Marsha P. Johnson was at the Stonewall Inn when the police raided the bar June 28, 1969, and she helped start the riots that mark the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. She was a beloved fixture in Greenwich Village for 30 years; she co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, modeled for Warhol, protested with…
Earlier this year, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery installed the portrait of Sylvia Rivera in the “Struggle for Justice” exhibition. Rivera is the first transgendered person in the museum’s collection. A forerunner in the fight against gender identity discrimination, Ray Rivera rechristened himself as Sylvia as a teenager. When cast out by her family, she…
“So Stonewall is a great, great foundation,” transgender activist and Stonewall veteran icon Sylvia Rivera wrote in her 2001 essay Bitch on Wheels. “It began the modern day liberation movement, like we spoke before about the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society. Yes, there were lots of other little groups but you had to…
A friend recently pointed me to a video of trans advocate Sylvia Rivera’s Y’all Better Quiet Down speech at New York City’s 1973 Liberation Day Rally. In the speech she stated, “I believe in the gay power. I believe in us getting our rights or else I would not be out their fighting for our…
