On Communities

An exploration of Sylvia and Marsha, STAR and their legacy.

I.

When I first figured out I liked boys, I cried for days. My Catholic community had drilled into me that love wasn’t even binary; it was just a union between a boy and a girl. Liking boys was shameful, something to be hidden, and playground taunts at my religious primary school only reinforced it. My only other identity was online, where being gay was banned by homophobic moderators. I had no one to turn to.

By the time I found out I was more girl than boy (of course, as Virginia Woolf theorised, our brains are a mixture between male and female, girl and boy, man and woman), I had found a community: one where I was accepted for whatever I was. I would not be alive if it were not for this community. It saved me from a suicide caused by loneliness and bigotry.

I realise now that I owe this community to my foremothers, the people who fucked with gender before I was even born (I hesitate to say they were on the transgender spectrum, as that didn’t exist when many, or even most, of them fucked).

II.

Two people I fell in debt to by discovering this community are Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. By all accounts, Johnson and Rivera were colourful characters (Marsha “was like an angel”, and it’s safe to assume Sylvia was too), and identified as queens.

You can’t talk about the two without talking about their involvement in Stonewall. At the time, the two were on the outskirts of queer society, with the street kids and the various types of queens (drag, flame, and scare). This pocket culture “felt a special loyalty to [Stonewall]… these gay [or gender-variant] homeless youths were ideal candidates to fight”. The climate of the time was dominated by homophile activists. The Mattachine Society, a major activism group, was dedicated to “the integration of the homosexual as a responsible and acceptable citizen in the Community”. This meant that if your ideal didn’t fit into the “married-with-two-point-four-kids” heteronormative status quo, you were ignored by the activist community.

The street kids were not this; Linda Hirshman describes them thus:

[T]ypically, involuntary orphans, born into heterosexual families and orphaned when their parents find out about their differences. They are often as young as thirteen or fourteen, and frequently from middle class or educated backgrounds. Although traumatized by the treatment they have received at the hands of their families or communities, desperate, hungry, hustling, and thieving, they are still functioning, resourceful adolescents. They were capable of becoming a crowd. As thinkers have known since the French Revolution, a crowd is filled with possibility.

Sylvia Rivera was a street kid. She had run away from home when she was eleven, and lived on the streets for a period of years. She met Marsha P. Johnson in the community of street kids (Johnson was a “boy hustler”, and while “not one of the street youth per se, she was very much of the street”) around six years before Stonewall. Johnson was seventeen and Sylvia was eleven when they met.

Both were present at the Stonewall Riots. Sylvia “used to go there to pick up drugs to take somewhere else”, and was as much a regular as a drag queen could be back in the day.

III.

After the riots, Rivera and Johnson were inspired to become politically conscious in the queer community. While Johnson guided Rivera through her early years on the street, it was in politics that Rivera guided Johnson. Rivera was influential within the Gay Liberation Front’s first few years. However, she eventually grew tired of the “mainly middle-class, mostly white” activists. Duberman has this to say on her treatment:

Sylvia was from the wrong ethnic group, from the wrong side of the tracks, wearing the wrong clothes-managing single-handedly and simultaneously to embody several frightening, overlapping categories of Otherness. By her mere presence, she was likely to trespass against some encoded middle-class script, and could count on being patronised when not being summarily excluded. If someone was not shunning her darker skin or sniggering at her passionate, fractured English, they were deploring her rude anarchism as inimical to order, or denouncing her sashaying ways as offensive to womanhood.

Arthur Bell, a co-founder of GLF, is quoted in Duberman as claiming “the general membership is frightened by Sylvia and thinks she’s a troublemaker.” More damningly, he adds that “they’re frightened by street people.”

Due to this (or perhaps despite) overwhelming hegemony, Rivera and fellow transvestite, Bubbles Rose Marie, founded STAR. Its aim was to house young “street queens” instead of leaving them out on the streets. In Johnson’s own words, STAR was founded to give “all gay people… equal rights” because “nobody… is going to stand up for transvestites”.

This proved true on the Pride of 1973.

IV.

Despite her verifiable queer credits, she was about to be discouraged from the cause — and at Pride, no less. Rivera had recently got into a nasty spat with Jean O’Leary, a white cis radical lesbian feminist. O’Leary claimed that transgender women were mocking cis women in their gender presentation, and aimed to take them down.

At that Pride, she succeeded.

At the last minute, the schedule was changed: no drag queens were to perform. Rivera had scheduled a speech months before, and she was stubborn. There was no way she wouldn’t speak at Pride. She fought her way onto the stage.

The crowd, riled by O’Leary, booed Rivera before she had a chance to speak. “Y’all better quiet down,” she cries. Trans* women, she says, “write to STAR, because we’re trying to do something for them”. Despite the bumpy beginning, the force of her words and her magnetism brings the crowd to her side within two minutes. She ends with a yelp of “Revolution now!” and leads the crowd to a chant of “Gay power!” This is when she loses her power. Her voice stumbles, and she realises that the mainstream movement will never accept people like her.

Rivera left the movement for decades, and attempted suicide. In 1998, Rivera revealed that she “get[s] depressed when [the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots] comes around” because she “still feel[s] like an outcast” (Rivera) despite the work that she had done to incorporate transgender people in the gay liberation movement.

Next on the schedule of the ’73 Pride was Lee Brewster, a transgender woman who bankrolled the gay movement. She had seen the battle between Rivera and O’Leary and come to the same realisation as Sylvia had. She took her tiara off her head, and threw it into the crowd. “Fuck gay liberation!” she spat, and walked off the stage.

V.

This is where my community was founded; this is how my community was found.

STAR was not only ideas; one of its major platforms was setting up the STAR House, a place where homeless trans* woman sex workers could find peace and quiet. Though it lasted less than a year, STAR House is significant as “the first political/social initiative of the trans community in New York City”.

Based on the house system immortalised in Paris is Burning, the “house mothers” (Johnson, Rivera, Bubbles Rose Marie, Andorra Marks, and Bambi L’Amour — give or take a few) “would hustle to pay the rent” and the tenants (their “children”) “would scrounge for food”. However, it came to an end, as all things must. Rivera and Johnson fell behind on rent. When they approached the GAA for help with rent, their request was denied. Despite the sour ending, Rivera looked back on it fondly: “everybody had fun”, she told Leslie Feinberg for Trans Liberation. The house “lasted for two or three years”, and has inspired a host of imitations — some more successful than others.

One such example of the STAR imitations was a house that Rivera lived the last years of her life in: the Transy House. If it was not for Transy House, Rivera would have died a homeless alcoholic in the piers. Untold more have been saved by these houses; an estimate is impossible.

VI.

A direct lineage can be traced from Sylvia and Marsha to STAR House to Transy House to the modern day trans* movement. Today the battle is fought through social media, spearheaded by the first trans* household names: Janet Mock and Laverne Cox. Both of these women have worked with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, bringing awareness to the plight of the lower income gender variant.

Even Caitlyn Jenner, a white Republican, is part of Rivera and Johnson’s legacy. As trans* people, we are “sitting on the shoulder of giants”. It is impossible to know if any of these people would have come out were it not for Sylvia, Marsha, and all the women in STAR. However, life would be a lot worse were it not for them.

So, to all those giants whose shoulders I’m sitting on: thank you. You are the only thing that allowed me to come out, and I hope that I do you proud.

For a PDF file including citations and footnotes, click here.