Sylvia Rivera spent her life insisting that the people with the least protection should be at the centre of the fight, not at its edges. It made her unpopular with some of the movement's leaders in her lifetime. It is much of the reason she is remembered now.
Who was Sylvia Rivera?
She was born in New York in 1951, of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan heritage. After a difficult childhood she was living on the streets of New York while still a child, among other gay and gender-nonconforming young people who had nowhere else to go.
The words she used for herself changed over her life, as did the words available. Today she is widely remembered as a trans woman and a trans rights pioneer.
Stonewall
Rivera is closely associated with the Stonewall uprising of June 1969 in New York. She said she was there, and she became one of its best-known voices. Historians still debate exactly who was present on the first night, and it is fair to say that her importance does not depend on settling that question.
STAR
In 1970, with her friend Marsha P. Johnson, she co-founded STAR, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. STAR worked to shelter and feed homeless young drag queens and trans people in New York, and for a time ran a house for them. It was mutual aid before the phrase was common.
The 1973 speech
At a gay liberation rally in New York in 1973, Rivera took the stage against resistance from parts of the crowd and delivered a furious speech about the trans people and street queens who were in prison and being beaten, while the movement looked away. Recordings of it still circulate, and it is often called one of the defining moments of trans activism.
Her legacy
Rivera stepped away from activism for long periods and returned to it later in life, still pushing for trans people to be included in rights legislation. She died in 2002. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, founded that year in New York, carries her name and works on legal help for trans and gender-nonconforming people.
Her insistence that nobody should be left behind is also, in its small way, why spaces built only for trans people exist today.
Wren · Editor
Wren is the name the T4TSpace blog is published under. The posts are written by the small team that builds the app, and signed with one name so the voice stays the same from one piece to the next.