THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

When she spoke those words, Rivera was commenting on a decision made by the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) to exclude the transgender community from language in early drafts of the New York gay-rights bill, introduced in 1986.

This was despite the role trans women took during the 1969 Stonewall Riots and Rivera's relentless battle for the community's inclusion both with GAA and the Gay Liberation Front (GLF).

However, to those who look back upon and study Rivera's 50 years of life, from her birth in the Bronx in 1951 to her untimely death from liver cancer in 2002, there is no equal, in determination, fight or love for community, like a drag queen scorned.

In 1967, equality-for-all activist Judy Bowen, having majored in journalism, became involved in the New York civil-rights movement.

"I was in a contest at a club in Long Island," she told Windy City Times. "The police raided the place and arrested me just as I was being crowned Queen of Hearts. They took about 17 people to jail and threw the gays, lesbians and [transgender] people in the same cell. They were very abusive during that time."

Bowen was released the following day. Shortly afterwards, she met Brooklyn-born businessman and activist Philip Raia. Bowen said that Raia helped her with an apartment on Christopher Street, less than a half block from the Stonewall Inn.

When his family moved to Long Island, Raia went to his first gay bar. He was 18.

"My father was a sailor for 20 years. My mom was very religious," Raia added. "When I came out, they told me 'if you want to stay in this house, you can't be that way. If you leave this house, you have to leave with the same things [with] which you came into this world' which was basically nothing."

Raia found a job with an architect and interior design firm on Madison Avenue and became involved with meetings and events held by the GLF, eventually leaving for the GAA.

"We were collecting signatures in the West Village for a [gay-rights] petition to send to councilwoman Carol Greitzer who represented the Upper West Side," he said. "Sylvia signed one of the petitions and got other people to sign the documents. She was arrested for that. She never took 'no' for an answer. She wasn't a person who was full of fluff. She was going to change things and make things happen. She had vision. I was always impressed with the way she got through this thing we call life."

Ostracized by her family and homeless from the age of 11, Rivera was living and working on the streets.

"Everybody had to survive," Bowen said. "I was just trying to keep my life together. I was offered a job working at the 10 Cents a Dance clubs. There were three of them in Midtown Manhattan. That's where you would find girls who were passable. During those days, a man could come into the club, and select the girl that he wanted. That's where the money was. Most of the clubs were mafia owned. Myself and another girl were selected to be escorts for people coming from Chicago to New York. Working the clubs was very dangerous. We were never supposed to talk about our reality."

Bowen became acquainted with Rivera's friend and fellow activist Marsha P. Johnson, who was murdered in 1992.

"Marsha was a great personality who was always with Sylvia," Bowen recalled. "Marsha and I would stop and talk and sometimes go for coffee. She always made me laugh. Sylvia was rejected by [GAA] because she was too militant. But she stood up to the police when the rest of us were afraid to. She led the way and let us all know we didn't have to take it anymore because the police would raid the clubs and beat everybody up. They didn't care."

Bowen was working when the Stonewall riots took place.

Ever the champion of Black, Puerto Rican and trans activism, in 1970, Rivera alongside Johnson formed the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) through which they provided the city's homeless trans population with a shared roof over their heads in an abandoned building at 640 East 12th Street.

"STAR was not Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in its first incarnation," Raia said. "It was really straight transvestites for gays. Sylvia saw that we were not different groups but a community. She was more interested in bringing people together than breaking them into factions."

"She had a great heart," Bowen noted, "because she grew up on the streets."

That year, STAR held a sit-in at New York University (NYU)'s Weinstein Hall.

"This is the question that is running through our minds," a STAR statement read. "Do you really want Gay Power or are you looking for a few laughs or maybe a little excitement? If you want Gay Liberation then you are going to have to fight for it. We don't mean tomorrow, or the next day, we are talking about today."

"My understanding was she was beginning to communicate to gay males and lesbian women that there was no need to run from each other," Raia said. "She really did not give up. As she became comfortable with the mission [GAA] was trying to achieve, she brought a number of homeless [transgender] people from 42nd Street to the meetings. For me, this was a wonderful thing because I believe that we make change through unity and not separation. One of the reasons I left GAA was because they were very fixated on white male, middle-class thinking. But even when they were saying 'no' Sylvia would find a way of fitting in."

Rivera would remember GAA's rejection of her during an interview with Village Voice: "When things started getting more mainstream it was like, 'we don't need you no more.'"

In a grainy, black-and-white video of a Liberation Day rally held in New York's Washington Square Park, Rivera can be seen squaring off against lesbian and Democratic Party activist Jean O'Leary (1948-2005) who blamed Rivera for organizers not being permitted to read a political statement.

"When men impersonate women for reasons of entertainment or profit, they insult women," O'Leary said. "Men have never been able to show us ourselves."

"Y'all better quiet down," Rivera stated as she took the microphone. "I've been trying to get up here all day. Your gay brothers and sisters in jail write me every motherfucking week and ask for your help and you don't do a goddamn thing for them. They've been beaten up and raped. They do not write women. They do not write men. They write STAR because we're trying to do something for them. I have been beaten, I have had my nose broken, I have been thrown in jail, I have lost my job, I have lost my apartment for Gay Liberation, and y'all treat me this way? What's wrong with you?"

"At the age of 13, I had long hair and I walked a certain way," Bowen said. "I was coming back from the store when a guy picked me up. I guess he thought he was picking up a girl. When he got me out into the country, he discovered my situation. I was raped. Then the man got out of the car and started digging the hole to bury me. I sneaked out of the car, got away and I ran. People found me later, I was found in the woods."

Although she credits Raia along with a British lawyer and others for helping her build what was to become a successful life as a business and art gallery owner, landlord and newspaper publisher in New York, Bowen never forgot the shadow of violence under which she lived.

"Our society attacks anyone who is different," she said. "That's why I have always dealt with everything with caution because I realized that people like me were in danger and you could not trust anybody."

Despite the loss of STAR's building, the death of Johnson (which New York police insist to this day was a suicide despite physical evidence to the contrary) and her own suicide attempts, Rivera always trusted that there would come a better day for the trans community.

In 2001, one year before her death, Rivera was invited to give a speech at a monthly meeting of Latino Gay Men of New York (LGMNY). After relating the history of her life, Stonewall and STAR, she got onto the topic of transgender woman Amanda Milan who had been murdered in New York in 2000.

"You screw with the transgender community and STAR will be on your doorstep," she said. "Just like we trashed the HRC [Human Rights Campaign] for not endorsing the Amanda Milan actions, and then, when they threw us a piece of trash, we refused to accept it. How dare you question the validity of a transgender group asking for your support, when this transgender woman was murdered? No. The trans community has allowed, we have allowed the gay and lesbian community to speak for us. Times are changing. Our armies are rising and we are getting stronger. And when we come a knocking they're going to know that you don't fuck with the transgender community."

Rivera's legacy

Dr. Beth Kelly, Ph.D. is a professor of Women's and Gender Studies at DePaul University's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Hungry for any education about LGBT issues since she came out as a teenager during the pre-Stonewall years, Kelly has been teaching courses in LGBT politics and legal issues for nearly two decades.

"Sylvia was a woman who was both of and ahead of her time," Kelly said. "She was angry in 1969 and she was still angry and still an activist almost up to the moment that she died. Many people were challenged by Sylvia in ways that they did not want to be challenged but she didn't back down. She was in poverty, she was a trans woman of color and her criticism of GAA back in the '70s was very contemporary today. She exemplified intersectionality long before feminists were talking about it."

"Clearly one cannot be queer with any serious grasp of our history without knowing at least something about Sylvia Rivera," Legacy Project founder and Executive Director Victor Salvo noted. "That Rivera was chosen by the [Legacy Project] Selection Committee is not a surprise, given the number of historians and academics involved. Though there is a lot of mythology about her within the community, academics and researchers have identified the hallmarks of her true legacy. Personally I was struck most by how she refused to be patronized, refused to be silenced, and was not afraid to take mainstream activists to task when they failed to consider the trans community in their political calculus."

"Rivera would have none of this," he added. "She struck out—without regard as to who got pissed off—and did what she felt she needed to do. It was not always eloquent. It was often uncomfortable. It was always confrontational. But she got heard. And she made an impression."

It is an impression that resounds today in the groundbreaking work of the New York-based Sylvia Rivera Law Project and among Kelly's students.

"A lot of our students are absolutely fascinated with discrimination against trans people in general," Kelly said. "The students who take my classes know about Sylvia and Marsha (another individual who has yet to get her full recognition). Many of them are challenging gender issues in ways that Sylvia probably could never have imagined. A lot of them reject all labels. I see hope for the future. The murders of trans women are being talked about on the news—not enough, not always well—but it makes a huge difference between growing up in the iron curtain of silence in the '50s and '60s and today growing up with television shows like Modern Family."

Raia hopes that the generations who see Rivera's plaque on The Legacy Walk are inspired by a woman "who was being who she is. We can't judge other people for who they are. By allowing them to be, we'll all be better off. We'll all learn. Sylvia was continually open to other people. Whether she agreed or disagreed, she would hear them out. We all depend on each other for survival but we will never do that if we put up walls and obstacles."

"Sylvia and Marsha gave us all hope," Bowen said. "From the very beginning I saw something in Sylvia that was very special. Even though she grew up living on the streets she still thought about other people, especially young people. If our society does not help them, they will not survive."

"She learned her sense of social justice from the perspective of someone who had to endure so much injustice in her lifetime," Salvo said. "It made her sensitive and empathetic. It made her tough. It made her smart. She learned how to fight. But she also learned how to collaborate. She learned how to talk. And she learned how to listen. She endured for over 50 years as an activist because she was able to be both uncompromising when that was needed, and to work in coalition. It is because of her that we began to remember the "T". I think that is amazing. We all owe Sylvia Rivera a debt. Because it is only by remembering the most vulnerable among us that we can build a new social reality that is safer and more just for everybody."

Sponsorship of The Legacy Project's 5th Dedication Ceremony Oct. 15, featuring Salvo, Raia, Bowen and celebrated Chicago transgender activist Myles Brady-Davis has been provided by BMO Harris Bank, the Center on Halsted, Levi Strauss, the Northalsted Business Alliance, Sidetrack, and Stoli Group USA. The media sponsor is Windy City Times. Rivera's plaque sponsor is Stoli Group USA (the second of a three-plaque commitment that began with Ugandan activist David Kato in 2014).

For more information and tickets for the events, which start at 1 p.m., visit: www.eventbrite.com/e/legacy-walk-dedication-v-tickets-27530936773 .