Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries

Marina S. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Kansas—

In 1973, the New York City Pride March, originally called Christopher Street Liberation Day, barred drag queens from openly attending the event. While the term drag queen today has a very limited connotation, in the 1970s this was not the case. As the contemporary term transgender had not reached widespread use, the terms “drag queen” and “transvestite” were used within the burgeoning LGBTQIA+ liberation movement to refer to a wide variety of feminine presenting gender-nonconforming individuals. Thus the 1973 prohibition against drag queens attending Christopher Street carried with it an implicit exclusion of individuals that would today identify as transgender women. Why was such a vulnerable and misunderstood segment of the queer community barred from participating in the first and largest annual pride event that year? The organizers were concerned that they were giving the gay and lesbian community “a bad name.” In response, two pioneering advocates for transgender rights, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, refusing to allow their community to be erased from the proceedings, triumphantly marched ahead of the parade.

Long before the shameful abandonment of gender non-conforming people by the organizers of Christopher Street, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera had long been well-known and vocal members of the New York City gay community. And while their level of participation is still not fully known, both Johnson and Rivera are permanently entwined with the story and mythology of the now legendary Stonewall Uprising, the first widely known uprising of queer people against brutal police repression and exploitation by organized crime elements beginning early on the morning of June 28, 1969.

It is critical today that we recognize and foreground the struggles of these two activists in order to reclaim the radical history of the queer liberation movement and win the movement back from the liberal-bourgeois elements that largely seek to define it today.

Marsha P. Johnson was born on Aug. 24, 1945 to a working-class New Jersey family. She first began expressing her gender identity at the age of five, but was forced into repression by harassment and physical violence. After spending six months in the United States Navy in the early 1960s, she moved to New York City and became a fixture of the city’s gay ball subculture along with her friend Sylvia Rivera. Rivera was born on July 2, 1951. Her father was from Puerto Rico and her mother was an immigrant from Venezuela. She was orphaned at the age of three and was raised by her grandmother who was vehemently opposed to Rivera as she began to present as feminine beginning in the fourth grade. At the age of ten Sylvia Rivera left home, where like many LGBTQIA+ youth of the time, she experienced homelessness and was forced to engage in subsistence sex work until she was taken in by Marsha P. Johnson, who became her trusted friend and protector — a bond of solidarity and community that was essential to the survival of proletarian queer youth in the 1970s and 80s.

The extent to which Johnson and Rivera played in the Stonewall Uprising is still disputed to this day, with some claiming that Johnson threw the brick that kicked off the riot, and some saying she wasn’t present until hours later. Some witnesses claim that Rivera was not present for the uprising at all. What is known is that in the early hours of June 28th 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, a bar that had become a central pillar of gay life in the city. Due to the criminalization faced by LGBTQIA+ people at the time under so-called “sodomy laws”Stonewall, like most gay bars, was owned and operated by a local organized crime outfit that exploited the patrons and often collaborated with police to keep raids from impeding the profits of the bars proprietors. However on that June morning, things didn’t go as planned for the officers executing the mass arrest, as the patrons of the Stonewall fought back, first using shot glasses and then bricks as projectiles. Before long the original protestors were joined by reinforcements from throughout the city as they battled the authorities for several days. Triumphant chants of “Christopher Street Shall Be Liberated” and “Get the Mafia and Police out of Gay Bars!” could be heard on the streets. While it is not known at what time she joined the uprising, Marsha P. Johnson was later confirmed to be “in the vanguard” of the crowds fighting against police retaliation. This event is often marked as the beginning of the modern queer liberation movement.

Immediately after Stonewall, Marsha P. Johnson began organizing with the newly formed Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and was particularly active in the GLF’s Drag Queen Caucus. When New York University cancelled a dance after it was sponsored by several gay rights organizations, Johnson and several other GLF members organized a sit-in protest at the university’s Weinstein Hall. The protestors eventually regained the right to use the venue. To capitalize on the political momentum of the sit-in Johnson collaborated with Sylvia Rivera to form a new organization to advocate specifically for gender-nonconforming members of the queer community. Originally called the Street Transvestite Actual Revolutionaries, they soon changed the name Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). 

Taking inspiration both from the GLF as well as the community defense programs of groups like the Black Panthers and Young Lords, STAR set out to organize mutual aid and housing networks for New York City’s largely impoverished transgender community. This included providing free clothing, healthcare, educational programs and even transportation assistance. In November 1970, STAR House was established to provide shelter for gender-nonconforming youth. While far from perfect in its execution, STAR House became a template for many housing programs initiated for unhoused LGBTQIA+ youth today. Central to STAR’s organizing work was a program for prison reform. This seemed to be particularly important to Sylvia Rivera who had experienced the violent conditions experienced by gay prisoners firsthand. Along with organizers from other local groups, STAR helped form the Gay Community Prison Committee which investigated reports of abuse in the prison system and organized bail funds and protests. 

In August of that year, Huey P. Newton wrote an article in the newspaper of the Black Panther Party (BPP) calling for an alliance between the BPP and both the nascent women’s liberation and gay liberation movements. This led to a meeting of both Rivera and Newton at the 1970 Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention, an experience that left a deep impact on Rivera’s life. She would continue to be active in demonstrations for prison reform and opposing the Vietnam War until her retirement from activism. In 1971, STAR, under the guidance of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, published a political  platform for the organization In addition to calling for an end to discrimination against gender nonconforming people regardless of sex, it took inspiration from the Panthers’ 10 Point Program in calling for free clothing, education, food, healthcare, housing, and transportation as well as a “revolutionary people’s government” and an end to capitalist exploitation of queer and straight people alike.

As Johnson, Rivera and the other STAR activists began to more vocally embrace radical politics and opposition to racial discrimination, it necessarily led to tension with the more liberal bourgeois elements of the LGBTQIA+ community, particularly white, gay bar and shop owners. This tension was first manifested during the campaign to pass the New York City Gay Rights Bill. While the bill had been formulated by the moderate Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), STAR took part in the first public hearing for the legislation. It soon became obvious that the bill would not include adequate protections for transgender individuals, causing many members of STAR to openly criticize it. At the third public hearing, transgender attendees were barred from using any bathrooms in the facility hosting the event and the police attempted to arrest those that did. While the police were successfully blocked from making any arrests, a gay men’s newspaper criticized the gender non-conforming members for their “misguided” bathroom use. This of course mirrors the rhetoric that remains popular today surrounding transgender women’s use of public facilities in many states, even the first openly presenting transgender woman in US Congress, Sarah McBride (D), downplayed the importance of these basic civil rights and integration.

However it was not until the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day mentioned at the beginning of this article, that this tension was fully realized. After the march, participants gathered around a stage to hear various speakers. Despite the hostility of the event, Sylvia Rivera took to the stage and gave her now-famous “Gay Rights” speech. Even today, watching this speech is an emotional experience. Fighting back tears and weathering abuse from the crowd, Rivera recounted the abuses that she and other queer and gender non-conforming people experienced in the prison system, while charging the largely affluent attendees of abandoning the imprisoned and homeless members of their community. It remains one of the most powerful moments of early Queer Liberation history. Unfortunately it was also largely the end for STAR.

After the Christopher Street Liberation Day rally, Sylvia River attempted to take her own life, largely due to the harassment she received from other speakers at the event. Fortunately Marsha P. Johnson was able to get her medical attention, but Rivera soon moved away from New York City and retired from activism. While she revived STAR in 2000 after the murder of Amanda Milan, a 25 year-old transgender woman, it was short-lived as Rivera passed away from liver cancer in 2002. After the dissolution of STAR, Marsha P. Johnson remained a fixture of the LGBTQIA+ community organizing through the early days of the AIDS epidemic as a member of ACT UP. For her many contributions to her community, she became known as The Mayor of Christopher Street. She was found murdered shortly after a gay pride march in 1992. Her murder remains unsolved as of time of writing, as do the murders, sexual violence and disappearances of countless gender nonconforming people all over the country.

Contemporary pride events have largely attempted to sanitize the movement for queer liberation of its roots in radical and anti-capitalist activism. The National LGBT Chamber of Commerce and their local affiliates are sponsors of many pride events in larger cities. As a result, some pride events have even become recruiting platforms for the very law enforcement agencies that have historically been used to arrest and imprison queer activists, or become races to the bottom for major corporations to try and assert how “hip and with it” these billionaires are as they lobby and fund and profit from administrations that kill and disenfranchise queer and/or working people all over the world. As LGBTQIA+ people face an ever increasing wave of oppression from the fascist Trump regime, it has never been more important that our community reclaims the radical context of the pride movement and to extend it to solidarity with all oppressed and freedom loving people in the struggle for liberation.

Categories: Discrimination, LGBTQIA+, U.S. News