Sylvia Rivera: Street Activist
Colfax & Race

Created By: Arvy
Sponsored By: Mariposa

Though her presence at the Stonewall Riots has been questioned, Sylvia Rivera became an influential LGBTQ activist in the early days of the movement. Sylvia was born July 2, 1951. Her father abandoned her, and later her mother took her own life. Sylvia was raised by her grandmother, who disapproved of Sylvia putting on makeup in fourth grade and her other feminine qualities. Rivera began living on the streets by age 11. Eventually, she was taken in by drag queens.

Sylvia was a close friend of Marsha P. Johnson. A year after the Stonewall riots, Sylvia and Marsha founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), the first organization to offer services for transgender youth in North America. Sylvia was also a founding member of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) and Gay Liberation Front (GLF).

In 1973, Sylvia angrily took the stage at the Christopher Street Liberation Day rally in New York and demanded that the movement recognize the transgender community. She accused the crowd of racism and transphobia. Rivera demanded that the crowd help LGBTQ people in jail and transgender women who suffered abuse from jailers and from mainstream society. The crowd tried to boo her off the stage. Sylvia would not be intimidated, shouting, “You all tell me go and hide my tail between my legs! I will not any longer put up with this shit!”

Sylvia was often homeless, suffered from substance abuse, and for a time lived in a homeless camp off Christopher Street pier. After Marsha P. Johnson’s death in 1992, Rivera called for an investigation insisting her friend was not suicidal. Sylvia was invited to Rome for the 2000 Millennium March where she was proclaimed “mother of all gay people.” A year later, she re-established STAR as a political organization, and from her death bed negotiated for transgender inclusion in the Empire State Pride Agenda (ESPA) structure. “I was a radical” Rivera once said, “This is the Revolution and I am not going to miss a minute of it.”