She Fought for the Right to Be Just Herself

Gender is not a duality and Sylvia Rivera’s life was a good example of that fact. She used feminine pronouns but had mixed feelings about the term transgender. She rejected the idea of surgical changes and only took hormone therapy later in her life. She fought for the rights of all sexualities and gender identities and embraced many labels though “drag queen” and “queen” were her principle term even though she never performed in drag shows.

Rivera was born on July 2, 1951, in the Bronx, New York, to Puerto Rican and Venezuelan parents. Her father abandoned Rivera and her mother early. By the time that Rivera was just three years old, her mother committed suicide. Her maternal grandmother, Viejita, stepped in to raise her but the two clashed over Rivera’s dark skin tone and feminine identity to such a negative degree that Rivera was living on the streets and engaging in sex work to survive by the age of 11. A local community of drag queens found and took her in, naming her Sylvia.

Determining Rivera’s activism is a bit tricky because of conflicting accounts, but this is what is known. In 1969 or 1970, she was arrested in Times Square while trying to get signatures in support of Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act, the first proposed positive gay and lesbian legislation in the New York City Council. The charges against Rivera were related to solicitation for sex but we know at that time there was extreme police hostility toward such activism so the claims against her may have been manufactured.

In 1970, Rivera joined the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) which was formed as a political neutral gay and lesbian rights group about six months after Stonewall. Rivera is alternatively mentioned as active part of Stonewall or not present at all depending on the source. Rivera worked to promote the inclusion of drag queens and transgender individuals in the work of the organization but also in the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a short-lived group (1970-1973) which she co-founded with Marsha P. Johnson, a prominent Stonewall and Gay Liberation Front founder. She also participated in the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March that same year.

Rivera’s outspokenness was not always welcomed by gay and lesbian groups. In 1973, she gave a speech representing STAR that called out heterosexual men who were preying on the community at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally in New York City. At that same rally, she was interrupted by feminist activist Jean O’Leary, or perhaps she interrupted O’Leary’s speech, reports vary, but either way, Rivera used that moment to speak out on the silencing of drag queens within lesbian rights and feminist organizations.  She, Johnson, and other drag queens were banned from such events because they “embarrassed” the movements. Rivera was continually angered by the increasing focus of gay and lesbian organizations to “assimilate” into mainstream heterosexual culture.

After a failed suicide attempt in the light of the O’Leary incident, Rivera seems to have withdrawn from public activism for two decades though she continued to help her “children” – gender nonconforming and queer minorities who struggle with poverty because of the multiple layers of discrimination they face. She was an active member of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York City (MCC-NY) and directed in their food pantry. She also was a leader in the MCC-NY’s Gender People program and their Queer Youth Shelter was named after her. During this time Rivera struggled with substance abuse and homelessness but never stopped helping others in the same situation.

Her ban from New York’s Gay & Lesbian Community Center in 1993 through 2000, happened because she violently demanded that they take care of the poor and homeless within the community. This triggered her fire to rejoin the public struggle. In 1994, she led an “illegal” march in honor of the25th anniversary of Stonewall. In 1997, she joined the Transy House Collective in Brooklyn. She was invited to speak around the world on the struggles and rights of non-gender conforming people.

In 2000, Rivera restarted STAR but changed the “T” to transgender to reflect a change in terminology that was beginning to take root in NYC culture. Their work resulted in greater inclusiveness on the issue of gender and sexuality in the agendas of the Human Rights Organization. STAR also worked with the New York State Transgender Coalition on legal issues.

Rivera died from liver cancer on February 19, 2002. Even in the last hours of her life, while suffering in the hospital, she was meeting with representatives from the Empire State Pride Agenda to get them to include trans rights in their legislation. Her “children” and her life partner Julia Murray continued her work. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project was created in Rivera’s honor in 2002 and still works on legal rights through this day.

After her death, Rivera has received honors for her work such as being inducted into The Legacy Project of Chicago. In 2005, the corner of Christopher and Hudson Streets in NYC was renamed Sylvia Rivera Way. In 2013, a new student group called Baldwin Rivera Boggs Social Justice Hub was recognized at The New School university in NYC and a center was created for that group in 2014. In 2015, she became the first transgender American to have a portrait in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, though among her photo collection are other activists. She was inducted into the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall National Monument in 2019. That same year she received a plague along the San Francisco Rainbow Honor Walk and the Parco Sylvia Rivera was dedicated to her in Livorno, Italy. In 2019, there was an announcement that she and Johnson will be represented by a monument in NYC in Greenwich Village as part of its She Built NYC art campaign.