SYMHC Classics: Sylvia Rivera

This 2014 episode covers transgender activist Sylvia Rivera. She became famous, in part, for participating in the Stonewall riots, and she spent her life campaigning bravely, stridently and vocally for the rights of gay and transgender people.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. The Stonewall Uprising started on June twenty eighth,
nineteen sixty nine, or fifty six years ago today. On
the day that we are publishing this episode, we talked
about this Center episode on Sylvia Rivera, which first came
out on October eighth, twenty fourteen. That is today's classic,
and since it is more than ten years old, we

(00:24):
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

(00:45):
more of an uprising, and ones who feel just as
strongly that Stonewall was a riot. So enjoy and also
happy Pride.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Wilson and I'm Holly fromy SO. Today's subject, which is
transgender activist Sylvia Rivera, is often compared to Rosa Parks

(01:18):
like I would say seventy percent of the articles that
I read researching this episode compared her to Rosa Parks.
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

(01:41):
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,

(02:03):
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

(02:26):
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.

(02:47):
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

(03:08):
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

(03:29):
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

(03:51):
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

(04:11):
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

(04:33):
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

(04:56):
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

(05:16):
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

(05:37):
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

(05:57):
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

(06:19):
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.

(06:43):
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

(07:05):
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,

(07:26):
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

(07:47):
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

(08:09):
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,

(08:33):
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

(08:55):
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.

(09:18):
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

(09:38):
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

(09:59):
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

(10:19):
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

(10:42):
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.

(11:05):
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

(11:28):
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

(11:49):
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

(12:10):
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,

(12:34):
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.

(12:56):
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

(13:19):
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

(13:39):
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

(14:02):
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,

(14:25):
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

(14:47):
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

(15:08):
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.

(15:30):
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,

(15:52):
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

(16:13):
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,

(16:35):
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

(16:55):
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,

(17:15):
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

(17:36):
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

(17:57):
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

(18:18):
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

(18:41):
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

(19:08):
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

(19:29):
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

(19:50):
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.

(20:13):
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

(20:36):
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

(20:56):
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

(21:19):
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,

(21:41):
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

(22:03):
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

(22:25):
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,

(22:46):
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.

(23:06):
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.

(23:26):
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

(23:47):
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

(24:08):
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

(24:30):
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,

(24:53):
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

(25:14):
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

(25:35):
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.

(25:59):
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

(26:24):
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

(26:44):
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

(27:06):
sex work, you know, just really being in at risk situations.
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since
this episode is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar
over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.

(27:26):
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(27:48):
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