Day: January 29, 2018

Though I grew up in New York City, am a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and have attended many pride parades right near the Stonewall Inn, I knew absolutely nothing about the Stonewall rebellion before today. However, what surprised me the most is that the Stonewall rebellion is considered to be a divisive event. According to Rebecca Vipond Brink, Stonewall has a “very divisive legacy […] in the LGBT community” because the “drag queens and transpeople […] on the front lines of the rebellion” are often forgotten about (Brink 2014). I didn’t even know that the events that occurred at Stonewall involved trans people, let alone that Stonewall is a divisive event for the lack of representation of these people. The significance of this fact for contemporary LGBTQ organizing is that it has likely caused the continued repression and lack of inclusion of trans people. In modern America, it seems to be that more progress is being made for gay rights than for trans rights- which is probably partially a result of the treatment of trans people in regards to Stonewall.

Prior to this class, I knew nothing about Marsha Johnson or Sylvia Rivera. Marsha Johnson has always been a familiar name, but I am unsure why. Marsha P. Johnson was a drag-queen and activist for the American LGBTQ+ movement. Johnson worked as an activist through a group called STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), which was “a multi-racial group of revolutionary street queens” (Nothing 5). According to author Ehn Nothing, Johnson, along with Rivera, “were not respectable queers” and were “poor, gender-variant women of color, street-based sex workers” (Nothing 6). Throughout her work with STAR, Johnson worked to provide housing, food, protection from police, and basic human rights to people living on the street. Johnson was sent to prison for her actions, where “A lot of transvestites were fighting amongst each other” (Johnson 21). After a pride parade in 1992, Marsha was found dead. Her “death was ruled a suicide by the police, while a vigilante campaign found that it was likelier murder” (Brink 2014).

One concept I’ve learned from these readings is the degree to which Stonewall (and other riots that mark the beginning of the LGBTQ rights movement) involved transgender people rioting alongside gay and lesbian people. Despite the shared struggle, trans people are often forgotten as having been involved in the initial movement at all. As Sylvia Rivera hollered in her emotional speech, Y’all Better Quiet Down, “They’ve been beaten up and raped, after they had to spend much of their money in jail to get their self home and try to get their sex change … But do you do anything for them? No!” (Rivera, qtd. STAR). The movement was in no way fought by white cisgender people alone, yet the stories are both whitewashed, and neglect to mention transgender people. Even if the intent of the LGBTQ movement as a whole was not to exclude any particular subgroups, over time, “trans brothers and sisters [were thrown] under the bus in an effort to win over the hetero mainstream” (Brink). The history of the LGBTQ movement has involved people of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and races since its inception; to neglect the existence of this diversity ignores a huge part of the battle for LGBTQ rights.

Prior to this class, I had never heard about Marsha Johnson or Sylvia Rivera. Even though my prior education made an attempt to teach us to respect and understand people with different lives than our own, LGBTQ history was (sadly) often neglected as a topic worth exploring.

Sylvia Rivera was raised by her strict, Catholic grandmother after her mother committed suicide when Rivera was just 3 years old. Rivera, a drag queen by her own assessment, is credited with being the first person at the Stonewall Riot to throw a bottle at the police, sparking the now famous event in LGBTQ history (Johnson). Rivera’s life was filled with homelessness, drug addiction, and poverty, yet she had quite a bit of influence as an transgender activist (Gilligan). In particular, Rivera is known for her speech, Y’all Better Quiet Down, in which she criticizes the gay liberation movement for neglecting to include transgender people (Reyes). Despite her incredible influence over the movement, her name is often skipped over entirely. For instance, the 2015 movie Stonewall, a story based on the events at the Stonewall Riots, neglected to include Rivera, and “drew protests for ‘whitewashing’ Rivera out of the story in favor of a fictional white character” (Reyes). Rivera lived to the age of 50, when she died of cancer in Manhattan (Dunlap).

–AG

Works Cited:

Gilligan, Heather. “Sylvia Rivera Threw One of the First Bottles in the Stonewall Riots, but Her Activism Went Much…” Timeline, 16 Mar. 2017, timeline.com/sylvia- rivera-threw-one-of-the-first-bottles-in-the-stonewall-riots-but-her-activism-went-much- 4bb0d33b9a2c.

Reyes, Raul A. “A Forgotten Latina Trailblazer: LGBT Activist Sylvia  Rivera.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 6 Oct. 2015,  www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/forgotten-latina-trailblazer-lgbt-activist-sylvia-rivera-n438586.

Dunlap, David W. “Sylvia Rivera, 50, Figure in Birth of the Gay Liberation  Movement.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 19 Feb. 2002,  www.nytimes.com/2002/02/20/nyregion/sylvia-rivera-50-figure-in-birth-of-the-gay-liberation-movement.html.

Johnson, Marsha P. “Rapping with a Street Transvestite Revolutionary.” Untorelli Press, 2011, untorellipress.noblogs.org/files/2011/12/STAR-imposed.pdf. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.