Sylvia Rivera. @sylviarivera-blog - Tumblr Blog

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Rivera’s wife name is Julia Murray. The stereotype that transgendered women cannot be in a relationship with another room is complete blasphemy. Rivera cared for many people in her life, from the homeless youth to her friend Marsha P. Washington. I think its important to note that and to be aware that Rivera had a relationship with a woman regardless of being a trans woman.

#artifact

BOOKS, INTERVIEWS, AND ARTICLES

Stonewall - Martin Duberman

The Gay Militants: How Gay Liberation Began in America, 1969-1971 - Donn Teal

“Sylvia Rivera: A Woman Before Her Time” - Liz Highleyman (from Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation)

“Marsha P. Johnson: New York City Legand” - Tommi Avicolli Mecca (fromSmash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation)

“Queens in Exile, The Forgotten Ones” - Sylvia Rivera (from GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary)

“Rapping With a Street Transvestite Revolutionary: An Interview with Marcia Johnson” (from Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation)

‘I’m glad I was in the Stonewall riot’: Leslie Feinberg interviews Sylvia Rivera

Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries - Leslie Feinberg

“A Woman for Her Time” - Riki Wilchins (from The Village Voice)

Sylvia Rivera: 1951-2002 - Michael Bronski (from Z Magazine)

Sylvia Rivera soundportraits interview (from New York Times Magazine)

Sylvia Rivera soundportraits update from July 4, 2001

Remembering Stonewall soundportraits transcript

Sylvia Rivera New York Times obituary

“Sylvia and Sylvia’s Children: a Battle for a Queer Public” - Benjamin Shepard (from That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation)

Sylvia Rivera’s talk at LGMNY, June 2001

“Still at the back of the bus”: Sylvia Rivera’s struggle - Jessi Gan

The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: “An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail” - Stephen L. Cohen

“Queens, Hookers, and Hustlers: Organizing for Survival and Revolt Amongst Gender-Variant Sex Workers, 1950-1970” - Mack Friedman

“Eliding trans Latino/a queer experience in U.S. LGBT history: José Sarria and Sylvia Rivera reexamined” - Tim Retzloff

“Sylvia Rivera: Fighting in Her Heels: Stonewall, Civil Rights, and Liberation” - Layli Phillips and Shomari Olugbala (from The Human Tradition in the Civil Rights Movement)

“History or Myth? Writing Stonewall” - Benjamin Shepard

Transgender Warriors: making history from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman - Leslie Feinberg

“From Community Organization to Direct Services: The Street Trans Action Revolutionaries to Sylvia Rivera Law Project” - Benjamin Shepard

“Sylvia Rivera: She was more than Stonewall” - jerimarie liesegang

“Amanda Milan and the rebirth of the Street Trans Action Revolutionaries” - Benjamin Shepard (in From Act Up to the WTO)

“Transvestites: your half sisters and half brothers of the Revolution” - Sylvia Rivera (from Come Out! Magazine 1971)

“Sylvia Goes to College: ‘Gay Is Proud’ at NYU” - Arthur Bell (from the Village Voice, October 15, 1970)

“Street Transvestites for Gay Power” (October 1971)

FILMS

Pay it No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson

Sylvia Rivera: Trans Movement Founder

Sylvia Rivera speaking at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade after being mocked and repressed by lesbian feminists and gay men

Clip from Market This featuring Sylvia

Sylvia Rivera at World Pride 2000

Changing House (a short documentary on Transy House)

Randy Wicker Interviews Sylvia Rivera on the Pier

Marsha P. Johnson home video

Marsha P. Johnson - People’s Memorial

Marsha P. Johnson In Person

Marsha P. Johnson at Baltimore Pride 1991

PHOTOGRAPHS

Marsha P. Johnson photo collection (by Randy Wicker)

Sylvia Rivera photo collection (by Randy Wicker)

Sylvia Rivera, Julia Murray & Randy Wicker at Wicker’s Lighting store, Uplight Lighting.

#evidence

Sylvia Rivera pictured in Randy Wicker’s store.

#evidence

In 2005, the corner of Christopher and Hudson streets was renamed "Sylvia Rivera Way" in her honour

The Sylvia Rivera Law Project. A project that was not created by Rivera herself, but an organization aimed to help low income transgendered individuals to remain off the streets. In order to do this, their approach and goal in mind is to create a community that prevents discrimination by educated people and raising awareness. For oppressed people who are constantly victimised and are suffering the SRLP is a platform to provide them with tools to help ‘fight their own liberation.’

For this project to strive and succeed, many others must stand behind the SRLP. The birth of this project and inspiration over that night that occurred many years ago at Stonewall, exemplifies that if Rivera will be a fighter for the truth, that collectively we can as well. Just like Rivera stated in her interview with Feinberg, “...we still got a long way ahead of us.” An organization such as the SRLP to succeed requires ambitious individuals to remain ambitious and to not give up the fight of the dominant heteronormative society.

An important organization that Rivera was engaged with during her life was the STAR. This organization stands for Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, later renamed to, Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries. This was an activist organization that Johnson and Rivera kept the young transgendered youth of New York safe by hustlin the streets so they wouldn’t have to do the same.

“I remember singing but I haven’t overcome a damn thing. I’m not even in the back of the bus. My community is being pulled by a rope around our neck by the bumper of the damn bus that stays in the front. Gay liberation but transgender nothing! I am tired of seeing homeless transgender children; young, gay, youth children. I am tired of seeing the lack of interest that this rich community has. This is a very affluent community. When we can afford to rerenovate a building for millions and millions of dollars and buy another building across the street and still not worry about your homeless children from your community, and I know this for a fact, because… I saw many of the kids before the building was being renovated up the street, many of the children are sleeping on the steps of that church…”

What has happened to me since the riots? Well, I became a junkie for many years. And then I got off of junk and ended up hustling the streets again. (Even then I was working hard for the movement.) Then I moved to Westchester, and I ended up having lovely jobs in food service. My lover Frank and I bought a house. Unfortunately we went into crack and we lost it. That's how I ended up homeless. So I moved to a pier in the West Village. That first winter was one of the worst, with all the snow and everything, but we survived. I was the typical mother to all the children living out there -- everybody came to Sylvia when they needed advice or comfort. I guess it comes from not having a mother or not having any love when you were a child and always being told that no one wanted you. When I see someone that's alone, and the person is hurting and they need some comfort, my heart opens up. I can't say no if they need a little help. I lived on the pier for about a year and a half. Now I live in Transie House in Brooklyn. (That's "Transgender House.") It's a house for all transgendered people or anyone who has a problem. Everybody calls me Ma -- Ma Sylvia. We help everybody that we can and we get involved in everything that we can: Matthew Shepard, Diallo, Louima. We just go all over getting arrested. We do dish at each other every once in a while, but what do you expect out of a bunch of transgendered ladies? My future wife is Julia Murray. Before I met her, I had heard about Julia. Julia was -- can I say this? Julia had lost her mind for a while, O.K.? Like most transgendered people do. We all get confused, we lose our minds, we end up in hospitals. Julia had lost her mind. And when I was moving into Transie House, Julia was just coming home. We became very good friends. The beautiful part about Julia is that she never likes to sleep alone, so she would always come down to the living room (that was my room in Transie House) and lie on the rug. And I'd tell her "lie on the bed." We did this for a long time and we spent a lot of time together as friends. Then one day it just happened, and we've been lovers ever since. That was four months ago. We plan to get married in a church in the early spring of next year. I never thought that I was going to get into the situation of marrying somebody, but I'm very happy. I don't plan on getting a sex change as my partner has already done. But I feel that both of us being transgendered, we understand what the other has gone through. We have always been with men, but the men that we have met in our lives haven't been able to give us the sensitivity that we share between ourselves. She's a person that has made my life different. She's helped me -- I'm not doing drugs, and I'm not drinking so much. It's just that we're happy together. And people have to understand that: people are people. We just want to be ourselves. And she's a great person for me. When I was young, I never thought I was going to be a part of gay history -- I didn't even expect that gay history would be in existence. So there's a lot of joy in my heart to see the 30th anniversary of Stonewall. You know what was beautiful about that night? To see the brothers and sisters stand as a unified people. But I do get depressed when this time of year comes around: for 30 years I've been struggling and fighting, and I still feel like an outcast in the gay community.

I left home at age 10 in 1961. I hustled on 42nd Street. The early 60s was not a good time for drag queens, effeminate boys or boys that wore makeup like we did. Back then we were beat up by the police, by everybody. I didn't really come out as a drag queen until the late 60s. When drag queens were arrested, what degradation there was. I remember the first time I got arrested, I wasn't even in full drag. I was walking down the street and the cops just snatched me. We always felt that the police were the real enemy. We expected nothing better than to be treated like we were animals-and we were. We were stuck in a bullpen like a bunch of freaks. We were disrespected. A lot of us were beaten up and raped. When I ended up going to jail, to do 90 days, they tried to rape me. I very nicely bit the shit out of a man. I've been through it all. In 1969, the night of the Stonewall riot, was a very hot, muggy night. We were in the Stonewall [bar] and the lights came on. We all stopped dancing. The police came in. They had gotten their payoff earlier in the week. But Inspector Pine came in-him and his morals squad-to spend more of the government's money. We were led out of the bar and they cattled us all up against the police vans. The cops pushed us up against the grates and the fences. People started throwing pennies, nickels, and quarters at the cops. And then the bottles started. And then we finally had the morals squad barricaded in the Stonewall building, because they were actually afraid of us at that time. They didn't know we were going to react that way. We were not taking any more of this shit. We had done so much for other movements. It was time. It was street gay people from the Village out front-homeless people who lived in the park in Sheridan Square outside the bar-and then drag queens behind them and everybody behind us. The Stonewall Inn telephone lines were cut and they were left in the dark. One Village Voice reporter was in the bar at that time. And according to the archives of the Village Voice, he was handed a gun from Inspector Pine and told, "We got to fight our way out of there." This was after one Molotov cocktail was thrown and we were ramming the door of the Stonewall bar with an uprooted parking meter. So they were ready to come out shooting that night. Finally the Tactical Police Force showed up after 45 minutes. A lot of people forget that for 45 minutes we had them trapped in there. All of us were working for so many movements at that time. Everyone was involved with the women's movement, the peace movement, the civil-rights movement. We were all radicals. I believe that's what brought it around. You get tired of being just pushed around. STAR came about after a sit-in at Wein stein Hall at New York University in 1970. Later we had a chapter in New York, one in Chicago, one in California and England. STAR was for the street gay people, the street homeless people and anybody that needed help at that time. Marsha and I had always sneaked people into our hotel rooms. Marsha and I decided to get a building. We were trying to get away from the Mafia's control at the bars. We got a building at 213 East 2nd Street. Marsha and I just decided it was time to help each other and help our other kids. We fed people and clothed people. We kept the building going. We went out and hustled the streets. We paid the rent. We didn't want the kids out in the streets hustling. They would go out and rip off food. There was always food in the house and everyone had fun. It lasted for two or three years. We would sit there and ask, "Why do we suffer?" As we got more involved into the movements, we said, "Why do we always got to take the brunt of this shit?" Later on, when the Young Lords [revolutionary Puerto Rican youth group] came about in New York City, I was already in GLF [Gay Liberation Front]. There was a mass demonstration that started in East Harlem in the fall of 1970. The protest was against police repression and we decided to join the demonstration with our STAR banner. That was one of first times the STAR banner was shown in public, where STAR was present as a group. I ended up meeting some of the Young Lords that day. I became one of them. Any time they needed any help, I was always there for the Young Lords. It was just the respect they gave us as human beings. They gave us a lot of respect. It was a fabulous feeling for me to be myself-being part of the Young Lords as a drag queen-and my organization [STAR] being part of the Young Lords. I met [Black Panther Party leader] Huey Newton at the Peoples' Revolutionary Convention in Philadelphia in 1971. Huey decided we were part of the revolution-that we were revolutionary people. I was a radical, a revolutionist. I am still a revolutionist. I was proud to make the road and help change laws and what-not. I was very proud of doing that and proud of what I'm still doing, no matter what it takes. Today, we have to fight back against the government. We have to fight them back. They're cutting back Medicaid, cutting back on medicine for people with AIDS. They want to take away from women on welfare and put them into that little work program. They're going to cut SSI. Now they're taking away food stamps. These people who want the cuts-these people are making millions and millions and millions of dollars as CEOs. Why is the government going to take it away from us? What they're doing is cutting us back. Why can't we have a break? I'm glad I was in the Stonewall riot. I remember when someone threw a Molotov cocktail, I thought: "My god, the revolution is here. The revolution is finally here!" I always believed that we would have a fight back. I just knew that we would fight back. I just didn't know it would be that night. I am proud of myself as being there that night. If I had lost that moment, I would have been kind of hurt because that's when I saw the world change for me and my people. Of course, we still got a long way ahead of us.

Sylvia Rivera

A clip of Video on the Internet shows the energetic, enigmatic, passionate Sylvia Rivera, at a young age approximately 17, at the StoneWall Riots. Rivera was preaching to the LGBT community for them to not only dismiss the TRANS community and to embrace and realize that beatings, the rapes that this community has faced. “It’s the revolution!” She exclaims. Little did she know, how much she would have influenced the trans movement today.

#evidence

The image titled, “Respect Trans” was photographed by Luis Carle in 2001. Pictured in the photograph is Sylvia Rivera alongside with her partner Julia Murray and Christina Hayworth. The picture ended up being in the National Gallery

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