Remembering Sylvia's work on Trans Day of Visibility

**as a note, much of this post is from part of my dissertation that didn’t make it to the manuscript because it needed more work to be ready—so have some un-dissertationed writing!**

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The video

Sylvia Rivera was supposed to speak on the stage of the Christopher Street Liberation Day rally in Manhattan, New York City, New York on June 24^th, 1973. As she recounted in a 2001 talk for the Latino Gay Men of New York, Rivera was initially slated as a verified speaker for this rally; however, the transphobic Lesbian Feminist Liberation group, led by white lesbian Jean O’Leary, were opposed to transgender women and drag artists appearing at this rally because they perceived them as a “threat” to womanhood.¹ When Rivera tried to take the stage that day, O’Leary and others physically attacked her. Rivera was permitted to speak after fighting her way on stage and after the large crowd protested her censorship.

The recording of this moment in history depicts a battered Rivera, who was barely in her 20s at this point, taking the stage after community organizers who initially refused her the right to speak. The speech that she gave on that day in 1973, called the “Y’all Better Quiet Down” speech, has gone on to become a pinnacle moment in the contemporary transgender rights movements both in the United States and abroad. Rivera’s speech took place at a rally whose participants sought to physically hurt her in order to silence her.

Here is a transcript (reproduced from STREET TRANSVESTITE ACTION REVOLUTIONARIES SURVIVAL, REVOLT, AND QUEER ANTAGONIST STRUGGLE)

Y’all better quiet down!

I’ve been trying to get up here all day, for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail! They’re writing me every motherfuckin’ week and ask for your help, and you all don’t do a god damn thing for them.

Have you ever been beaten up and raped in jail? Now think about it. They’ve been beaten up and raped, after they had to spend much of their money in jail to get their self home and try to get their sex change. The women have tried to fight for their sex changes, or to become women of the women’s liberation. And they write STAR, not the women’s group. They do not write women. They do not write men. They write STAR, because we’re trying to do something for them. I have been to jail. I have been raped and beaten many times, by men, heterosexual men that do not belong in the homosexual shelter. But do you do anything for them? No! You all tell me, go and hide my tail between my legs. I will no longer put up with this shit.

I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been thrown in jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment for gay liberation, and you all treat me this way? What the fuck’s wrong with you all? Think about that!

I do not believe in a revolution, but you all do. I believe in the gay power. I believe in us getting our rights or else I would not be out there fighting for our rights. That’s all I wanted to say to your people. If you all want to know about the people that are in jail - and do not forget Bambi l’Amour, Andorra Marks, Kenny Messner, and the other gay people that are in jail - come and see the people at STAR House on 12th Street, on 640 East 12th Street between B and C, apartment 14. The people who are trying to do something for all of us and not men and women that belong to a white, middle-class, white club. And that’s what y’all belong to.

REVOLUTION NOW!

Give me a G! Give me an A!

Give me a Y!

Give me a P!

Give me an O!

Give me a W!

Give me an E!

Give me an R!

GAY POWER!

Louder! GAY POWER!

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Sylvia Rivera: a short bio

Rivera’s place within the modern narrative of the LGBTQ rights movement is, at ends, one of reverence—and, at others, one of erasure and misconstruction. On one hand, Rivera is perceived to be the mother of today’s transgender rights movement, a movement that has, since Rivera’s entrance into the gay rights activism of the 1960s, been seen as “separate” from the motivations and goals of gay and lesbian rights.²

Born in 1951, Rivera was raised by a Venezuelan grandmother who abused Rivera for her darker skin, perceived femininity, and openness with her sexuality.³ Following her disownment by her grandmother, Rivera became homeless as a preteen and was forced to turn to sex work to survive. Her saving grace was a group of Latinx street queens—other queer and transgender who like Rivera were homeless—who took her in and christened her “Sylvia Lee.”⁴ As Laurence La Fountain-Stokes writes, Rivera “became politicized in the mid-to late 1960s and early 1970s” within the environment of overlapping movements for racial, gender, and global equity.⁵ Rivera was barely 18 years old when the Stonewall Riots occurred in June of 1969: she was said to have been present at the first night of the Stonewall Riots, not throwing the second brick—the first brick has been attributed to Black lesbian and drag king Stormé De Larverie⁶—but rather the second Molotov cocktail.⁷

Following the Stonewall Riots, Rivera took up the cause of gay rights with groups such as the Gay Action Alliance (GAA), Gay Liberation Front (GLF), and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), the last being a project that she and her friend/fellow activist Marsha P. Johnson led together.⁸ In her early years of activism, Rivera collaborated with the Puerto Rican gang-turned-civil rights group, the Young Lords; she met and spoke with the Black Panthers, specifically with Huey P. Newton, who was one of the few Black Panthers to speak up and out for coalition between Black and gay rights organizations.⁹ Then, from the mid-1990s to her death at 51 in 2002 of liver failure, Rivera pushed transgender rights activism into the mainstream—whether it was received well or not.¹⁰ Benjamin Shepard, a friend of Rivera and one of her fiercest allies in modern-day discussions of the gay rights movement, has written that Rivera was seen as the “‘Grand Dame’ of the gay liberation and international transgender rights movement.”¹¹ This title only begins to describe the work that Rivera accomplished during her long tenure as a transgender rights activist in the mid-20^th and early 21^st centuries. During her time with the early gay rights movements, Rivera was known for what Shepard calls her “willingness to engage in direct action.”¹² An often-told story about Rivera is that, during her time with GAA to promote the passing of a New York City gay rights bill, she took direct action to make sure the group’s petition for the gay rights bill would be received. As Lisa Beard summarizes this event, Rivera “whacked city councilwoman Carol Greitzer over the head with a clipboard of petitions when Greitzer would not accept them (Greitzer went on to become the first sponsor of the bill).”¹³ Then, following the deaths of Matthew Shepherd, a young gay white man, Amanda Milan, a young transgender Black woman, in the 1990s, Rivera took to the streets to promote an LGBTQ rights activist culture that saw Amanda’s right to life to be as important as Matthew’s.¹⁴ Even on her deathbed, a Shepard writes, Rivera fought for LGBTQ rights. Before her death in 2002, Rivera lobbied for the passing of transgender rights bill that would ensure protection on the basis of gender in New York City—this bill was passed three months after Rivera’s death.¹⁵ Rivera was a firebrand. Because of her work, transgender activists like Raquel Willis have identified her as the very blueprint from which the modern-day transgender rights movement has been built.¹⁶

On the other hand, people have actively sought to erase Rivera from the narrative of gay rights from the 1960s to this very day. Rivera has been dismissed and erased from the mainstream narratives of Stonewall because she has been, as La Fountain-Stokes writes, “the subject of elision and controversy.”¹⁷ Her erasure is clearly tied to a lineage of transphobia that has plagued the gay rights movement since its inception. The abuse and pushback that Rivera received for attempting to fight for gay rights as well as transgender rights resulted in a suicide attempt shortly after the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day rally.¹⁸ Over the two decades in hiding that followed, Rivera left the gay rights scene, moving around the state of New York and facing drug addiction and homelessness.¹⁹ While it was transgender and gender non-conforming, especially Black transgender and gender non-conforming people, who ignited gay rights fervor in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Atlanta and New York City, white cisgender gay and lesbian people began to take over and whitewash the movement as early as the 1970s. Jessi Gan describes part of this phenomena in her 2007 article “ ‘Still at the back of the bus’: Sylvia Rivera’s Struggle”: “[because] the iconography of Stonewall enabled middle-class white gays and lesbians to view themselves as resistant and transgressive, Stonewall narratives…[thus] elided the central role of poor gender variant people of color in that night’s acts of resistance against New York City police.”²⁰ Rivera herself has spoken of the white supremacist, cissexist gay rights organizing that was occurring at this time, describing how there were those in the late 1960’s and 1970’s who sought to be “‘normal homosexuals’” who “wore suits and ties” and dresses to “show the world that they were normal.”²¹ These ideological threads were still present before Rivera’s death in 2002, and are still visible today in the intracommunal and systemic attacks on transgender rights. The erasure of Rivera from historical accounts about Stonewall by authors such as David Carter and the representation of Rivera as a white man in a fictitious, coming-of-age film called Stonewall (2015) are some of the most recent and egregious examples of Rivera’s erasure.²²

There is so much more to say about what Sylvia did for our community, especially today. She deserves more attention because she was continually beat down and silenced. I am not a scholar of Rivera, but if you are interested in reading and hearing more about her, I would suggest looking into the sources below as well as interviews of Sylvia herself conducted by gay rights activist Randy Wicker.

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References + additional sources

Beard, Lisa. “‘For Your Gay Brothers and Your Gay Sisters in Jail’: Sylvia Rivera’s Countercall.” If We Were Kin: Race, Identification, and Intimate Political Appeals. Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 17-45.

Feinberg, Leslie. “Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries—Lavender & Red, Part 73.” Workers.org. September 24, 2006. Accessed March 15, 2018. https://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-73/.

---. “'I'm Glad I Was in the Stonewall Riot.’” Workers.org. 1998. Accessed March 15, 2018. https://www.workers.org/ww/1998/sylvia0702.php.

Gan, Jessi. "“Still at the Back of the Bus”: Sylvia Rivera’s Struggle.” CENTRO Journal XIX, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 125-39.

Gilligan, Heather. “Sylvia Rivera Threw One of the First Bottles in the Stonewall Riots, but Her Activism Went Much Further.” Timeline. March 16, 2017. Accessed March 15, 2018. https://timeline.com/sylvia-rivera-threw-one-of-the-first-bottles-in-the-stonewall-riots-but-her-activism-went-much-4bb0d33b9a2c

Jones, Angela. “DeLarverie, Stormé.” African American Activism and Political Engagement: An Encyclopedia of Empowerment. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023, p.165.

La Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence. “The Life and Times of Trans Activist Sylvia Rivera.” Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies, eds. Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas and Mérida M. Rúa. New York University Press, 2021, pp. 241-253.

Marcus, Eric. “Sylvia Rivera Discusses the Stonewall Riots in a Never-Heard-Before Interview (Exclusive).” OUT. October 13, 2016. Accessed May 01, 2018. https://www.out.com/out-exclusives/2016/10/13/sylvia-rivera-discusses-stonewall-riots-never-heard-interview-exclusive.

Rivera, Sylvia. “Y’all Better Quiet Down.” 1973. Internet Archive. January 01, 1973. Accessed May 01, 2018. https://archive.org/details/SylviaRiveraYallBetterQuietDown1973.

—. “Queens in Exile.” STREET TRANSVESTITE ACTION REVOLUTIONARIES: SURVIVAL, REVOLT, AND QUEER ANTAGONIST STRUGGLE. Untorelli Press, 2013, pp. 40-55.

—. “Sylvia Rivera’s Talk at LGMNY, June 2001 Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, New York City.” Compiled by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes and Lauren Galarza. CENTRO Journal XIX, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 117-23.

Shepard, Benjamin. “History or Myth? Writing Stonewall.” Lambda Book Report 13, no. 1/2. (August 2004): 12-14.

--. “Sylvia and Sylvia's Children: A Battle for Queer Public Space.” In That's Revolting! Queer

STREET TRANSVESTITE ACTION REVOLUTIONARIES: SURVIVAL, REVOLT, AND QUEER ANTAGONIST STRUGGLE. Untorelli Press, 2013.

Willis, Racquel. “How Sylvia Rivera Created the Blueprint for Transgender Organizing.” OUT Magazine, 21 May 2019, https://www.out.com/pride/2019/5/21/how-sylvia-rivera-created-blueprint-transgender-organizing.

1. LGMNY

2. Shepard, “Sylvia and Sylvia’s Children,” 128

3. Rivera, “Queens in Exile,” 40-41

4. La Fountain-Stokes 242

5. Ibid

6. Jones, Angela. “DeLarverie, Stormé.” African American Activism and Political Engagement: An Encyclopedia of Empowerment. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023, p.165.

7. Rivera, “Talk for LGMNY,” 119

8. La Fountain-Stokes 24

9. Feinberg, “STAR”; Ng 11

10. Shepard, “Sylvia and Sylvia’s Children,” 127-129

11. Shepard, “History or Myth?”, 13

12. Shepard, “Sylvia and Sylvia’s Children,” 125

13. Beard 39

14. Shepard, “Sylvia and Sylvia’s Children,” 128; Rivera, “Talk for LGMNY”, 122

15. Shepard, “Sylvia and Sylvia’s Children,” 128

16. Willis, “How Sylvia Rivera Created the Blueprint for Transgender Organizing”

17. La Fountain-Stokes 241

18. Gan 133

19. Shepard, “Sylvia and Sylvia’s Children: A Battle for Queer Public Space,” 127

20. Gan 127

21. Rivera, “Talk for LGMNY,” 121

22. Shepard, “History or Myth?”, 13; Barnes, “Stonewall sparks boycott row after claims film ‘whitewashes’ gay struggle”