Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. The Stonewall Uprising started on June twenty eighth,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, or fifty six years ago today. On
Speaker 1: the day that we are publishing this episode, we talked
Speaker 1: about this Center episode on Sylvia Rivera, which first came
Speaker 1: out on October eighth, twenty fourteen. That is today's classic,
Speaker 1: and since it is more than ten years old, we
Speaker 1: just really feel compelled to note that language has evolved
Speaker 1: about some of the things that are part of this episode,
Speaker 1: like how to talk about homelessness and addiction, and whether
Speaker 1: Stonewall is best described as a riot and uprising, a rebellion,
Speaker 1: or some other term. At this point, there are people
Speaker 1: who feel really passionately that Stonewall should be described as
Speaker 1: more of an uprising, and ones who feel just as
Speaker 1: strongly that Stonewall was a riot. So enjoy and also
Speaker 1: happy Pride.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 2: of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 2: Wilson and I'm Holly fromy SO. Today's subject, which is
Speaker 2: transgender activist Sylvia Rivera, is often compared to Rosa Parks
Speaker 2: like I would say seventy percent of the articles that
Speaker 2: I read researching this episode compared her to Rosa Parks.
Speaker 2: Rosa Parks, as you probably know, became famous in part
Speaker 2: for refusing to give up her bus seat on a
Speaker 2: segregated bus, and Sylvia Rivera became famous in part for
Speaker 2: purportedly throwing the first bottle at a police officer during
Speaker 2: the Stonewall Riots. But really, Rosa Parks and Sylvia Rivera
Speaker 2: almost could not be more different from each other. Rosa
Speaker 2: Parks's case was chosen specifically to try to overturn a
Speaker 2: bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, precisely because she seemed really polite.
Speaker 2: She was married, she was soft spoken, she went to church,
Speaker 2: and she had no criminal records, so basically there was
Speaker 2: nothing in her background that might turn white people off
Speaker 2: to the idea that she deserved the same basic civil
Speaker 2: rights that they did. Sylvia Rivera, on the other hand,
Speaker 2: has a lot more in common with Claudette Colvin, who
Speaker 2: was also arrested for refusing to give up a seat
Speaker 2: on a segregated bus in Montgomery. But Claudette Culvin did
Speaker 2: not become the household name that Rosa Parks did because
Speaker 2: she was an unmarried, pregnant teenager who had a reputation
Speaker 2: for being a troublemaker. Civil rights leaders deliberately didn't pursue
Speaker 2: her case because they knew it would be a hard
Speaker 2: one to win. They held out for a more so
Speaker 2: called respectable plaintiff instead, And that brings us to Sylvia Rivera.
Speaker 2: In the years immediately after the Stonewall Riots, she campaigned
Speaker 2: bravely and stridently and vocally for the rights of gay
Speaker 2: and transgender people. Although the term transgender, which is used
Speaker 2: to describe people whose gender and identity doesn't match up
Speaker 2: with the sex that they were assigned when they were born,
Speaker 2: that word had not been coined yet. But Sylvia was
Speaker 2: also loud and aggressive and angry and poor, sometimes even homeless.
Speaker 2: She had a history of sex work and drug addictions.
Speaker 2: Her mannerisms were really flamboyant, in your face. So when
Speaker 2: the gay rights movement started trending towards so called respectability,
Speaker 2: Sylvia got really pushed to the sidelines, along with a
Speaker 2: lot of other transgender people. She refused to be put
Speaker 2: in a box, and so she wound up being excluded
Speaker 2: from the very movement that she was fighting for, and
Speaker 2: she was for decades pretty much forgotten about So before
Speaker 2: we get started, there's a word of caution about this story.
Speaker 2: Because Sylvia ran away from home when she was only eleven.
Speaker 2: Some of the events that happened to her, especially in
Speaker 2: her young life, are disturbing. So parents and teachers, before
Speaker 2: you share this with young people, I recommend listening to
Speaker 2: it yourself first. And as a second note, some of
Speaker 2: the language that was used at the time that so
Speaker 2: lived and that she used about herself isn't the preferred
Speaker 2: language that we use today, and we'll sort of point
Speaker 2: out those as they come up. So now that you've
Speaker 2: been worn, we will jump in as we usually do,
Speaker 2: at the very beginning. Sylvia was born on July second
Speaker 2: of nineteen fifty one. Her mother was Venezuelan and her
Speaker 2: father was Puerto Rican. Sylvia's mother committed suicide by eating
Speaker 2: rat poison when Sylvia was three. She also tried to
Speaker 2: kill Sylvia at that time, but Sylvia survived and went
Speaker 2: on to be raised by her grandmother, Viahita. Viahita raised
Speaker 2: both Sylvia and Sylvia's half sister. Viahita was essentially functioning
Speaker 2: as a single parent. Her husband had abandoned her and
Speaker 2: Sylvia's father, who had also abandoned the family was not
Speaker 2: paying child support. Sylvia's grandmother was also very strict. Although
Speaker 2: she taught Sylvia to cook and to sew and to knit,
Speaker 2: she really did I did not like it when Sylvia
Speaker 2: started wearing girls clothes. Biahita would punish Sylvia, sometimes physically,
Speaker 2: for wearing makeup and for dressing in girls clothing, and,
Speaker 2: as Sylvia described in the oral history Making History the
Speaker 2: Struggle for gay and Lesbian equal Rights nineteen forty five
Speaker 2: to nineteen ninety, her grandmother would say, quote, we don't
Speaker 2: do this. You're one of the boys. I want you
Speaker 2: to be a mechanic, and Sylvia would answer, no, I
Speaker 2: want to be a hairdresser, and I want to wear
Speaker 2: these clothes. From Sylvia's point of view, her grandmother also
Speaker 2: didn't like her because her skin was too dark. She
Speaker 2: had heard her grandmother say that she wanted a white
Speaker 2: granddaughter instead, and the struggle between the two of them
Speaker 2: went on until, at the age of ten, Sylvia tried
Speaker 2: to commit suicide by taking her grandmother's pills. She wound
Speaker 2: up instead in the hospital for two months. Sylvia also
Speaker 2: faced bullying and harassment at school and in the neighborhood.
Speaker 2: As well. The other children and their neighbors didn't like
Speaker 2: her wearing girl's clothing, and they didn't like her effeminate mannerisms.
Speaker 2: Feeling lonely, isolated, and desperately at odds with everyone around her,
Speaker 2: Sylvia left home at age eleven. The straw that really
Speaker 2: broke the camel's back was seeing how others treatment of
Speaker 2: her was affecting her grandmother. Even though their relationship was
Speaker 2: often contentious and strained and even violent, Sylvia did not
Speaker 2: like seeing her grandmother suffer over the way people talked
Speaker 2: about her. After she ran away, Sylvia went to forty
Speaker 2: second Street in New York City, which was a haven
Speaker 2: for cross dressers and street walkers. She had no other
Speaker 2: means to support herself, and so she turned to sex work.
Speaker 2: And I want to make it clear that there are
Speaker 2: people who choose to go into sex work, but at
Speaker 2: this time, Sylvia was eleven and she had no other options.
Speaker 2: The area's drag queens pretty much adopted her, and they're
Speaker 2: the ones who gave her the name Sylvia. Sylvia was
Speaker 2: arrested frequently, and her grandmother would come and bail her
Speaker 2: out a few days. Shy of Sylvia's eighteenth birthday. She
Speaker 2: went to the Stonewall Inn for the first time, and
Speaker 2: this was June twenty eth eighth of nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 2: The Stonewall Inn was, like many of New York's bars
Speaker 2: that catered to the Gate community at the time, owned
Speaker 2: by the mafia. Homosexuality was a crime, and so was
Speaker 2: cross dressing, so pretty much the only people who were
Speaker 2: willing to operate businesses that catered to this demographic were
Speaker 2: also themselves criminals. Gay bars were rated on a regular basis.
Speaker 2: Standard operating procedure was that the police would come in,
Speaker 2: they would make arrests and confiscations. They would then collect
Speaker 2: a payoff, and then they would leave and padlock the
Speaker 2: door behind them. Not long after the police had gone,
Speaker 2: members of the mafia would come by cut the padlock off.
Speaker 2: They would then restock the alcohol supply and business would
Speaker 2: start right back up. So for the people who didn't
Speaker 2: wind up getting arrested, it was more of a hassle
Speaker 2: and an interruption to their evening's revelry than anything else.
Speaker 2: For people who did get arrested, it could be way
Speaker 2: way harder, not just for the fact that they were
Speaker 2: taken to jail, but often in they were then taunted
Speaker 2: and sometimes beaten and sometimes assaulted by other people who
Speaker 2: were in the jail. On June twenty eighth, when the
Speaker 2: police came in, most of the patrons went to the
Speaker 2: park across the street to wait, and they were tired
Speaker 2: of being hassled. A lot of people say that this
Speaker 2: was because it was the same week that Judy Garland died,
Speaker 2: and that doesn't seem through the oral histories to actually
Speaker 2: add up necessarily. But yeah, it's more a point a
Speaker 2: coincidence than a cause and effect situation. Right At some point,
Speaker 2: somebody started throwing coins at the police officers, yelling things
Speaker 2: like here's your payoff, come get some more, and then
Speaker 2: things started to escalate. People started throwing bottles and Molotov cocktails.
Speaker 2: Sylvia is widely cited as the first to do this,
Speaker 2: but near the end of her life she really worked
Speaker 2: to try to dispel this idea, saying that she was
Speaker 2: in fact the second to throw a bottle. Soon, the
Speaker 2: police were pinned down inside the bar with the protesters outside,
Speaker 2: and the riot went on until reinforcements arrived and dispersed
Speaker 2: the crowd. The Stonewall riot wasn't remotely the first event
Speaker 2: in the modern gay rights movement. It wasn't even the
Speaker 2: first riot in an establishment that was frequented by LGBT people.
Speaker 2: An early earlier example was a riot at Cooper's Donuts
Speaker 2: in Los Angeles in nineteen sixty five, and in that event,
Speaker 2: drag queens and gay men, many of them black or Latino,
Speaker 2: fought back against police, first by throwing donuts, which sounds
Speaker 2: sort of funny, and then with hand to hand fighting,
Speaker 2: much less funny. In San Francisco, a picket protest among
Speaker 2: LGBT protesters turned into a riot at Compton's Cafeteria in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty six. But Stonewall really did act as a
Speaker 2: sort of tipping point in a rallying cry. It's definitely
Speaker 2: the most famous today for sure. So there are several
Speaker 2: things about the riots and Sylvia's presents there that are
Speaker 2: caused for debate today. One is just how much of
Speaker 2: the Stonewall Ends clientele was made up of cross dressers
Speaker 2: and transgender people. Now, as we mentioned before, the term
Speaker 2: transgender had not really been coined at this point in history,
Speaker 2: but when it was coined about ten years later, a
Speaker 2: lot of the people who had identified as cross stressers
Speaker 2: or as transvestites at the time, then went on to
Speaker 2: identify as transgender. So we're going to keep talking about
Speaker 2: both cross dressers and transgender people both for the rest
Speaker 2: of the episode, because there are two different things. Cross
Speaker 2: Dressing is about the clothes you have on and transgender
Speaker 2: is about your gender expression, so your expression of the
Speaker 2: gender that you are inwardly versus the clothes that you
Speaker 2: have on your body. In Sylvia's own words, cross dressers
Speaker 2: could only get and if they knew somebody, because cross
Speaker 2: dressers were really frequently targeted by the police, so a
Speaker 2: lot of businesses felt like it was too much of
Speaker 2: a hassle to deal with them. Other people have characterized
Speaker 2: the Stonewell In as a haven for cross dressers and
Speaker 2: for transgender people, and there are reputable historians on both sides.
Speaker 2: Another bone of contention is actually whether Sylvia herself was
Speaker 2: even there. She says she was, and of course she's
Speaker 2: often credited with being the first bottle thrower, but historians
Speaker 2: have not been able to corroborate her presence there through
Speaker 2: eyewitness accounts. In the end, it doesn't necessarily matter how
Speaker 2: many transgender patrons the Stonewall In had or whether Sylvia
Speaker 2: was actually there that night. What does matter is that
Speaker 2: Sylvia and the rest of the cross dressing and transgender
Speaker 2: community became vocal, aggressive campaigners for the rights of gay
Speaker 2: me in, lesbians, bisexuals, and all manner of people who
Speaker 2: just didn't conform to gender norms. They were, in many
Speaker 2: ways the people who were the most visibly on the
Speaker 2: forefront of the fight for equality and for civil rights.
Speaker 2: And we're going to talk more about what happened after
Speaker 2: Stonewall right after a word from our sponsor. If that
Speaker 2: is cool with Tracy, it is. Sylvia Rivera had already
Speaker 2: been active in racial equality and anti war causes before
Speaker 2: the Stonewall riot, and after the riot she immediately passionately
Speaker 2: turned her attention to the growing movement for gay rights.
Speaker 2: Two gay rights organizations formed in New York in the
Speaker 2: wake of the riot. That was the Gay Activists Alliance
Speaker 2: and the Gay Liberation Front, and Sylvia was active in
Speaker 2: both of those groups. As part of the Gay Activists Alliance,
Speaker 2: Sylvia petitioned the city of New York for an anti
Speaker 2: discrimination bill, and she was arrested while trying to get signatures.
Speaker 2: When she appeared before the judge, he immediately let her go,
Speaker 2: he recognized that with all of the social turmoil that
Speaker 2: was going on in the United States at that point,
Speaker 2: it would be a really unwise pr move for him
Speaker 2: to jail someone who was getting signatures for a petition.
Speaker 2: Sylvia also testified before the city Council to try to
Speaker 2: get the bill pass. However, as the bill was being negotiated,
Speaker 2: others in the gay community agreed to drop protections for
Speaker 2: cross dressers from the bill in the hope that it
Speaker 2: would be more likely to pass. Sylvia and many of
Speaker 2: the other cross dressing and transgender citizens of New York
Speaker 2: felt really deeply betrayed by this. They had been working
Speaker 2: campaigning and getting arrested and sometimes facing abuse and violence
Speaker 2: and sexual assault in jail once they had been arrested
Speaker 2: fighting for these causes, and at this point it felt
Speaker 2: like they had done this for a cause that had
Speaker 2: then turned their back on them. And it didn't help
Speaker 2: that the bill minus discrimination protections for gender expression did
Speaker 2: not actually pass until fifteen years later, so that would
Speaker 2: have been nineteen eighty six, so this concession really in
Speaker 2: the end, was not much of a help. Along the way,
Speaker 2: the Gay Activist's Alliance specifically dropped rights for the cross
Speaker 2: dressing communities from its mission entirely. Consequently, after being excluded
Speaker 2: from other gay rights organisms, Sylvia and her longtime friend
Speaker 2: Marcia P. Johnson co founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries
Speaker 2: or STAR in the fall of nineteen seventy. Essentially, the
Speaker 2: cross dressing and transgender community had begun to feel excluded
Speaker 2: by other gay and lesbian rights organizations, and so they
Speaker 2: formed their own. As a side note to a lot
Speaker 2: of people today, the word transvestite has connotations that are offensive,
Speaker 2: so people a lot of people prefer the word cross dresser,
Speaker 2: but at the time it was a word that they
Speaker 2: were using to talk about themselves frequently. Yeah, you also
Speaker 2: hear drag, which is in there and they O, right,
Speaker 2: get a little fuzzy. And there's still ongoing debate over
Speaker 2: you know, terminology and who should use what to some
Speaker 2: degree that's still being worked out. Yes, so, uh, we're
Speaker 2: not at all using those terms to be disrespectful, but
Speaker 2: because that's those are the words that Sylvia and Marcia
Speaker 2: were using to describe themselves. So Sylvia and Marcia's next
Speaker 2: step was to start what was known as STAR House,
Speaker 2: and this was an hour outreach effort for the so
Speaker 2: called street queens. These were young, homeless gay youth, many
Speaker 2: of whom later went on to identify as transgender, and
Speaker 2: many of whom were also people of color. And they
Speaker 2: originally operated Starhouse out of the back of a truck,
Speaker 2: and then they started renting a building at two thirteen
Speaker 2: East Second Street and they fixed that up and there
Speaker 2: they provided shelter, food, and guidance for homeless transgender youth
Speaker 2: and Sylvia and Marcia really became mother figures for these kids.
Speaker 2: They had a dance to try to raise some money
Speaker 2: to fund their operation, but for the most part, Sylvia
Speaker 2: and Marcia kept the place running by doing sex work.
Speaker 2: They tried to protect all of the young people who
Speaker 2: were in their care from being involved in the sex
Speaker 2: trade at all. However, many of the youth wound up
Speaker 2: helping Starhouse's efforts by stealing food, and eventually, you know,
Speaker 2: this is not really a workable business model. So Starhouse
Speaker 2: was evicted from the property for non payment of rent.
Speaker 2: And before they left, they took the refrigerator and they
Speaker 2: destroyed all of the improvements that they'd made in the
Speaker 2: building out of a sort of turn about as fair
Speaker 2: play mindset, and I feel like, we should point out
Speaker 2: that the reason that they were having to turn to
Speaker 2: stealing and sex work to fund their operations is because
Speaker 2: their entire lives at this point were not only illegal,
Speaker 2: but also specifically targeted by the police and other people
Speaker 2: for harassment. So that was sort of what it had
Speaker 2: come to by being excluded from so many other social
Speaker 2: organizations that were working to help homeless people and others
Speaker 2: in New York. Yeah, it certainly was not like a, oh,
Speaker 2: we don't want to pursue legitimate means of gaining money.
Speaker 2: They just did not have opportunities to do so, right,
Speaker 2: and that continues to be a problem in a lot
Speaker 2: of areas today. Throughout this time, Sylvia was also active
Speaker 2: in other radical organizations as well, including the Black Panther
Speaker 2: Party and the Young Lords, which is a Puerto Rican
Speaker 2: nationalist activism group. In nineteen seventy three, Sylvia I was
Speaker 2: supposed to speak at Christopher Street Liberation Day, which was
Speaker 2: a festival to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. However,
Speaker 2: radical feminists tried to keep Sylvia from the stage because
Speaker 2: they viewed her wearing women's clothing as sexist. In particular,
Speaker 2: activist Gino Leary, a former nun and lesbian feminist, spoke
Speaker 2: out against Sylvia taking part. Sylvia's response was to physically
Speaker 2: grab the microphone and to talk anyway with a lot
Speaker 2: of vigor and profanity behind her words. She spoke very
Speaker 2: candidly and angrily about how the gay community was benefiting
Speaker 2: from the cross dresser's work, while simultaneously excluding them from
Speaker 2: their successes as her payment. I do want to note
Speaker 2: that Gino Leary went on to soften her views about
Speaker 2: cross dressers and transgender people later in her life. I
Speaker 2: don't want to paint her as a terrible person who
Speaker 2: went around depressing other people. She did later on express
Speaker 2: embarrassment and shame that she had really basically kicked people
Speaker 2: who were already down. Yeah, and the drag queens that
Speaker 2: were supposed to perform at this rally were also barred
Speaker 2: from performing. After this incident, Sylvia moved to Terrytown, New
Speaker 2: York and lived with a boyfriend. Since she was no
Speaker 2: longer in the city, she became less prominent in its
Speaker 2: civil rights and gay rights efforts, but she did make
Speaker 2: her way back every year for the parades and festivals
Speaker 2: that commemorated the end of the Stonewall riot. In the interim,
Speaker 2: she led a relatively quiet life. She mostly worked food
Speaker 2: service jobs for a while, but eventually, unfortunately, she began
Speaker 2: abusing drugs again and wound up homeless, and journalists who
Speaker 2: were working to chronicle the gay rights movements earlier years
Speaker 2: and transgender people's contribution to the gay rights movement found
Speaker 2: her living on the streets in New York in the
Speaker 2: early nineteen nineties. This actually marked her return to activism
Speaker 2: and to the public eye, which we'll talk about after
Speaker 2: another brief ad break. It's tricky to talk about some
Speaker 2: of the issues that are in today's episode because the
Speaker 2: terminology that we used to talk about it today, some
Speaker 2: of it was coined basically halfway through Sylvia Rivera's life.
Speaker 2: It's also tricky to talk about Sylvia Rivera's identity specifically,
Speaker 2: because she really really resisted the idea of labels for
Speaker 2: a lot of her life. She referred to herself as
Speaker 2: a transvestite, and as we said earlier, that's a word
Speaker 2: that a lot of people don't prefer to be used anymore.
Speaker 2: The term transgender came around about halfway through her life,
Speaker 2: but she wasn't totally comfortable calling herself that. Towards the
Speaker 2: end of her life, she said quote, I'm tired of
Speaker 2: being labeled. I don't even like the label transgender. I
Speaker 2: just want to be who I am. I'm living the
Speaker 2: way Sylvia wants to live. But despite her lack of
Speaker 2: affinity for labels, Sylvia was undoubtedly an advocate for rights
Speaker 2: and protections for transgender people throughout the last ten years
Speaker 2: or so of her life. We talked earlier about Sylvia
Speaker 2: founding the organization Star with Marcia P. Johnson. Marsha's body
Speaker 2: was actually found in the Hudson River in nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 2: Police originally said that it was a suicide, but they
Speaker 2: eventually opened a homicide investigation. And when I say eventually,
Speaker 2: I mean two decades later. At the time of her death,
Speaker 2: Sylvia and other friends of Marcia's had said that she
Speaker 2: was not suicidal and that they had witnessed her being
Speaker 2: harassed by someone near where her body was found. Shortly
Speaker 2: before her death. In nineteen ninety four, Sylvia was asked
Speaker 2: to lead the twenty fifth anniversary Stonewall March. That same year,
Speaker 2: she advocated for Martin Duberman's publishers to translate his LGBT
Speaker 2: history book Stonewall into Spanish, but according to her, she
Speaker 2: was told it would not sell well in quote third
Speaker 2: world countries in Latin countries. In her last years, she
Speaker 2: and her partner Julia Murray lived and work at a
Speaker 2: place called Transy House. This is a collective and shelter
Speaker 2: for transgender youth, and they joined this collective in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety seven. In nineteen ninety eight, Sylvia was arrested during
Speaker 2: a memorial for Matthew Shepherd in New York. So if
Speaker 2: you are not familiar with his story, Matthew Shepherd was
Speaker 2: a student at the University of Wyoming at Laramie who
Speaker 2: was tortured, tied to a fence post, and left to
Speaker 2: die as part of an anti gay hate crime. He
Speaker 2: wound up dying of his injuries a few days after
Speaker 2: he was found tied to the fence post. According to
Speaker 2: Sylvia's own account, a police officer basically spread the word
Speaker 2: to arrest her first because she was known for being
Speaker 2: very vocal at these kinds of demonstrations. In nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 2: Sylvia spoke at the World Pride Rally in Rome. In
Speaker 2: two thousand, another trans woman named Amanda Milan was stabbed
Speaker 2: in the neck and killed on forty second Street. Sylvia
Speaker 2: organized a series of rallies and protests surrounding her death.
Speaker 2: In the trial of her killers, Sylvia continued to be
Speaker 2: really vocal about the schism between the gay community and
Speaker 2: the trans community in the years before her death, and
Speaker 2: about a year before she died, at a talk given
Speaker 2: before the Latino Gay Men of New York, she said, yes,
Speaker 2: we can adopt children. All well and good, that's fine.
Speaker 2: I would love to have children. I would love to
Speaker 2: marry my lover over there, she pointed to Julia Murray.
Speaker 2: But for political reasons, I will not do it, because
Speaker 2: I don't feel that I have to fit in that
Speaker 2: closet of normal straight society which the gay mainstream is
Speaker 2: going towards. In the same speech, she described the trans
Speaker 2: community's participation in the gay rights movement this way quote.
Speaker 2: We were determined that evening, that evening, being the night
Speaker 2: of the Stonewall riots, that we were going to be
Speaker 2: a liberated, free community, which we did acquire that. Actually,
Speaker 2: I'll change the WII. You have acquired your liberation, your
Speaker 2: freedom from that night. Myself, I've got Explative deleted, just
Speaker 2: like I had back then, but I still struggle, and
Speaker 2: I still continue the struggle. I will struggle till the
Speaker 2: day I die. And my main struggle right now is
Speaker 2: that my community will seek the rights that are justly hours.
Speaker 2: In the last year of her life, Sylvia campaigned for
Speaker 2: New York Sexual Orientation Non Discrimination Act, which is also
Speaker 2: referred to as SONDA, and that act prohibits discrimination on
Speaker 2: the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation in employment, housing,
Speaker 2: public accommodations, education, credit, and the exercise of civil rights.
Speaker 2: It includes protections for transgender people. Sylvia was not exaggerating
Speaker 2: when she said that she was going to work until
Speaker 2: she died for this. Her last meeting about SONDA, when
Speaker 2: she met with city officials for the last time, took
Speaker 2: place in a hospital bed when she was an in
Speaker 2: stage liver disease and a great pain. She died on
Speaker 2: February nineteenth, two thousand and two, of liver disease at
Speaker 2: the age of fifty one. SONDA was signed into law
Speaker 2: on December seventeenth of that same year. On November fourteenth
Speaker 2: of two thousand and five, the City of New York
Speaker 2: named the corner of Christopher and Hudson streets in the
Speaker 2: West Village. Sylvia rivera way today the Silvia Rivera food
Speaker 2: pantry which is under the auspices of the Metropolitan Community
Speaker 2: Church of New York, which serves a working poor as
Speaker 2: well as people with HIV through a specialized pantry program
Speaker 2: that's designed for people on anti retroviral therapies. These are
Speaker 2: higher in protein and easy to prepare. It also provides
Speaker 2: nutritional information and kind of meal guidance for all of
Speaker 2: the populations that it serves. Sylvia's Place is a Metropolitan
Speaker 2: Community Church of New York services organization for homeless youth.
Speaker 2: Sylvia Rivera Law Project's work focuses on transgender intersects and
Speaker 2: gender nonconforming people, particularly those who are low income people
Speaker 2: and people of color. They provide legal services, public education,
Speaker 2: and advocacy for public policy reform. She had a big legacy.
Speaker 2: She did have a big legacy, had big legacy that
Speaker 2: I think her name is not necessarily well known in
Speaker 2: the context of the gay rights movement unless you are
Speaker 2: pretty familiar with it. The oral history that we referenced
Speaker 2: making history, she is actually the only transgender person who's included,
Speaker 2: and she's referred to with male pronouns the whole time
Speaker 2: and is classified as a drag queen, which is she
Speaker 2: did call herself a drag queen, but that's kind of
Speaker 2: limiting and how she actually viewed herself well, I mean,
Speaker 2: since she was not a fan of the labels and
Speaker 2: she identified in her life as Sylvia. Yeah, a lot
Speaker 2: of drag performers will still maintain their you know, in
Speaker 2: many cases, the old school drag performers that were mostly
Speaker 2: men and then presented as female for performance, they still
Speaker 2: maintained that male persona, whereas she did not at all totally.
Speaker 2: One of the reasons that I there were a couple
Speaker 2: of reasons that I wanted to do this episode, and
Speaker 2: one is that I think the campaign for transgender rights
Speaker 2: has been increasingly present in the news over the last
Speaker 2: year or so. It's in terms of mainstream news coverage.
Speaker 2: It's definitely not something that has been unknown. But when
Speaker 2: it comes to like the really mainstream news outlets, and
Speaker 2: the other is a lot of the things that Sylvia
Speaker 2: and the young people that she and Marsha were looking after,
Speaker 2: you know, twenty years ago, a lot of those issues
Speaker 2: still really exist today. Like there are still a lot
Speaker 2: of homeless transgender youth who've basically been thrown out of
Speaker 2: their homes by their parents and don't really have anywhere
Speaker 2: else to turn. So I think her legacy is extremely important,
Speaker 2: not just for having been part of the gay rights movement,
Speaker 2: but for specifically when it comes to working with homeless
Speaker 2: young people who don't really have anywhere else to go. Yeah,
Speaker 2: extremely high risk community in terms of violence, falling into
Speaker 2: sex work, you know, just really being in at risk situations.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since
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