workingclasshistory:

On this day, 2 July 1951, transgender revolutionary icon Sylvia Rivera of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent was born in the Bronx, New York. Rejected by her family due to her “effeminate” behaviour Rivera ran away from home aged 11 and engaged in survival sex work in the Times Square area.
In the 1960s, Rivera became involved in movements against the Vietnam war and for Black liberation, then with the Stonewall rebellion threw herself into the burgeoning gay liberation movement, taking part in activities with the Gay Liberation Front, and later the Gay Activists Alliance.
With her friend Marsha P Johnson and others, she co-founded Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, a radical group which raised money to rent an apartment to house and support homeless gay and trans young people. And she was a critic of the more middle-class, cis gendered (i.e. not transgender) leadership of much of the gay rights movement, especially when a Gay Rights Bill which was eventually passed in 1986 omitted trans people: “They have a little backroom deal without inviting Miss Sylvia and some of the other trans activists to this backroom deal with these politicians. The deal was, ‘You take them out, we’ll pass the bill’”.
After the suspected murder of Johnson in 1992, her life went “off the rails”, according to her friend, historian Eric Marcus, and she ended up homeless again living on an abandoned pier in Manhattan and drinking heavily. She did get involved in movement again, and in 2001 relaunched STAR, renamed Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries, but she died the following year of liver cancer.
She is today remembered as one of the key activists who “who made sure there was a ’T’ with the ‘LGB…’”.
Learn more about the gay liberation movement in the 60s and 70s in our podcast: https://workingclasshistory.com/2019/05/13/e21-22-the-stonewall-riots-and-pride-at-50/ https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1465608393624306/?type=3