Sylvia Rivera threw one of the first bottles in the Stonewall riots, but her activism went much further
‘It was a fabulous feeling for me to be myself’
Sylvia Rivera was a queen before her time. Born to a Puerto Rican father and Venezuelan mother in the Bronx in 1951, she was soon abandoned by her father and orphaned at age three when her mother committed suicide. Her grandmother adopted her, but had little love for her effeminate grandson. Rivera started hustling on the streets of Times Square when she was 11, relieved to leave behind the ridicule and brutal judgment of the woman she called “viejita,” or little old lady.
Though she spent the rest of her life in and out of homelessness, drug addiction, and poverty, Rivera became a one-woman political force in the gay liberation movement of the 1960s. In an equally impressive and lesser-known feat, she influenced the development of political groups representing people of color in the New Left in the late 1960s. At a time of rampant machismo, Rivera earned respect, albeit fleetingly, for queers in the militant New Left, while she advocated for the rights of trans people and people of color in the gay liberation movement.
Rivera is rumored to have thrown one of the first bottles at police during the Stonewall uprising. She would have fit right in. The crowd, according to witness Titus Montalvo, was 70 percent African American and Puerto Rican, and fronted in part by trans men and women, a fact that Rivera emphasized at every opportunity. “We were the frontliners,” Rivera later told interviewers. “We didn’t take no shit from nobody,” she explained. “We had nothing to lose.”
That attitude eventually made her a legend in the LGBT community, but in the 1960s, middle-class gays who made up organizations like the Mattachine Society and the Gay Activist Alliance were afraid of her. Rivera was a bony, beautiful, loud, and demanding drag queen (the term she applied to herself). She was also an impoverished Latina sex worker. A founder of the the Gay Activist Alliance later admitted that “the general membership is frightened of Sylvia and thinks she’s a troublemaker. They’re frightened by street people.”
With few others willing to pick up the slack, Rivera felt compelled to help trans kids who ended up homeless and hustling. She started to call them “her children.” After Stonewall, in 1970, she started an organization called Street Transvestite Active Revolutionary, and later a home called STAR House. She and her partner kept both afloat with their sex work so her children wouldn’t have to hustle. The kids stole food for people living in STAR House.
Soon after STAR started, Rivera heard that an uprising against police brutality was kicking off uptown, led by the Young Lords, a revolutionary group of young Puerto Ricans. She and other members of STAR beat a path to Spanish Harlem, and marched alongside the Young Lords. “That was one of the first times the STAR banner was shown in public,” Rivera recalled, “where STAR was present as a group.” Rivera was surprised, happily, by the “respect they gave us as human beings.”
Pablo Guzman, part of the Young Lord’s leadership, acknowledged that gay liberation groups “were on the same road we were.” His thinking was shaped by Denise Oliver, Iris Morales, and other women in the Young Lords who had demanded leadership roles. Working with women as equals, and the creation of a Women’s Caucus within the organization, forced Guzman and other Young Lords to think critically about gender and sexuality. Guzman called gay liberation “a whole other trip,” though, and a much harder sell for Young Lords than women’s liberation. “It’s a lot quicker for people to accept the fact that sisters should be in front of the struggle than saying we’re going to have gay people in the Party.”
Rivera was quick to solidarity with the Puerto Rican movement, and started a Gay and Lesbian Caucus that worked with the Women’s Caucus within the Young Lords. “I became one of them,” she explained. “It was a fabulous feeling for me to be myself — being part of the Young Lords as a drag queen.”
The same year, in 1970, Huey Newton gave a speech in favor of alliances with radical gay liberation groups at a national convention of revolutionary organizations in Washington D.C. Misogyny and homophobia, he argued, were rooted in fear. “We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the women or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with.” These fears, he told the crowd, were unacceptable in a truly revolutionary movement.
That openness on the part of organizations of the New Left representing people of color was short lived. Like the Black Panthers, the Young Lords were targeted by COINTELPRO, and split by internal divisions that led to their demise. After just a few years of acceptance, between 1970 and 1972, Rivera lost her allies.
Meanwhile, the gay liberation movement became even more hostile to transgender people, turning their backs on the ongoing police brutality they faced. She pushed and fought her way through people she once considered her allies, shoving them out of her way to make it onstage. She thundered at the crowd of gay activists as they tried to boo and curse her off the stage: “I’ve been trying to get up here all day, for your gay brothers and your gay sisters who are in jail, and write me, every motherfucking week, and ask for your help. And you all don’t do a goddamn thing for them.”
She started on an articulate rampage, forcing the audience to at least hear about the beatings and rapes her children had endured in jails and at the hands of police, and castigating the mainstream gay rights movement for abandoning them. In the end, though, she broke down in sobs as she led the rally in a cheer: “Give me a G!” she demanded, and spelled out “gay power,” a chant the crowd joined reluctantly at first, and then with enthusiasm. Rivera made it almost to the last letter before she started crying.
It would be her last hurrah for decades to come. She left activism behind after the rally, moving to Tarrytown and working in food manufacturing until the 1990s, when she slowly returned to public life. She was a main character in Martin Duberman’s Stonewall, the seminal history of the uprising, published in 1993. She gave speeches at universities, including CUNY. But she never really recovered, still cycling through addiction, homelessness, and suicide attempts. Rivera died at 50 from advanced liver cancer, advocating for trans and homeless queer kids from her hospital deathbed.
She knew her dream was unrealized. “We used to sit around, just try and figure out when this harassment would come to an end. And we would always dream that one day it would come to an end. And we prayed and we looked for it. We wanted to be human beings.”
Rivera, at least, has been recognized, in ways that would have pleased her. She’s had a street named after her in the Village, and her photograph is displayed at the National Portrait Gallery. She probably would have been happiest, though, with an organization that “works 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.” It’s called the Sylvia Rivera Law Project.
A pervious version of this story misstated Denise Oliver’s first name.
