The Riddle of Gender

Village outdoor parking area; it was primitive, but a step up from sleeping in doorways,” writes Martin Duberman. “The ground rule in the trailer was that nobody had to go out and hustle her body, but that when they did, they had to kick back a percentage to help keep STAR House going. Marsha and Sylvia took it upon themselves to hustle on a regular basis and to return to the truck each morning with breakfast food for everybody.”

After the “abandoned” trailer was hauled away, the group rented a house from a Mafioso who owned a gay bar in the Village. The building was falling apart, but Sylvia and her supporters made it habitable. “Marsha and I had always sneaked people into our hotel rooms,” Rivera says in Trans Liberation. “And you can sneak fifty people into two hotel rooms. Then we got a building at 213 East Second Avenue. 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.” Keeping the building going was tough, however, and Rivera and Johnson were not always able to make the rent. Duberman notes that when Rivera asked for help from the Gay Activists Alliance— rental of their stereo equipment to use during a benefit dance for STAR House—she was turned down. Later, when she was behind on the rent, she once again approached GAA for help and was once again turned down. Rivera and her “children” were eventually evicted and back out on the streets. “There was always food in the house and everyone had fun,” Rivera says nostalgically in Trans Liberation. “It lasted for two or three years.”

By then, the fragile post-Stonewall alliance between the street, the classroom, and the closet was beginning to fall apart. Most middle-class gays and lesbians didn’t look or behave much differently from their heterosexual peers. They shared similar values; politically, some were quite conservative. In Out for Good, Clendenin and Nagourney quote a 1972 editorial in the gay paper The Advocate: “It is possible for all homosexuals to favor freedom and justice for homosexuals. But it is the wildest and most improbable jump to say that therefore they should all be against the Vietnam war, against capitalism, or in favor of destroying society.”

Street people like Sylvia Rivera, on the other hand, were radicals in every sense of the word. Rivera herself had ties with the Black Panthers and the Young Lords and attended the People’s Revolutionary Congress held in Philadelphia in 1970, where she met Huey Newton. “ Huey decided that we were part of the revolution—that we were revolutionary people,” she says proudly in Trans Liberation. One of the first occasions at which STAR marched as a group was a 1970 protest against police repression in Harlem. “I ended up meeting 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.”

That respect was sorely lacking in other contexts. The lifestyle of a street queen was in many ways a flagrant challenge to traditional social mores. Surviving by prostitution and drug dealing, in and out of jail, the cross-dressing street queen was a figure of the underworld, viewed with distaste by many upscale gays who lived in an orderly, affluent world utterly inaccessible to people like Sylvia Rivera. “When attacked by a GAA man—who, in trying to liberate himself from traditional ridicule about being a surrogate woman, could be impatiently moralistic about cross-dressing ‘stereotypes’—Rivera would attack back,” says Martin Duberman. “She would remind him how tough you had to be to survive as a street queen, how you had to fight, cheat, and steal to get from one day to the next.”

The tension between middle-class gays and lesbians and the street exploded at a June 1973 march and rally in commemoration of the Stonewall riots. The Gay Pride march, held annually, “was being seized by drag queens as their holiday, a chance to celebrate their role in the original uprising at the bar,” report Clendenin and Nagourney in Out for Good. “They were demanding a prominent place in the line of march, and they wanted to be the centers of attention at the rally.” The high visibility of the drag queens and the way that they drew the attention of the media rankled many gay men and lesbians who were increasingly convinced that these “extreme” members of the community were holding back the progress of the whole. Furthermore, many lesbians continued to be angry at what they viewed as the disrespectful parody of femaleness embodied by drag queens.

At the 1973 rally, when Sylvia Rivera took the stage and began to harangue the crowd about its lack of support for street queens, some of the lesbians had had enough. Jean O’Leary took the mike after Rivera and read a prepared statement denouncing transvestites as “men who impersonate women for entertainment and profit.” O’Leary delivered a scathing attack on not only Rivera but any male-bodied person who wore makeup and women’s clothes. Wearing dresses was not a revolutionary act, as some of the early (male) leaders of the gay liberation movement had asserted; it was instead an insult to women. O’Leary was challenged by Lee Brewster, who defended Rivera and reminded the crowd that “today you’re celebrating what was the result of what the drag queens did at the Stonewall.” But the damage had been done. Gay leaders were beginning to publicly dissociate themselves from cross-dressers, drag queens, and transsexuals. Some viewed this as pragmatism, others as selling out. Rivera, rejected by the movement she had helped found, “crawled into a whiskey bottle,” says her friend and STAR daughter Chelsea Goodwin. It would take decades for her to reemerge as a public figure. When she did, the gay rights movement’s betrayal of its transgender allies would be her major theme.

“We liberated them. They owe us,” she shouted in June 2001, at a rally held in Sheridan Square, near the site of the original Stonewall bar. “I want to call on all the dykes and fags who think that transpeople are a separate community to come out in support of us. It’s still open season on transpeople in New York City,” she said, referring to the recent murder of twenty-five-year-old Amanda Milan in front of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The rally itself was a call for justice for Milan and other transgendered victims of violence, and Rivera used the occasion to contrast the gay community’s visible public support for Matthew Shepherd—killed in Laramie, Wyoming—and his family with the noticeable absence of such support in the case of transgender hate crime victims. “New York is the birthplace of so many battles for civil rights. Well, it’s our turn. We stand here in the cradle of the gay rights movement, but trannies have been left behind. We’re still in the back of the bus. We’ve been silent and invisible for too long.”

At the rally, Rivera called for the passage of a trans-inclusive civil rights bill in New York City. “I’ve been working in this movement for thirty years and I’m still begging for what you’ve got,” she shouted at pedestrians on Christopher Street, the heart of gay Greenwich Village. Rivera, like many transgendered and transsexual people, was infuriated by the passage of civil rights protections for gays that failed to include protections for people whose “real or perceived gender identity” made them targets of violence and discrimination. This strategy had been initiated in New York City in the seventies, when gay leaders, aware of the difficulties of passing any kind of legislation protecting the civil rights of gays and lesbians, had removed language from the bill that explicitly protected cross-dressers and transsexuals.

Continued gay resistance to the inclusion of gender-variant people in local and national civil rights legislation today is perhaps best exemplified by a syndicated article that appeared in GLBT newspapers after Rivera’s death, in 2002. In “The Myth of a Transgender Stonewall,” author Dale Carpenter objects to the “guilt-ridden commentary about how the gay civil rights movement has pushed aside ‘the people that started it all,’” which followed in the wake of Rivera’s death. “This commentary is wrong as a matter of history and unsupported as a matter of policy,” says Carpenter, who adds that “historical disputes have no bearing—either way—on whether ‘gender identity’ ought to be included in gay civil rights legislation. Even if Stonewall was the casus belli of the gay struggle and even if transgenders were the only people there kicking shins and uprooting parking meters, so what?” Carpenter argues that “gay civil rights legislation would be stalled or effectively killed in many places if transgenders were included. The choice is often between a more inclusive bill that goes nowhere and a less inclusive bill that actually becomes law. These are hard realities. We should not feel guilty because we want to make progress, least of all because someone is telling us fairy tales about our past.”

A law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity was finally passed in New York City on May i, 2002. Hours before she died, Rivera met with a group from the Empire State Pride Agenda to negotiate trans inclusion in a civil rights bill then being debated in the New York State legislature (the bill was passed without a gender-identity clause). When National Public Radio’s All Things Considered ran a program titled “Remembering Stonewall” in 2001, Sylvia Rivera sent the following update: “Since May, I’ve been the food director at the Metropolitan Community Church food pantry. My girlfriend, Julia, is my assistant and my computer person (because I still don’t know a damn thing about these new modern contraptions of yours!). We have been rather busy with the resurrection of street Transgender Action Revolutionaries and are planning protests around the trial of Amanda Milan’s assassins. So between the jobs and politics, you know how frantic it is. One of our main goals right now is to destroy the Human Rights Campaign, because I’m tired of sitting on the back of the