“SILENCE = DEATH” – “AIDS: WHERE IS YOUR RAGE? ACT UP,” Sylvia Rivera (July 2, 1951 - February 19, 2002) and the ACT UP contingent, Heritage of Pride Parade, New York City, June 26, 1994. Photo by Paul Fusco, c/o @magnumphotos. Sylvia Rivera, who would turn sixty-five today, was a founding parent of the modern LGBT liberation movement, having served as a founding member of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) and the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), and co-founding (with Marsha P. Johnson) the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.), a group dedicated to helping homeless drag queens, trans women, and survival (i.e., sex) workers. From Stonewall until her death, Sylvia raised her voice to protest the increasingly assimilationist mainstream LGB movement’s exclusion of gender non-conforming people from its social and legal victories. In 1971, Rivera helped lead GAA’s campaign for a New York City anti-discrimination ordiance, only to have GAA drop those portions of the bill covering the trans community at the last minute. And, near the end of her life, Rivera took particular exception with the dominance played by the Human Rights Campaign, a lobbying organization that, for many years, consciously and conspicuously ignored the struggles of the trans community. In April 2002, Rivera said that “one of our main goals now is to destroy the Human Rights Campaign, because I’m tired of sitting on the back of the bumper. It’s not even the back of the bus anymore–it’s the back of the bumper.” It is indisputable that Sylvia Rivera helped shape the modern LGBT liberation movement as it unfolded, but it is equally important to note that, without Sylvia, the history of that movement–and, specifically, the contributions of drag queens and trans women–may well have been lost. Sylvia Rivera died of complications from liver cancer on February 19, 2002; she was fifty. #lgbthistory #lgbtherstory #lgbttheirstory #lgbtpride #queerhistorymatters #haveprideinhistory (at Fifth Avenue)
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