Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy the Wilson. So today's subject, which is transgender
Speaker 1: activist Sylvia Rivera is often compared to Rosa Parks, like
Speaker 1: I would say seventy percent of the articles, but I
Speaker 1: read researching this episode compared her to Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks,
Speaker 1: as you probably know, became famous in part for refusing
Speaker 1: to give up her bus seat on a segregated bus,
Speaker 1: and Sylvia Rivera became famous in part for purportedly throwing
Speaker 1: the first bottle at a police officer during the Stonewall Riots.
Speaker 1: But really, Rosa Parks and Sylvia Rivera almost could not
Speaker 1: be more different from each other. Rosa Parks's case was
Speaker 1: chosen specifically to try to overturn bus segregation Montgomery, Alabama,
Speaker 1: precisely because she seemed really polite. She was married, she
Speaker 1: was soft spoken, she went to church, and she had
Speaker 1: no criminal records, so basically there was nothing in her
Speaker 1: background that might turn white people off to the idea
Speaker 1: that she deserved the same basic civil rights that they did.
Speaker 1: Sylvia Rivera, on the other hand, has a lot more
Speaker 1: in common with Claudett Colvin, who was also arrested for
Speaker 1: refusing to give up a seat on a segregated bus
Speaker 1: in Montgomery. But Claudett Colvin did not become the household
Speaker 1: name that Rosa Parks did. Because she was an unmarried,
Speaker 1: pregnant teenager who had a reputation for being a troublemaker.
Speaker 1: Civil rights leaders deliberately didn't pursue her case because they
Speaker 1: knew it would be a hard one to win. They
Speaker 1: held out for a more so called respectable plaintiff instead,
Speaker 1: And that brings us to Sylvia Rivera and the years
Speaker 1: immediately after the Stonewall riots. She campaigned bravely and stridently
Speaker 1: and vocally for the rights of gay and transgender people.
Speaker 1: Although the term transgender, which is used to describe people
Speaker 1: whose gender and identity doesn't match up with the sex
Speaker 1: that they were assigned when they were born, that word
Speaker 1: had not been coined yet. But Sylvia was also loud
Speaker 1: and aggressive and angry and poor, sometimes even homeless. She
Speaker 1: had a history of sex work and drug addictions. Her
Speaker 1: mannerisms were really flamboyant, in your face. So when the
Speaker 1: gay rights movement started trending towards so called respectability. Sylvia
Speaker 1: got really pushed to the sidelines along with a lot
Speaker 1: of other transgender people. She refused to be put in
Speaker 1: a box, and so she wound up being excluded from
Speaker 1: the very movement that she was fighting for, and she
Speaker 1: was for decades pretty much forgotten about. So before we
Speaker 1: get started, there's a word of caution about this story.
Speaker 1: Because Sylvia ran away from home when she was only eleven.
Speaker 1: Some of the events that happened to her, especially in
Speaker 1: her young life, are disturbing. So parents and teachers, before
Speaker 1: you share this with young people, I recommend listening to
Speaker 1: it yourself first. And as a second note, some of
Speaker 1: the language that was used at the time that Sylvia
Speaker 1: lived and that she used about herself isn't the preferred
Speaker 1: language that we used today, and will sort of point
Speaker 1: out those as they come up. Uh. So, now that
Speaker 1: you've been warned, we will jump in as we usually
Speaker 1: do at the very beginning. Sylvia was actually born Ray
Speaker 1: Rivera on July two of nineteen fifty one. Her mother
Speaker 1: was Venezuelan and her father was Puerto Rican. Sylvia's mother
Speaker 1: committed suicide by eating rat poison when Sylvia was three.
Speaker 1: She also tried to kill Sylvia at that time, but
Speaker 1: Sylvia survived and went on to be raised by her grandmother,
Speaker 1: via Hita. Via Hita raised both Sylvia and Sylvia's half sister.
Speaker 1: Viahita was essentially functioning as a single parent. Her husband
Speaker 1: had abandoned her, and Sylvia's father, who had also abandoned
Speaker 1: the family, was not paying child support. Sylvia's grandmother was
Speaker 1: also very strict. Although she taught Sylvia to cook and
Speaker 1: to sew and too niche, she really did not like
Speaker 1: it when Sylvia started wearing girls clothes. Viajita would punish Sylvia,
Speaker 1: sometimes physically, for wearing makeup and for dressing and girl's clothing, and,
Speaker 1: as Sylvia described in the Oral History, Making History the
Speaker 1: struggle for gay and lesbian equal rights, her grandmother would say, quote,
Speaker 1: we don't do this. You're one of the boys. I
Speaker 1: want you to be a mechanic, and Sylvia would answer, no,
Speaker 1: I want to be a hairdresser, and I want to
Speaker 1: wear these clothes. From Sylvia's point of view, her grandmother
Speaker 1: also didn't like her because her skin was too dark.
Speaker 1: She had heard her grandmother say that she wanted a
Speaker 1: white granddaughter instead, and the struggle between the two of
Speaker 1: them went on until at the age of ten, Sylvia
Speaker 1: tried to commit suicide by taking her grandmother's pills. She
Speaker 1: wound up instead in the hospital for two months. Sylvia
Speaker 1: also faced bullying and harassment at school and in the
Speaker 1: neighborhood as as well. The other children and their neighbors
Speaker 1: didn't like her wearing girls clothing, and they didn't like
Speaker 1: her effeminine mannerisms. Feeling lonely, isolated, and desperately at odds
Speaker 1: with everyone around her, Sylvia left home at age eleven.
Speaker 1: The straw that really broke the camel's back was seeing
Speaker 1: how others treatment of her was affecting her grandmother. Even
Speaker 1: though their relationship was often contentious and strained and even violent,
Speaker 1: Sylvia did not like seeing her grandmother suffer over the
Speaker 1: way people talked about her. After she ran away, Sylvia
Speaker 1: went to forty two Street in New York City, which
Speaker 1: was a haven for cross dressers and street walkers. She
Speaker 1: had no other means to support herself, and so she
Speaker 1: turned to sex work. And I want to make it
Speaker 1: clear that there are people who choose to go into
Speaker 1: sex work, but at this time Sylvia was eleven and
Speaker 1: she had no other options. The area's drag queens pretty
Speaker 1: much adopted her, and they're the ones who gave her
Speaker 1: the name Sylvia. Sylvia was arrested frequently and her grandmother
Speaker 1: would come and bail her out. A few days shy
Speaker 1: of Sylvia's eighteenth birthday, she went to the Stonewall In
Speaker 1: for the first time, and this was June twenty, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine. The Stonewall End was, like many of New
Speaker 1: York's bars that catered to the gay community at the time,
Speaker 1: owned by the Mafia. Homosexuality was a crime, and so
Speaker 1: was cross dressing, so pretty much the only people who
Speaker 1: were willing to operate businesses that catered to this demographic
Speaker 1: were also themselves criminals. Gay bars were rated on a
Speaker 1: regular basis. Standard operating procedure was that the police would
Speaker 1: come in, they would make arrests and confiscations. They would
Speaker 1: then collect a payoff, and then they would leave and
Speaker 1: padlock the door behind them. Not long after the police
Speaker 1: had gone, members of the mafia would come by cut
Speaker 1: the padlock off. They would then restock the alcohol supply
Speaker 1: and business would start right back up. So for the
Speaker 1: people who didn't wind up getting arrested, it was more
Speaker 1: of a hassle and an interruption to their evening's revelry
Speaker 1: than anything else. For people who did get arrested, it
Speaker 1: could be way way harder, and not just for the
Speaker 1: fact that they were taken to jail, but often in
Speaker 1: jail they were then taunted and sometimes beaten and sometimes
Speaker 1: assaulted by other people who were in the jail. On June,
Speaker 1: when the police came in, most of the patrons went
Speaker 1: to the park across the street to wait, and they
Speaker 1: were tired of being hassled. A lot of people say
Speaker 1: that this was because it was the same week that
Speaker 1: Judy Garland died, and that doesn't seem through the oral
Speaker 1: histories to actually add up necessarily, but it's more a
Speaker 1: point a coincidence than to cause an effect situation. Right
Speaker 1: at some point, somebody started throwing coins at the police officers,
Speaker 1: yelling things like here's your payoff, come get some more,
Speaker 1: and then things started to escalate. People started throwing bottles
Speaker 1: and Molotov cocktails. Sylvia is widely cited as the first
Speaker 1: to do this, but near the end of her life
Speaker 1: she really worked to try to dispel this idea, saying
Speaker 1: that she was in fact the second to throw a bottle.
Speaker 1: Soon the police were pinned down inside the bar with
Speaker 1: the protesters outside, and the riot went on until reinforcements
Speaker 1: arrived and dispersed the crowd. The Stonewall ryot wasn't remotely
Speaker 1: the first event in the modern gay rights movement. It
Speaker 1: wasn't even the first riot in an establishment that was
Speaker 1: frequented by LGBT people. An early earlier example was a
Speaker 1: riot at Cooper's Donuts in Los Angeles in X five,
Speaker 1: and in that event, drag queens and gay men, many
Speaker 1: of them black or Latino, fought back against police, first
Speaker 1: by throwing donuts, which sounds sort of funny, and then
Speaker 1: with hand to hand fighting much less funny. Uh. In
Speaker 1: San Francisco, a picket protest among LGBT protesters turned into
Speaker 1: a riot at Compton's Cafeteria in nineteen sixty six. But
Speaker 1: Stonewall really did act as a sort of tipping point
Speaker 1: and a rallying cry, definitely the most famous today. So
Speaker 1: there are several things about the riots and lvia's presence
Speaker 1: there that are caused for debate today. One is just
Speaker 1: how much of the Stonewell Ins clientele was made up
Speaker 1: of cross stressers and transgender people. Now, as we mentioned before,
Speaker 1: the term transgender had not really been coined at this
Speaker 1: point in history, but when it was coined about ten
Speaker 1: years later, a lot of the people who would identified
Speaker 1: as cross stressors or as transvestites at the time then
Speaker 1: went on to identify as transgender. So we're gonna keep
Speaker 1: talking about both cross stressers and transgender people both for
Speaker 1: the rest of the episode, because there are two different things.
Speaker 1: Cross stressing is about the clothes you have on and
Speaker 1: transgender is about your gender expression, so your expression of
Speaker 1: the gender that you uh that you are inwardly versus
Speaker 1: the clothes that you have on your body. In Sylvia's
Speaker 1: own words, cross stressers could only get and if they
Speaker 1: knew somebody, because cross stressors were really frequently targeted by
Speaker 1: the police, so a lot of businesses felt like it
Speaker 1: was too much of a hassle to deal with them.
Speaker 1: Other people have characterized the Stonewell in as a haven
Speaker 1: for cross jessers and for transgender people, and there are
Speaker 1: reputable historians on both sides. Another bone of contention is
Speaker 1: actually whether Sylvia herself was even there. She says she was, uh,
Speaker 1: And of course she's often credited with being the first
Speaker 1: bottle thrower, but historians have not been able to corroborate
Speaker 1: her presence there through eyewitness accounts. In the end, it
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily matter how many transgender patrons the Stonewell in
Speaker 1: had or whether Sylvia was actually there that night. What
Speaker 1: does matter is that Sylvia and the rest of the
Speaker 1: cross dressing and transgender community became vocal, aggressive campaigners for
Speaker 1: the rights of game and lesbians, bisexuals, and all manner
Speaker 1: of people who just didn't conform to gender norms. They were,
Speaker 1: in many ways the people who were the most visibly
Speaker 1: on the forefront of the fight for equality and for
Speaker 1: civil rights. And we're going to talk more about what
Speaker 1: happened after Stonewall, right after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1: If that is cool with Tracy, it is. Sylvia Rivera
Speaker 1: had already been active in racial equality and anti war
Speaker 1: causes before the Stonewall riot, and after the riot she
Speaker 1: immediately passionately turned her attention to the growing movement for
Speaker 1: gay rights to gay rights organizations formed in New York
Speaker 1: in the wake of the riot. That was the Gay
Speaker 1: Activists Alliance and the Gay Liberation Front, and Sylvia was
Speaker 1: active in both of those groups as part of the
Speaker 1: Gay Activists Alliance. Sylvia petitioned the city of New York
Speaker 1: for an anti discrimination bill, and she was arrested while
Speaker 1: trying to get signatures. When she appeared before the judge,
Speaker 1: he immediately let her go. He recognized that with all
Speaker 1: of the social turmoil that was going on in the
Speaker 1: United States at that point, it would be a really
Speaker 1: unwise pr move for him to jail someone who was
Speaker 1: getting signatures for a petition. Sylvia also testified before the
Speaker 1: city Council to try to get the bill passed. However,
Speaker 1: as the bill was being negotiated, others in the gay
Speaker 1: community agreed to drop protections for cross dressers from the
Speaker 1: bill in the hope that it would be more likely
Speaker 1: to pass. Sylvia and many of the other cross dressing
Speaker 1: and transgender citizens of New York felt really deeply betrayed
Speaker 1: by this. They had been working, campaigning and getting arrested
Speaker 1: and sometimes facing abuse and violence and sexual assault in
Speaker 1: jail once they had been arrested fighting for these causes,
Speaker 1: and at this point it felt like they had done
Speaker 1: this for a cause that had then turned their back
Speaker 1: on them. And it didn't help that the bill minus
Speaker 1: discrimination protections for gender expression did not actually pass until
Speaker 1: fifteen years later, so that would have been ninet So
Speaker 1: this concession really in the end was not much of
Speaker 1: a help along the way. The Gay Activists Alliance specifically
Speaker 1: dropped rights for the cross dressing communities from its mission entirely. Consequently,
Speaker 1: after being excluded from other gay rights organizations, Sylvia and
Speaker 1: her long time friend Marcia P. Johnson co founded the
Speaker 1: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries or STAR in the fall of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy. Essentially, the cross dressing and transgender community had
Speaker 1: begun to feel excluded by other gay and lesbian rights organizations,
Speaker 1: and so they formed their own. As a side note
Speaker 1: to a lot of people today, the word transvestite has
Speaker 1: connotations that are offensive, so people a lot of people
Speaker 1: prefer the word cross stressor but at the time it
Speaker 1: was a word that they were using to talk about
Speaker 1: themselves frequently. Yeah, you also hear drag, which is in there,
Speaker 1: and they can get a little fuzzy, and they're still
Speaker 1: ongoing debate over you know, terminology and who should use
Speaker 1: what to some degree that's still being worked out. Yes, so, uh,
Speaker 1: we're not at all using those terms to be disrespectful,
Speaker 1: but because that's those are the words that Sylvia and
Speaker 1: Marcia were using to describe themselves. So Sylvia and Marcia's
Speaker 1: next step was to start what was known as Star House,
Speaker 1: and this was an outreach effort for the so called queens.
Speaker 1: These were young homeless gay youth, many of whom later
Speaker 1: went on to identify as transgender, and many of whom
Speaker 1: were also people of color. And they originally operated Starhouse
Speaker 1: out of the back of a truck, and then they
Speaker 1: started renting a building at two thirteen et Second Street
Speaker 1: and they fixed that up and there they provided shelter, food,
Speaker 1: and guidance for homeless transgender youth and Sylvia and Marcia
Speaker 1: really became mother figures for these kids. They had a
Speaker 1: dance to try to raise some money to fund their operation,
Speaker 1: but for the most part, Sylvia and Marcia kept the
Speaker 1: place running by doing sex work. They tried to protect
Speaker 1: all of the young people who were in their care
Speaker 1: from being involved in the sex trade at all. However,
Speaker 1: many of the youth wound up helping Star Houses efforts
Speaker 1: by stealing food and eventually, uh, you know, this is
Speaker 1: not really a workable business model. So Starhouse was evicted
Speaker 1: from the property for non payment of rent, and before
Speaker 1: they left, they took the refrigerator and they destroyed all
Speaker 1: of the improvements that they made in the building out
Speaker 1: of a sort of turnabout is fair play mindset, And
Speaker 1: I feel like we should point out that the reason
Speaker 1: that they were having to turn to stealing and sex
Speaker 1: work to fund their operations is because their entire lives
Speaker 1: at this point were not only illegal, but also specifically
Speaker 1: targeted by the police and other people for harassment. So
Speaker 1: that was sort of what it had come to by
Speaker 1: being excluded from so many other social organizations that were
Speaker 1: working to help homeless people and others in New York. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it certainly was not like, oh, we don't want to
Speaker 1: pursue legitimate means of gaining money. They just did not
Speaker 1: have opportunities to do so, right, and that continues to
Speaker 1: be a problem in a lot of areas today. Throughout
Speaker 1: this time, Sylvia was also active in other radical organizations
Speaker 1: as well, including the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords,
Speaker 1: which is a Puerto Rican nationalist activism group. In nine three,
Speaker 1: Sylvia was supposed to speak at Christopher's Street Liberation Day,
Speaker 1: which was a festival to commemorate the anniversary of the
Speaker 1: Stonewall Riots. However, radical feminists tried to keep Sylvia from
Speaker 1: the stage because they viewed her wearing women's clothing as sexist.
Speaker 1: In particular, activist Gino Leary, a former nun and lesbian feminist,
Speaker 1: spoke out against Sylvia taking part. Sylvia's response was to
Speaker 1: physically grab the microphone and to talk anyway, with a
Speaker 1: lot of vigor and profanity behind her words. Um. She
Speaker 1: spoke very candidly and angrily about how the gay community
Speaker 1: was benefiting from the cross stressors work while simultaneously excluding
Speaker 1: them from their successes as your payment. I do want
Speaker 1: to note that Gino Leary went on to soften her
Speaker 1: views about cross stressors and transgender people later in her life.
Speaker 1: I don't want to paint her as a terrible person
Speaker 1: who went around oppressing other people. She she did later
Speaker 1: on express embarrassment and shame that she had really sickly
Speaker 1: kicked people who were already down. Yeah, and the drag
Speaker 1: queens that were supposed to perform at this rally were
Speaker 1: also barred from performing. After this incident, Sylvia moved to Terrytown,
Speaker 1: New York and lived with a boyfriend. Since she was
Speaker 1: no longer in the city, she became less prominent in
Speaker 1: its civil rights and gay rights efforts, but she did
Speaker 1: make her way back every year for the parades and
Speaker 1: festivals that commemorated the end of the Stonewall Riot. In
Speaker 1: the interim, she led a relatively quiet life. She mostly
Speaker 1: worked food service jobs for a while, but eventually, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: she began abusing drugs again and wound up homeless, and
Speaker 1: journalists who were working to chronicle the gay rights movements
Speaker 1: earlier years and transgender people's contribution to the gay rights
Speaker 1: movement found her living on the streets in New York
Speaker 1: in the early nine nineties. This actually marked her return
Speaker 1: to activism and to the public eye, which we'll talk
Speaker 1: about after another brief ad break. It's tricky to talk
Speaker 1: about some of the issues that are in today's episod
Speaker 1: because the terminology that we used to talk about it today,
Speaker 1: some of it was coined basically halfway through Sylvia Rivera's life.
Speaker 1: It's also tricky to talk about Sylvia Rivera's identity, specifically UH,
Speaker 1: because she really really resisted the idea of labels for
Speaker 1: a lot of her life. She referred to herself as
Speaker 1: a transvestite, and as we said earlier, that's the word
Speaker 1: that a lot of people don't prefer to be used anymore.
Speaker 1: The term transgender came around about halfway through her life,
Speaker 1: but she wasn't totally comfortable calling herself that. Towards the
Speaker 1: end of her life, she said quote, I'm tired of
Speaker 1: being labeled. I don't even like the label transgender. I
Speaker 1: just want to be who I am. I'm living the
Speaker 1: way Sylvia wants to live. But despite her lack of
Speaker 1: affinity for labels, Sylvia was undoubtedly an advocate for rights
Speaker 1: and protections for transgender people throughout the last ten years
Speaker 1: or show of her life. We talked earlier about Sylvia
Speaker 1: founding the organization Star with Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha's body
Speaker 1: was actually found in the Hudson River in Nineteo. Police
Speaker 1: originally said that it was a suicide, but they eventually
Speaker 1: opened a homicide investigation. And when I say eventually, I
Speaker 1: mean two decades later. At the time of her death,
Speaker 1: Sylvia and other friends of Marsha's had said that she
Speaker 1: was not suicidal and that they had witnessed her being
Speaker 1: harassed by someone near where her body was found shortly
Speaker 1: before her death. In nine Sylvia was asked to lead
Speaker 1: the twenty fifth anniversary Stonewall March. That same year, she
Speaker 1: advocated for Martin Duberman's publishers to translate his LGBT history
Speaker 1: book Stonewall into Spanish, but according to her, she was
Speaker 1: told it would not sell well in quote third world countries.
Speaker 1: In Latin countries and her last years, she and her
Speaker 1: partner Julia Murray lived and work at a place called
Speaker 1: Transy House. This is a collective and shelter for transgender
Speaker 1: youth and they joined this collective in nine in Sylvia
Speaker 1: was arrested during m O real for Matthew Shepherd in
Speaker 1: New York. So if you are not familiar with his story,
Speaker 1: Matthew Shepherd was a student at the University of Wyoming
Speaker 1: at Laramie who was tortured, tied to a fence post,
Speaker 1: and left to die as part of an anti gay
Speaker 1: hate crime. He wound up dying of his injuries a
Speaker 1: few days after he was found tied to the fence post.
Speaker 1: According to Sylvia's own account, a police officer basically spread
Speaker 1: the word to arrest her first because she was known
Speaker 1: for being very vocal at these kinds of demonstrations. In
Speaker 1: Sylvia spoke at the World Pride rally in Rome. In
Speaker 1: two thousand, another transwoman named Amanda Milan was stabbed in
Speaker 1: the neck and killed on street. Sylvia organized a series
Speaker 1: of rallies and protests surrounding her death and the trial
Speaker 1: of her killers. Sylvia continued to be really vocal about
Speaker 1: the schism between the gay community and the trans community
Speaker 1: in the years before her death, and about a year
Speaker 1: before she died, at a talk given before the Latino
Speaker 1: Amen of New York, she said, yes, we can adopt children.
Speaker 1: All well and good, that's fine. I would love to
Speaker 1: have children. I would love to marry my lover over there,
Speaker 1: she pointed to Julia Murray. But for political reasons, I
Speaker 1: will not do it, because I don't feel that I
Speaker 1: have to fit in that closet of normal straight society
Speaker 1: which the gay mainstream is going towards. In the same speech,
Speaker 1: she described the trans community's participation in the gay rights
Speaker 1: movement this way quote. We were determined that evening, that evening,
Speaker 1: being the night at the Stonewall riots, that we were
Speaker 1: going to be a liberated, free community, which we did
Speaker 1: acquire that Actually, I'll change the WII you have acquired
Speaker 1: your liberation, your freedom. From that night, myself, I've got
Speaker 1: expletive deleted, just like I had back then. But I
Speaker 1: still struggle, and I still continue the struggle. I will
Speaker 1: struggle till the day I die. And my main struggle
Speaker 1: right now is that my community will seek the rights
Speaker 1: that are justly ours. In the last year of her life,
Speaker 1: Sylvia campaigned for New York Sexual or Ination Non Discrimination Act,
Speaker 1: which is also referred to as SUNDA, and that act
Speaker 1: prohibits discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived sexual
Speaker 1: orientation in employment, housing, public accommodations, education, credit, and the
Speaker 1: exercise of civil rights. It includes protections for transgender people.
Speaker 1: Sylvia was not exaggerating when she said that she was
Speaker 1: going to work until she died for this. Her last
Speaker 1: meeting about SANDA, when she met with city officials for
Speaker 1: the last time, took place in a hospital bed when
Speaker 1: she was an in stage liver disease and in great pain.
Speaker 1: She died on February nineteenth, two thousand two, of liver
Speaker 1: disease at the age of fifty one. SANDA was signed
Speaker 1: into law on December seventeenth of that same year. On
Speaker 1: November fourteenth of two thousand and five, the City of
Speaker 1: New York named the corner of Christopher and Hudson Streets
Speaker 1: in the West Village Sylvia Rivera Way. Today, the Sylvia
Speaker 1: Rivera Food Pantry, which is under the auspice, is of
Speaker 1: the Metropolitan Community Church of New York, which serves the
Speaker 1: working poor as well as people with HIV through a
Speaker 1: specialized pantry program that's designed for people on anti retroviral
Speaker 1: therapies UH. These are higher in protein and easy to prepare.
Speaker 1: It also provides nutritional information and kind of meal guidance
Speaker 1: for all of the populations that it serves. Sylvia's Place
Speaker 1: is a Metropolitan Community Church of New York services organization
Speaker 1: for homeless youth. Sylvia Rivera Law projects work focuses on
Speaker 1: transgender intersects and gender nonconforming people, particularly those who are
Speaker 1: low income people and people of color. They provide legal services,
Speaker 1: public education, and advocacy for public policy reform. She had
Speaker 1: a big legacy. She did have a big legacy. She
Speaker 1: had a big legacy that I think her Her name
Speaker 1: is not necessarily well known in the context of the
Speaker 1: gay rights movement unless you are pretty familiar with it.
Speaker 1: The oral history that we referenced, making history Um, she
Speaker 1: is actually the only transgender person who's included, and she's
Speaker 1: referred to with male pronouns the whole time, and is
Speaker 1: classified as a drag queen, which is she did call
Speaker 1: herself a drag queen, but that's kind of limiting and
Speaker 1: how she actually viewed herself. I mean, since she was
Speaker 1: not a fan of the labels and she identified in
Speaker 1: her life as Sylvia, like a lot of drag performers
Speaker 1: will still maintain their uh you know, in many cases,
Speaker 1: the old school drag performers that were mostly men and
Speaker 1: then presented as female for performance, they still maintained that
Speaker 1: male persona, whereas she did not at all totally. One
Speaker 1: of the reasons that I wanted There are a couple
Speaker 1: of reasons that I wanted to do this episode, and
Speaker 1: one is that I think the campaign for transgender rights
Speaker 1: has been increasingly present in the news over the last
Speaker 1: year or so in terms of mainstream news coverage. It's
Speaker 1: definitely not something that has been unknown, but when it
Speaker 1: comes to like the really mainstream news outlets, um, and
Speaker 1: the other is a lot of the things that Sylvia
Speaker 1: and the young people that she and Marcia were looking after,
Speaker 1: you know, twenty years ago. A lot of those issues
Speaker 1: still really exist today, Like, there are still a lot
Speaker 1: of homeless transgender youth who's who've basically been thrown out
Speaker 1: of their homes by their parents and don't really have
Speaker 1: anywhere else to turn. So I think her legacy is
Speaker 1: extremely important, not just for having been part of the
Speaker 1: gay rights movement, but for specifically when it comes to
Speaker 1: working with homeless young people who don't really have anywhere
Speaker 1: else to go. Yeah, it's an extremely high risk community
Speaker 1: in terms of uh, violence, falling into sex word, you know,
Speaker 1: just really being in at risk situations. Yeah. Well, and
Speaker 1: Sylvia specifically in addition to being uh originally identifying as
Speaker 1: a transvestite and then later kind of identifying as transgender.
Speaker 1: Maybe in addition to that, she was Latina, and she
Speaker 1: was very poor, she was not particularly educated. She was
Speaker 1: in a whole lot of at risk groups all at
Speaker 1: the same time. And um she had she said in
Speaker 1: a in a speech right before her her death, not
Speaker 1: right before, about a year before, that she wanted to
Speaker 1: live to be a hundred. She only made it to
Speaker 1: fifty one. But given all of those factors, the fact
Speaker 1: that she made it to fifty one in the time
Speaker 1: that she was living. It's pretty incredible. That's the saddest
Speaker 1: possible place to end that. So on a more upbeat tone,
Speaker 1: we're going to do a continuation of what we have
Speaker 1: already started, which is reading some of the responses we
Speaker 1: got when we asked for people who had history degrees
Speaker 1: to tell us kind of what they did with those
Speaker 1: in terms of their career, which grew out of a
Speaker 1: question someone to us of how we got work to
Speaker 1: where we are and how people who study history in
Speaker 1: college might get such jobs, and we didn't know because
Speaker 1: that's not what we studied in college. So we went
Speaker 1: to our fabulous listener base because they are smarty pants
Speaker 1: is and a lot of them have history degrees. Uh.
Speaker 1: So we will read a few more summer short uh.
Speaker 1: One is our listener, Christina. She has a degree in
Speaker 1: history from the University of Toronto St. Michael's and she
Speaker 1: went on to teach high school in the Toronto area
Speaker 1: and she teaches Canadian history to Grade ten students as
Speaker 1: well as other social studies courses. So we always love
Speaker 1: a teacher, So thank you for teaching the historians of tomorrow.
Speaker 1: Our listener, Kristen got her bachelor's in history and she's
Speaker 1: currently finishing up her master's uh. She currently works to
Speaker 1: part time jobs both in history. She's a museum educator
Speaker 1: at a hands on children's museum as well as registrar
Speaker 1: at a lighthouse museum, which sounds fascinating to me, and
Speaker 1: then once her master's degree is complete, her plan is
Speaker 1: to work in preservation. So a lot of these kind
Speaker 1: of do lead to an archivist path. Our listener Meghan
Speaker 1: is a curator, and she says, my recommendation is to
Speaker 1: find out what your interests are teaching, research, museum studies, politics, etcetera,
Speaker 1: and go from there. If working in a museum is
Speaker 1: your career goal, I'd recommend taking any internships that may
Speaker 1: be offered and volunteer as much as possible. Our listener
Speaker 1: Gina said, I have a double major liberal arts degree
Speaker 1: in history and classical Studies, i e. Ancient Mediterranean. It
Speaker 1: has served me well through very jobs by endowing me
Speaker 1: with an appreciation of perspective, context, communication, and storytelling, which
Speaker 1: is what drew me to ancient Greece and Rome in
Speaker 1: the first place. And I believe that understanding the roles
Speaker 1: played by perspective and context in historical storytelling gives us
Speaker 1: a foundation for humanistic empathy that can impact how we
Speaker 1: read and interpret news stories today. I could not agree more. Uh.
Speaker 1: These days, I am celebrating almost a decade in sales
Speaker 1: and customer service and expanding my communication skills into the
Speaker 1: animal world with dogcare and training. Uh. She makes such
Speaker 1: a great point. I think about kind of the historical
Speaker 1: perspective giving you a better lens through which to view
Speaker 1: the world around us today. Definitely that's a motivating factor
Speaker 1: in my episode selection. Sometimes. Yeah, and then the last
Speaker 1: time I will read is from Colleen, and Colleen says
Speaker 1: I bartend and my degree gives me lovely conversation fodder
Speaker 1: off and all reference. Your podcast then discussed something I
Speaker 1: studied that vaguely relates. I've worked with several other folks
Speaker 1: with degrees in equally exciting fields creative writing, graphic design, etcetera.
Speaker 1: I genuinely love my job, But as one of many
Speaker 1: folks who graduated just as the quote great Recession began,
Speaker 1: the actual history related career opportunities for history degrees we're
Speaker 1: not as plentiful as one might hope. That happens a
Speaker 1: lot to liberal arts degree holders in general, and especially
Speaker 1: in the last five seven years. It's been a long
Speaker 1: time since we've had like a big staff expansion that
Speaker 1: how stuff works, but we did several years ago. And
Speaker 1: one of the best things about that was Number one.
Speaker 1: I was always like, I wanna find people. You don't
Speaker 1: have to have a journalism degree, you don't have to
Speaker 1: have an English degree, but a liberal arts degree is
Speaker 1: preferred because there's so much research and writing involved in
Speaker 1: basically every liberal arts degree. Um. And then number two
Speaker 1: was getting to basically offer people jobs. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a good feeling. It's a really good feeling to make
Speaker 1: that phone call doing the things that the career center
Speaker 1: at college was always telling me, Like, people love liberal
Speaker 1: arts degrees because of all these reasons that these history
Speaker 1: majors have just been pointing out. But then when I
Speaker 1: got into the world of actually trying to find the job,
Speaker 1: I was like, you guys, true films were told. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I got to make that true for some people
Speaker 1: on a limited scale. Yeah, which is awesome. Anybody who
Speaker 1: gets a chance to work for Tracy, I highly recommend it.
Speaker 1: So if you would like, I really genuinely do that.
Speaker 1: It's not me being nice because she's here, she's my
Speaker 1: favorite boss I think of all time. That's you have
Speaker 1: some stiff competition there. You're there's a very close seconds.
Speaker 1: So if you do something wrong, you're gonna fall the
Speaker 1: number two. But right now I'll try not to do that.
Speaker 1: You won't. If you would like to write to us,
Speaker 1: we are at History podcast that How Stuff Works dot com.
Speaker 1: Our Facebook is Facebook dot com slash mss in history,
Speaker 1: and our Twitter is miss in History. Our tumbler is
Speaker 1: miss in history dot tumble dot com, and we are
Speaker 1: also on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash miss in History.
Speaker 1: We have a spreadshirt store where you can buy all
Speaker 1: kinds of cool stuff you miss in history class slag
Speaker 1: that is at miss in history dot spreadshirt dot com.
Speaker 1: If you would like to learn a little bit more
Speaker 1: about something that we've talked about today, you can come
Speaker 1: to our website and you can put the word transgender
Speaker 1: into the search bar, and one of the things that
Speaker 1: you will find is an article called ten Things Doctors
Speaker 1: Have Changed their Minds about this Century, which talks about
Speaker 1: the changes in the ways that the medical community have
Speaker 1: transgender people and gender expression. You can come to our website,
Speaker 1: which is miss in history dot com, and you can
Speaker 1: find our show notes and next to all the episodes,
Speaker 1: and a giant archive of everything we've ever done. So
Speaker 1: you can do all of that at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com or missed in history dot com. For more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, is it how
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