Today's Out Spotlight was an instigator, an activist, a voice, and a pioneer in the modern gay rights movement. Many consider her the Rosa Parks of the modern transgender movement. Today's Out Spotlight is transgender pioneer Sylvia Rivera.
Sylvia Rivera was born Ray Rivera Mendosa on July 2, 1951 in New York City. Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent she was abandoned by her birth father José as a baby, and became an orphan after her mother committed suicide when she was three years old. She went and was raised by her Venezuelan grandmother who disapproved of her effeminate behavior, especially after she began wearing women's makeup around the fourth grade. By ten, Rivera was on her own, living on the streets, where found and joined a community of drag queens.
Her activism began during the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, and feminist movements. She became involved in Puerto Rican and African American youth activism, with such group as the Young Lords and Black Panthers. But her activism bloomed around the time of the Stonewall Riots. She was 17.
The seventeen-year-old drag queen was in the crowd that gathered outside the Stonewall Inn the night of June 27, 1969, when the Greenwich Village gay bar was raided by the police. She reportedly shouted, "I'm not missing a minute of this, it's the revolution!" As police escorted the patrons from the bar, Rivera was one of the first bystanders to throw a bottle.
After Stonewall, she joined the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) were she was a founding member as well as a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front.After Gay Liberation Front folded and the more reformist Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) became New York's primary gay rights group, she worked hard with in the ranks on the GAA's campaign in 1971 to pass the New York City Gay Rights Bill. Riveria was famously arrested for climbing the walls of City Hall in a dress and high heels to crash a closed-door meeting on the bill.
But for all of her work, when it came time to make deals, GAA dropped the portions in the civil rights bill that dealt with transvestitism and drag; it just wasn't possible to pass it with such "extreme" elements included. As it turned out, it wasn't possible to pass the bill anyway until 1986. But not only was the language of the bill changed, GAA; which was becoming increasingly more conservative, several of its founders and officers had plans to run for public office; it even changed its political agenda to exclude issues of transvestitism and drag.
It was not unusual for Rivera to be urged to "front" possibly dangerous demonstrations, but when the press showed up, she would be pushed aside by the more middle-class, "straight-appearing" leadership. In 1995,and still hurt she said, "When things started getting more mainstream, it was like, 'We don't need you no more'". But, she added, "Hell hath no fury like a drag queen scorned".
Much of her activist zeal was fueled by her own struggles to find food, shelter, and safety in the urban streets. In 1970, Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries)a group dedicated to helping homeless transgendered youth living on the streets.Over the course of her life Rivera battled substance abuse issues and found herself back living on the streets. Those experiences made her more focused on advocacy for those who, in her view, the mainline community (and often the queer community) were leaving behind.
In May 1995, Rivera tried to commit suicide by walking into the Hudson River. That same year she appeared in the Arthur Dong documentary "Out Rage '69", part of the PBS series The Question of Equality.
In the last five years of her life she renewed her political activity, giving many speeches concerning the Stonewall Riots and the necessity for unity among transgender people to fight for their historic legacy as people in the forefront of the LGBT movement.
She traveled to Italy for the Millennium March in 2000 where she was acclaimed as the Mother of all gay people.
In early 2001, after a church service at the MCC referring to the Star announcing the birth of Jesus she decided to reinstate Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries as an active political organization. STAR fought for the New York City Transgender Rights Bill and for a trans-inclusive New York State Sexual Orientation Non Discrimination Act. It also was behind the call for justice for Amanda Milan, a transgender woman who was murdered in 2000.
Rivera refused to have the drag culture erased from the gay rights agenda by what she considered to be assimilationist gay leaders who were, in her mind, seeking to make the community look more attractive to the heterosexual majority. Her conflicts with mainstream gay and lesbian advocacy groups were emblematic of the mainstream gay rights movement's strained relationship to transgender (Drag, transvestite, cross-dressing, transsexual etc.) issues.She attacked the Human Rights Commission and the Empire State Pride Agenda as organizations which were standing in the way of transgender rights. On her death bed she met with Matt Foreman and Joe Grabarz of the Empire State Pride Agenda in order to negotiate trans inclusion in ESPA's political structure and agenda.
After her death, Michael Bronski recalled her anger when she felt that she was being marginalized within the community:
According to Bronski, Rivera was banned from New York's Gay & Lesbian Community Center for several years in the mid-nineties, because, on a cold winter's night, she aggressively demanded that the Center take care of poor and homeless queer youth. A short time before her death, Bronski reports that she said:
One of our main goals now is to destroy the Human Rights Campaign, because I'm tired of sitting on the back of the bumper. It's not even the back of the bus anymore — it's the back of the bumper. The bitch on wheels is back.
Rivera's struggles were not exclusively about transgender issues, but also about questions of poverty and discrimination faced by people of color. The transgender-of-color activist and scholar Jessi Gan spoke of how mainstream LGBT groups have routinely dismissed or not paid sufficient attention to Rivera's Latina identity, while Puerto Rican and Latino groups often have not fully acknowledged her contribution to their struggles for civil rights.Though she was frequently homeless, she spent the end of her life at Transy House, a direct descendant of the original STAR shelter she co-founded. She lived to see the '90s protest group Transsexual Menace and, later on, the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA).
Rivera died February 19, 2002 at New York's St. Vincent's Hospital, of complications from liver cancer.
An active member of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York, she ministered through the Church's food pantry, which provided food to the hungry. Recalling her life as a child on the streets, she remained a passionate advocate for queer youth, and MCC New York's queer youth shelter is called Sylvia's Place in her honor.Established and name for her in 2002, The Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), is dedicated to ending poverty and gender identity discrimination, and carries on her work on behalf of marginalized persons. Their mission is "to guarantee that all people are free to self-determine gender identity and expression, regardless of income or race, and without facing harassment, discrimination or violence".
Also 2002, actor/comedian Jade Esteban Estrada portrays Rivera in the well-received solo musical ICONS: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World, Vol. 1 winning her renewed national attention. In January 2007, a new musical based upon Rivera's life, Sylvia So Far, premiered in New York at La Mama.
And 2005, the corner of intersection of Christopher and Hudson streets in Greenwich Village was renamed "Rivera Way" in her honor. It is the neighborhood where Rivera got her start of her life of activism and is only two blocks from the Stonewall Inn where a 17 year drag queen helped make history.
"I'm not missing a minute of this, it's the revolution!"