Sylvia Rivera

Let's set up the stage so that the right events happen.

This message of direct action appealed to Sylvia Rivera.

She was then 19 years old and still involved with sex work.

She'd had some troubles with drugs and she lived on the streets when she couldn't keep a room of her own.

We won't be harassed and degraded anymore." Michael Brown from the GLF agreed, saying, "This march is an affirmation and declaration of our new pride." When Craig Rodwell arrived in Central Park at the end of the march, he had a broad smile on his face, surrounded by thousands of fellow friends and compatriots.

They were all there around him, and at least for the moment, they were all together.

But for Sylvia Rivera, the Liberation Day March only emphasized her mixed feelings about political involvement.

On the one hand, it was good that the march had happened, but on the other, she still felt excluded from goals the march had been trying to achieve.

Others gravitated to major cities like New York or San Francisco to try and carve out new lives for themselves, where at least they had the chance to find a more accepting community.

One of these was Sylvia Rivera, born in the Bronx in 1951 to a Puerto Rican father and a Venezuelan mother.

She was orphaned at an early age after her father abandoned the family and her mother killed herself.

Rivera's grandmother took her in, but by the time Rivera was 10 years old, the two barely got along.

A lot of us were beaten up and raped.

When I ended up going to jail to do 90 days, they tried to rape me.

I very nicely beat the shit out of a man." The world that Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P.

Johnson experienced in New York mirrored other people's experiences in different cities across the country.

And there's a story that I tell in transgender history about how And to oversimplify things, like in the later 60s and early 70s, trans or drag people were, you know, often considered kind of like at the militant forefront of, you know, social change movements.

And I think about the overtold stories of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who founded a group called Star Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, you know, that that there was a kind of trans politics that was seen as like like this is the most radical.

But by around 1973, 74, that's changed.

And I think there's two important things that happened in 1973.