In June, Document Women told the story of Marsha P Johnson. In that essay, we mentioned a close friend, Sylvia Rivera. Rivera along with Johnson made significant contributions to the fight for Trans and gay rights in America. Sylvia Rivera, a survivor of the Stonewall Inn riot in 1969, was a relentless defender of individuals who were marginalised and ignored by more significant causes. She battled against the exclusion of transgender people from the greater LGBT rights movement throughout her life, particularly the marginalization of transgender people of colour.
Rivera was born to Puerto Rican parents in New York City in 1951. She was born to the male gender. Rivera went through a challenging upbringing. Rivera’s mother committed suicide when she was 3 years old, and her father was not present. Rivera, who was raised by her grandmother, was quite young when she started playing around with fashion and makeup. Following an assault on a school playground in the sixth grade, she was punished by being beaten for doing so. by another student and received a weeklong suspension from school. At 11, Rivera fled his home and fell prey to sexual exploitation around 42nd Street.
When Rivera met Marsha P. Johnson in 1963, her life was forever altered. Johnson, a self-described drag queen and activist from the African American community, was also fighting exclusion from the homosexual rights movement because it did not accept her gender presentation. Rivera remarked about Johnson saying that “she was like a mother to me.” On June 28, 1969, guests of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in lower Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, rose against a police raid and changed the course of the gay rights movement. The two were heavily involved in this revolt.
In a 2001 interview, Rivera stated that despite the long-standing misconception that she threw the first Molotov cocktail towards the police, she did toss the second. After the New York City Pride March in early July 1992, Marsha P. Johnson’s body was discovered floating in the Hudson River near the West Village Piers. Despite having a head injury, police quickly determined that Johnson died by suicide. Johnson’s friends and supporters, including Rivera, argued that Johnson had not been suicidal, and a postering campaign by the general public later claimed that Johnson had previously faced harassment close to the location where her body was discovered.
Rivera attempted suicide in May 1995 by wading into the Hudson River. She also made an appearance that year in the Arthur Dong documentary episode “OutRage ’69,” which was a part of the PBS series “The Question of Equality” and featured the 1973 footage of her “Gay Power” speech at Pride. She also conducted a lengthy interview with gay journalist Randy Wicker during which she spoke about her previous suicide attempts, Johnson’s life and death, and her support for gay people from lower socioeconomic classes who had become homeless due to the AIDS epidemic.
Rivera struggled with substance misuse throughout her life and spent time among the LGBT homeless people at the Christopher Street docks. Rivera passed away from complications related to liver cancer in the early hours of February 19, 2002, at St. Vincent’s Hospital.”In many ways, Sylvia was the Rosa Parks of the modern transgender movement, a term that was not coined until two decades after Stonewall,” activist Riki Wilchins observed. Rivera served as a minister through the Metropolitan Community Church of New York’s food bank, which gives food to the hungry. She remained an ardent supporter of gay youngsters, recalling her background as a child on the streets. The Sylvia Rivera Food Pantry and Sylvia’s Place, the gay adolescent shelters run by MCC New York, are located in the city.
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