumbled across her.

Yours, Lizbeth

Sources

1. Emma Rothberg: Sylvia Rivera. National Women's History Museum, März 2021. Ausführliche Biografie zu Kindheit, Stonewall, STAR, Rückzug, Transy House, Tod und Nachleben. https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sylvia-rivera

2. Marsha Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and the History of Pride Month. Smithsonian Institution, 7. Juni 2021. Historische Einordnung von Stonewall, STAR House, Terminologie und dem Ausschluss von Drag Queens beim Marsch 1973. https://www.si.edu/stories/marsha-johnson-sylvia-rivera-and-history-pride-month

3. Enduring Changemaker: Sylvia Rivera. Smithsonian, Resilience. Zu Herkunft, Kindheit, Straßenleben und Riveras Kritik an einer Bewegung, die sich von radikalen Positionen distanzierte. https://resilience.si.edu/story/resilient-lgbtq-activist-changemaker-sylvia-rivera

4. Ana Perry: Sylvia Rivera. Activist and Trailblazer. Face to Face Blog, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Zur Aufnahme Riveras in die Sammlung, zum Verhältnis zur Gay Activists Alliance und zu STAR House. https://npg.si.edu/blog/welcome-collection-sylvia-rivera

5. It Doesn't Matter Who Threw the First Brick at Stonewall. The Nation, 2019. Zusammenfassung der Forschungslage zu Riveras Anwesenheit in der ersten Nacht, mit Bezug auf David Carter und Stephan L. Cohen. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/trans-black-stonewall-rivera-storme/

6. Stonewall 50, Episode 2: "Everything Clicked… And the Riot Was On". Making Gay History. Zeitzeugeninterviews und Anmerkungen zur Quellenlage rund um Rivera und Johnson in der Nacht des Aufstands. https://makinggayhistory.org/podcast/stonewall-50-episode-2-everything-clicked-and-the-riot-was-on/

7. Marsha P. Johnson's Place(s) in NYC's LGBT History. NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, 6. Oktober 2017. Gründung von STAR 1970, Adresse und Betriebszeitraum des STAR House von November 1970 bis Juli 1971. https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/2017/10/06/marsha-p-johnsons-places-in-nycs-lgbt-history/

8. Revolutionaries on East Second Street: The STAR House. Village Preservation, 29. Oktober 2020. Zur Zwangsräumung im Juli 1971, zum späteren Abriss des Gebäudes und zu wiedergefundenen Tonaufnahmen von 1970. https://villagepreservation.org/2020/10/29/revolutionaries-on-east-second-street-the-star-house/

9. When Existence is Resistance. Museum of the City of New York. Einordnung von STAR als erste explizit um trans Rechte organisierte Gruppe der USA und von STAR House als erste Unterkunft dieser Art. https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/when-existence-resistance

10. Y'all Better Quiet Down. The Gay & Lesbian Review. Zum Ablauf des Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally am 24. Juni 1973 und zur Auseinandersetzung mit Jean O'Leary. https://glreview.org/yall-better-quiet-down/

11. Sylvia Rivera: "Y'all Better Quiet Down". Originalaufnahme, LoveTapesCollective, 24. Juni 1973. Primärquelle der Rede im Washington Square Park. https://vimeo.com/234353103

12. "Hell Hath No Fury like a Drag Queen Scorned": Sylvia Rivera's Activism, Resistance, and Resilience. OutHistory, Challenging Gender Boundaries. Zur Wiederbelebung von STAR im Januar 2001, zum Fall Amanda Milan und zu Riveras letzten Lebensjahren. https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/tgi-bios/sylvia-rivera

13. Who was Sylvia Rivera? Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Selbstdarstellung der Organisation zu Riveras Kampf gegen den Ausschluss von trans Menschen aus SONDA. https://srlp.org/about/who-was-sylvia-rivera/

14. We Can't Forget the Legacy of Sylvia Rivera This Latinx Heritage Month. Lambda Legal, 19. September 2023. Zum Treffen mit der Empire State Pride Agenda, zur Verabschiedung von SONDA ohne Schutz der Geschlechtsidentität und zur späteren Verabschiedung von GENDA. https://lambdalegal.org/blogs/us_20230919_latinx-month-sylvia-rivera-trans-history-legacy/

15. What is the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act? Office of the New York State Attorney General. Amtliche Darstellung von Inhalt, Verabschiedung Ende 2002 und Inkrafttreten am 16. Januar 2003. https://ag.ny.gov/resources/individuals/civil-rights/sexual-orientation-non-discrimination-act-sonda

16. GENDA: Know Your Rights. Office of the Governor of New York. Amtliche Darstellung des Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act, unterzeichnet am 25. Januar 2019. https://www.governor.ny.gov/advancing-lgbtq-equality/genda-know-your-rights

17. SRLP History. Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Gründung im August 2002 durch Dean Spade, Überführung in eine Kollektivstruktur 2003 und heutige Zusammensetzung. https://srlp.org/about/srlp-history/

18. Mayor Adams to Revive Creation of Paused Monuments Honoring New York City Women. New York City Mayor's Office, 28. März 2024. Zum Stand der Initiative She Built NYC und zur pandemiebedingten Verzögerung der 2019 angekündigten Denkmalprojekte. https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2024/03/mayor-adams-revive-creation-paused-monuments-honoring-new-york-city-women