SYMHC Classics: Sylvia Rivera

out on October eighth, twenty fourteen. That is today's classic, and since it is more than ten years old, we just really feel compelled to note that language has evolved about some of the things that are part of this episode, like how to talk about homelessness and addiction, and whether Stonewall is best described as a riot and uprising, a rebellion,

or some other term. At this point, there are people who feel really passionately that Stonewall should be described as more of an uprising, and ones who feel just as strongly that Stonewall was a riot. So enjoy and also happy Pride.

Rosa Parks, as you probably know, became famous in part for refusing to give up her bus seat on a segregated bus, and Sylvia Rivera became famous in part for purportedly throwing the first bottle at a police officer during the Stonewall Riots. But really, Rosa Parks and Sylvia Rivera almost could not be more different from each other. Rosa Parks's case was chosen specifically to try to overturn a bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, precisely because she seemed really polite.

She was married, she was soft spoken, she went to church, and she had no criminal records, so basically there was nothing in her background that might turn white people off to the idea that she deserved the same basic civil rights that they did. Sylvia Rivera, on the other hand, has a lot more in common with Claudette Colvin, who was also arrested for refusing to give up a seat

on a segregated bus in Montgomery. But Claudette Culvin did not become the household name that Rosa Parks did because she was an unmarried, pregnant teenager who had a reputation for being a troublemaker. Civil rights leaders deliberately didn't pursue her case because they knew it would be a hard one to win. They held out for a more so called respectable plaintiff instead, And that brings us to Sylvia Rivera.

In the years immediately after the Stonewall Riots, she campaigned bravely and stridently and vocally for the rights of gay and transgender people. Although the term transgender, which is used to describe people whose gender and identity doesn't match up with the sex that they were assigned when they were born, that word had not been coined yet. But Sylvia was also loud and aggressive and angry and poor, sometimes even homeless. She had a history of sex work and drug addictions.

Her mannerisms were really flamboyant, in your face. So when the gay rights movement started trending towards so called respectability, Sylvia got really pushed to the sidelines, along with a lot of other transgender people. She refused to be put in a box, and so she wound up being excluded from the very movement that she was fighting for, and she was for decades pretty much forgotten about So before we get started, there's a word of caution about this story.

Because Sylvia ran away from home when she was only eleven. Some of the events that happened to her, especially in her young life, are disturbing. So parents and teachers, before you share this with young people, I recommend listening to it yourself first. And as a second note, some of the language that was used at the time that so lived and that she used about herself isn't the preferred language that we use today, and we'll sort of point

out those as they come up. So now that you've been worn, we will jump in as we usually do, at the very beginning. Sylvia was born on July second of nineteen fifty one. Her mother was Venezuelan and her father was Puerto Rican. Sylvia's mother committed suicide by eating rat poison when Sylvia was three. She also tried to kill Sylvia at that time, but Sylvia survived and went on to be raised by her grandmother, Viahita. Viahita raised

both Sylvia and Sylvia's half sister. Viahita was essentially functioning as a single parent. Her husband had abandoned her and Sylvia's father, who had also abandoned the family was not paying child support. Sylvia's grandmother was also very strict. Although she taught Sylvia to cook and to sew and to knit, she really did I did not like it when Sylvia

started wearing girls clothes. Biahita would punish Sylvia, sometimes physically, for wearing makeup and for dressing in girls clothing, and, as Sylvia described in the oral history Making History the Struggle for gay and Lesbian equal Rights nineteen forty five to nineteen ninety, her grandmother would say, quote, we don't do this. You're one of the boys. I want you to be a mechanic, and Sylvia would answer, no, I want to be a hairdresser, and I want to wear

these clothes. From Sylvia's point of view, her grandmother also didn't like her because her skin was too dark. She had heard her grandmother say that she wanted a white granddaughter instead, and the struggle between the two of them went on until, at the age of ten, Sylvia tried to commit suicide by taking her grandmother's pills. She wound up instead in the hospital for two months. Sylvia also faced bullying and harassment at school and in the neighborhood.

As well. The other children and their neighbors didn't like her wearing girl's clothing, and they didn't like her effeminate mannerisms. Feeling lonely, isolated, and desperately at odds with everyone around her, Sylvia left home at age eleven. The straw that really broke the camel's back was seeing how others treatment of

her was affecting her grandmother. Even though their relationship was often contentious and strained and even violent, Sylvia did not like seeing her grandmother suffer over the way people talked about her. After she ran away, Sylvia went to forty second Street in New York City, which was a haven for cross dressers and street walkers. She had no other means to support herself, and so she turned to sex work.

And I want to make it clear that there are people who choose to go into sex work, but at this time, Sylvia was eleven and she had no other options. The area's drag queens pretty much adopted her, and they're the ones who gave her the name Sylvia. Sylvia was arrested frequently, and her grandmother would come and bail her out a few days. Shy of Sylvia's eighteenth birthday. She went to the Stonewall Inn for the first time, and this was June twenty eth eighth of nineteen sixty nine.

The Stonewall Inn was, like many of New York's bars that catered to the Gate community at the time, owned by the mafia. Homosexuality was a crime, and so was cross dressing, so pretty much the only people who were willing to operate businesses that catered to this demographic were also themselves criminals. Gay bars were rated on a regular basis. Standard operating procedure was that the police would come in,

they would make arrests and confiscations. They would then collect a payoff, and then they would leave and padlock the door behind them. Not long after the police had gone, members of the mafia would come by cut the padlock off. They would then restock the alcohol supply and business would start right back up. So for the people who didn't wind up getting arrested, it was more of a hassle and an interruption to their evening's revelry than anything else.

For people who did get arrested, it could be way way harder, not just for the fact that they were taken to jail, but often in they were then taunted and sometimes beaten and sometimes assaulted by other people who were in the jail. On June twenty eighth, when the police came in, most of the patrons went to the park across the street to wait, and they were tired

of being hassled. A lot of people say that this was because it was the same week that Judy Garland died, and that doesn't seem through the oral histories to actually add up necessarily. But yeah, it's more a point a coincidence than a cause and effect situation. Right At some point, somebody started throwing coins at the police officers, yelling things like here's your payoff, come get some more, and then things started to escalate. People started throwing bottles and Molotov cocktails.

Sylvia is widely cited as the first to do this, but near the end of her life she really worked to try to dispel this idea, saying that she was in fact the second to throw a bottle. Soon, the police were pinned down inside the bar with the protesters outside, and the riot went on until reinforcements arrived and dispersed the crowd. The Stonewall riot wasn't remotely the first event

in the modern gay rights movement. It wasn't even the first riot in an establishment that was frequented by LGBT people. An early earlier example was a riot at Cooper's Donuts in Los Angeles in nineteen sixty five, and in that event, drag queens and gay men, many of them black or Latino, fought back against police, first by throwing donuts, which sounds sort of funny, and then with hand to hand fighting,

much less funny. In San Francisco, a picket protest among LGBT protesters turned into a riot at Compton's Cafeteria in nineteen sixty six. But Stonewall really did act as a sort of tipping point in a rallying cry. It's definitely the most famous today for sure. So there are several things about the riots and Sylvia's presents there that are caused for debate today. One is just how much of the Stonewall Ends clientele was made up of cross dressers

and transgender people. Now, as we mentioned before, the term transgender had not really been coined at this point in history, but when it was coined about ten years later, a lot of the people who had identified as cross stressers or as transvestites at the time, then went on to identify as transgender. So we're going to keep talking about both cross dressers and transgender people both for the rest

of the episode, because there are two different things. Cross Dressing is about the clothes you have on and transgender is about your gender expression, so your expression of the gender that you are inwardly versus the clothes that you have on your body. In Sylvia's own words, cross dressers could only get and if they knew somebody, because cross dressers were really frequently targeted by the police, so a lot of businesses felt like it was too much of

a hassle to deal with them. Other people have characterized the Stonewell In as a haven for cross dressers and for transgender people, and there are reputable historians on both sides. Another bone of contention is actually whether Sylvia herself was even there. She says she was, and of course she's often credited with being the first bottle thrower, but historians have not been able to corroborate her presence there through

eyewitness accounts. In the end, it doesn't necessarily matter how many transgender patrons the Stonewall In had or whether Sylvia was actually there that night. What does matter is that Sylvia and the rest of the cross dressing and transgender community became vocal, aggressive campaigners for the rights of gay me in, lesbians, bisexuals, and all manner of people who

just didn't conform to gender norms. They were, in many ways the people who were the most visibly on the forefront of the fight for equality and for civil rights. And we're going to talk more about what happened after Stonewall right after a word from our sponsor. If that

is cool with Tracy, it is. Sylvia Rivera had already been active in racial equality and anti war causes before the Stonewall riot, and after the riot she immediately passionately turned her attention to the growing movement for gay rights. Two gay rights organizations formed in New York in the wake of the riot. That was the Gay Activists Alliance and the Gay Liberation Front, and Sylvia was active in

both of those groups. As part of the Gay Activists Alliance, Sylvia petitioned the city of New York for an anti discrimination bill, and she was arrested while trying to get signatures. When she appeared before the judge, he immediately let her go, he recognized that with all of the social turmoil that was going on in the United States at that point, it would be a really unwise pr move for him to jail someone who was getting signatures for a petition.

Sylvia also testified before the city Council to try to get the bill pass. However, as the bill was being negotiated, others in the gay community agreed to drop protections for cross dressers from the bill in the hope that it would be more likely to pass. Sylvia and many of the other cross dressing and transgender citizens of New York

felt really deeply betrayed by this. They had been working campaigning and getting arrested and sometimes facing abuse and violence and sexual assault in jail once they had been arrested fighting for these causes, and at this point it felt like they had done this for a cause that had

then turned their back on them. And it didn't help that the bill minus discrimination protections for gender expression did not actually pass until fifteen years later, so that would have been nineteen eighty six, so this concession really in the end, was not much of a help. Along the way, the Gay Activist's Alliance specifically dropped rights for the cross

dressing communities from its mission entirely. Consequently, after being excluded from other gay rights organisms, Sylvia and her longtime friend Marcia P. Johnson co founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries or STAR in the fall of nineteen seventy. Essentially, the cross dressing and transgender community had begun to feel excluded by other gay and lesbian rights organizations, and so they

formed their own. As a side note to a lot of people today, the word transvestite has connotations that are offensive, so people a lot of people prefer the word cross dresser, but at the time it was a word that they were using to talk about themselves frequently. Yeah, you also hear drag, which is in there and they O, right, get a little fuzzy. And there's still ongoing debate over you know, terminology and who should use what to some

degree that's still being worked out. Yes, so, uh, we're not at all using those terms to be disrespectful, but because that's those are the words that Sylvia and Marcia were using to describe themselves. So Sylvia and Marcia's next step was to start what was known as STAR House, and this was an hour outreach effort for the so called street queens. These were young, homeless gay youth, many of whom later went on to identify as transgender, and

many of whom were also people of color. And they originally operated Starhouse out of the back of a truck, and then they started renting a building at two thirteen East Second Street and they fixed that up and there they provided shelter, food, and guidance for homeless transgender youth and Sylvia and Marcia really became mother figures for these kids.

They had a dance to try to raise some money to fund their operation, but for the most part, Sylvia and Marcia kept the place running by doing sex work. They tried to protect all of the young people who were in their care from being involved in the sex trade at all. However, many of the youth wound up helping Starhouse's efforts by stealing food, and eventually, you know, this is not really a workable business model. So Starhouse was evicted from the property for non payment of rent.

And before they left, they took the refrigerator and they destroyed all of the improvements that they'd made in the building out of a sort of turn about as fair play mindset, and I feel like, we should point out that the reason that they were having to turn to stealing and sex work to fund their operations is because their entire lives at this point were not only illegal, but also specifically targeted by the police and other people

for harassment. So that was sort of what it had come to by being excluded from so many other social organizations that were working to help homeless people and others in New York. Yeah, it certainly was not like a, oh, we don't want to pursue legitimate means of gaining money. They just did not have opportunities to do so, right, and that continues to be a problem in a lot

of areas today. Throughout this time, Sylvia was also active in other radical organizations as well, including the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords, which is a Puerto Rican nationalist activism group. In nineteen seventy three, Sylvia I was supposed to speak at Christopher Street Liberation Day, which was a festival to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. However, radical feminists tried to keep Sylvia from the stage because

they viewed her wearing women's clothing as sexist. In particular, activist Gino Leary, a former nun and lesbian feminist, spoke out against Sylvia taking part. Sylvia's response was to physically grab the microphone and to talk anyway with a lot of vigor and profanity behind her words. She spoke very candidly and angrily about how the gay community was benefiting from the cross dresser's work, while simultaneously excluding them from

their successes as her payment. I do want to note that Gino Leary went on to soften her views about cross dressers and transgender people later in her life. I don't want to paint her as a terrible person who went around depressing other people. She did later on express embarrassment and shame that she had really basically kicked people who were already down. Yeah, and the drag queens that were supposed to perform at this rally were also barred

from performing. After this incident, Sylvia moved to Terrytown, New York and lived with a boyfriend. Since she was no longer in the city, she became less prominent in its civil rights and gay rights efforts, but she did make her way back every year for the parades and festivals that commemorated the end of the Stonewall riot. In the interim,

she led a relatively quiet life. She mostly worked food service jobs for a while, but eventually, unfortunately, she began abusing drugs again and wound up homeless, and journalists who were working to chronicle the gay rights movements earlier years and transgender people's contribution to the gay rights movement found her living on the streets in New York in the early nineteen nineties. This actually marked her return to activism and to the public eye, which we'll talk about after

another brief ad break. It's tricky to talk about some of the issues that are in today's episode because the terminology that we used to talk about it today, some of it was coined basically halfway through Sylvia Rivera's life. It's also tricky to talk about Sylvia Rivera's identity specifically, because she really really resisted the idea of labels for

a lot of her life. She referred to herself as a transvestite, and as we said earlier, that's a word that a lot of people don't prefer to be used anymore. The term transgender came around about halfway through her life, but she wasn't totally comfortable calling herself that. Towards the end of her life, she said quote, I'm tired of being labeled. I don't even like the label transgender. I just want to be who I am. I'm living the

way Sylvia wants to live. But despite her lack of affinity for labels, Sylvia was undoubtedly an advocate for rights and protections for transgender people throughout the last ten years or so of her life. We talked earlier about Sylvia founding the organization Star with Marcia P. Johnson. Marsha's body was actually found in the Hudson River in nineteen ninety two. Police originally said that it was a suicide, but they eventually opened a homicide investigation. And when I say eventually,

I mean two decades later. At the time of her death, Sylvia and other friends of Marcia's had said that she was not suicidal and that they had witnessed her being harassed by someone near where her body was found. Shortly before her death. In nineteen ninety four, Sylvia was asked

to lead the twenty fifth anniversary Stonewall March. That same year, she advocated for Martin Duberman's publishers to translate his LGBT history book Stonewall into Spanish, but according to her, she was told it would not sell well in quote third world countries in Latin countries. In her last years, she and her partner Julia Murray lived and work at a place called Transy House. This is a collective and shelter for transgender youth, and they joined this collective in nineteen

ninety seven. In nineteen ninety eight, Sylvia was arrested during a memorial for Matthew Shepherd in New York. So if you are not familiar with his story, Matthew Shepherd was a student at the University of Wyoming at Laramie who was tortured, tied to a fence post, and left to die as part of an anti gay hate crime. He wound up dying of his injuries a few days after

he was found tied to the fence post. According to Sylvia's own account, a police officer basically spread the word to arrest her first because she was known for being very vocal at these kinds of demonstrations. In nineteen ninety nine, Sylvia spoke at the World Pride Rally in Rome. In two thousand, another trans woman named Amanda Milan was stabbed in the neck and killed on forty second Street. Sylvia organized a series of rallies and protests surrounding her death.

In the trial of her killers, Sylvia continued to be really vocal about the schism between the gay community and the trans community in the years before her death, and about a year before she died, at a talk given before the Latino Gay Men of New York, she said, yes, we can adopt children. All well and good, that's fine. I would love to have children. I would love to marry my lover over there, she pointed to Julia Murray.

But for political reasons, I will not do it, because I don't feel that I have to fit in that closet of normal straight society which the gay mainstream is going towards. In the same speech, she described the trans community's participation in the gay rights movement this way quote. We were determined that evening, that evening, being the night of the Stonewall riots, that we were going to be a liberated, free community, which we did acquire that. Actually,

I'll change the WII. You have acquired your liberation, your freedom from that night. Myself, I've got Explative deleted, just like I had back then, but I still struggle, and I still continue the struggle. I will struggle till the day I die. And my main struggle right now is that my community will seek the rights that are justly hours.

In the last year of her life, Sylvia campaigned for New York Sexual Orientation Non Discrimination Act, which is also referred to as SONDA, and that act prohibits discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation in employment, housing, public accommodations, education, credit, and the exercise of civil rights. It includes protections for transgender people. Sylvia was not exaggerating when she said that she was going to work until

she died for this. Her last meeting about SONDA, when she met with city officials for the last time, took place in a hospital bed when she was an in stage liver disease and a great pain. She died on February nineteenth, two thousand and two, of liver disease at the age of fifty one. SONDA was signed into law on December seventeenth of that same year. On November fourteenth of two thousand and five, the City of New York named the corner of Christopher and Hudson streets in the

West Village. Sylvia rivera way today the Silvia Rivera food pantry which is under the auspices of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York, which serves a working poor as well as people with HIV through a specialized pantry program that's designed for people on anti retroviral therapies. These are higher in protein and easy to prepare. It also provides nutritional information and kind of meal guidance for all of

the populations that it serves. Sylvia's Place is a Metropolitan Community Church of New York services organization for homeless youth. Sylvia Rivera Law Project's work focuses on transgender intersects and gender nonconforming people, particularly those who are low income people and people of color. They provide legal services, public education, and advocacy for public policy reform. She had a big legacy.

She did have a big legacy, had big legacy that I think her name is not necessarily well known in the context of the gay rights movement unless you are

pretty familiar with it. The oral history that we referenced making history, she is actually the only transgender person who's included, and she's referred to with male pronouns the whole time and is classified as a drag queen, which is she did call herself a drag queen, but that's kind of limiting and how she actually viewed herself well, I mean, since she was not a fan of the labels and

she identified in her life as Sylvia. Yeah, a lot of drag performers will still maintain their you know, in many cases, the old school drag performers that were mostly men and then presented as female for performance, they still maintained that male persona, whereas she did not at all totally.

One of the reasons that I there were a couple of reasons that I wanted to do this episode, and one is that I think the campaign for transgender rights has been increasingly present in the news over the last year or so. It's in terms of mainstream news coverage.

It's definitely not something that has been unknown. But when it comes to like the really mainstream news outlets, and the other is a lot of the things that Sylvia and the young people that she and Marsha were looking after, you know, twenty years ago, a lot of those issues still really exist today. Like there are still a lot of homeless transgender youth who've basically been thrown out of their homes by their parents and don't really have anywhere

else to turn. So I think her legacy is extremely important, not just for having been part of the gay rights movement, but for specifically when it comes to working with homeless young people who don't really have anywhere else to go. Yeah, extremely high risk community in terms of violence, falling into sex work, you know, just really being in at risk situations.

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