Remembering Sylvia Rivera 50 Years After the Stonewall Uprising
“Hell hath no fury like a drag queen scorned.” — Sylvia Rivera
Almost 50 years have passed since the Stonewall Uprising sparked the modern gay civil rights movement. In honor of the upcoming anniversary, we are highlighting one LGBTQ+ activist every week. The second is Sylvia Rivera (1951–2002).
Sylvia Rivera was raised by her grandmother after her father disappeared and Rivera’s mother killed herself. She was a New Yorker of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent. Her grandmother did not approve of Rivera wearing makeup or acting in a feminine way. Rivera had left home by age 11 and lived on the city streets. She survived through child prostitution before being taken in by a group of drag queens.
She would eventually become a celebrated trans activist, drag queen, and close friend of Marsha P. Johnson.
There have been multiple and conflicting accounts of exactly how the events at Stonewall Inn began that fateful June night in 1969. But Rivera was certain that trans women were on the front line against the police squads.
In an interview with lesbian trans activist and author Leslie Feinberg, Rivera said, “It was street gay people from the Village out front: homeless people who lived in the park in Sheridan Square outside the bar — and then drag queens behind them and everybody behind us.”
Despite her actions at Stonewall and beyond, issues of class, race, and gender were increasingly considered secondary to issues of sexuality within the movement. As evident in her “Y’all Better Quiet Down Now” speech during the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally — an early version of the Pride March — Rivera was angry with mainstream white gay liberation.
After fighting to gain access to the rally stage in Washington Square Park, Rivera railed against the inaction for trans people in prison, declaring, “the people 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 you all belong to!”
When queer and homeless youth needed help, it was Rivera and Johnson who took them in, under their organization: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. When in prison, trans people would write to STAR for help, rather than the gay or lesbian rights groups, according to Rivera.
Marsha P. Johnson’s death in 1992 left Rivera heartbroken. And lacking resources, STAR disbanded after three years.
Later in life, Rivera worked for the Metropolitan Community Church of New York, in its food pantry, providing food to hungry people including those who were homeless and living with HIV or AIDS. She struggled with homelessness and alcoholism. In 2002, she died from liver cancer.
She met with fellow organizers while in bed at St. Vincent’s Manhattan Hospital, fighting until the time of her death for legal and social protections of queer, trans, and homeless youth.
The Sylvia Rivera Law Project continues her work “by centralizing issues of systemic poverty and racism, and prioritizing the struggles of queer and trans people who face the most severe and multi-faceted discrimination.”
A few years before her death, Rivera published a personal essay titled Queens in Exile, The Forgotten Ones. She wrote, “I’m tired of being labeled. I don’t even like the label transgender. I’m tired of living with labels. I just want to be who I am. I am Sylvia Rivera. Ray Rivera left home at the age of 10 to become Sylvia. And that’s who I am.”
