Episode 29: Sylvia Rivera

Hi everyone, I’m so excited to bring you the story of Sylvia Rivera, an incredible queer icon if there ever was one. Rivera was at the Stonewall Uprising (maybe) and she began one of the first-ever US organizations dedicated to advocating for trans rights. Her story is a bit sad, but it gives us good work to aspire to. 🎙️ Transcript Hey everyone, welcome to Unruly Figures, the podcast that celebrates history’s greatest rule-breakers. I’m your host, Valorie Clark, and today I’m going to be covering an icon of trans leadership and activism: Sylvia Rivera. But before we jump into Rivera’s life and her role in queer history, I want to give a huge thank you to all the paying subscribers on Substack who make this podcast possible. Y’all are the best and this podcast wouldn’t still be going without you! Each of these episodes takes me nearly 30 hours of work, which means they’ve become a part-time job. So if you like this show and want more of it, please become a paying subscriber for just $6/month or $60/year! Contributions help ensure that I will be able to continue doing this work. Becoming a paying subscriber will also give you access to exclusive content, merch, and behind-the-scenes updates on the upcoming Unruly Figures book. When you’re ready to do that, head over to unrulyfigures.substack.com. A quick trigger warning before we jump in: Sylvia Rivera’s life has some moments of serious darkness. We’re going to talk about sex trafficking and sexual assault and prostitution as a minor in this episode, a lot of which is tough. But, as Sylvia Rivera’s friend Ehn Nothing wrote, quote, “creating a narrative of revolt against the constraints of civilization gives us a lineage to draw motivation from, to keep us warm when we feel broken under the weight of this miserable world. By understanding ourselves as part of an ongoing war that has been raging for 12,000 years, we dynamite a history that would keep us as either spectators or pawns in a theater created by bosses, politicians, and police. History is a compass.” One last note, the term ‘transgender’ was coined in the 1960s, during Sylvia Rivera’s lifetime, but it wasn’t yet in popular use. That didn’t come until the 1990s. So Rivera often referred to herself as a drag queen, or a gay boy, and when I quote some of her writing, I’m going to use her language. Later in her life, however, she referred to herself as transgender and as a woman, though, as we’ll see, she didn’t love labels. Okay, let’s hop in. Sylvia Rivera was born on July 2, 1951 in New York City. In a 1989 interview, she mentioned, she was born, quote, “at 2:30 in the morning in a taxi cab in the old Lincoln Hospital parking lot. The old queen couldn’t wait.” At birth, she was assigned the male gender and named Ray. Her father, a Puerto Rican man, abandoned her and her Venezuelan mother pretty soon after her birth. When she was just three years old, her mother died by suicide. In her short memoir essay, “Queens in Exile, The Forgotten Ones” Rivera speculates that her mother was trying to escape her then-boyfriend’s abuse. He was a drug dealer and when he was high, he would threaten to kill Rivera’s mother and Rivera. Her mother mixed rat poison into milk and drank it; she gave some of the poisoned milk to her child too. Rivera and her mother survived long enough to be taken to the hospital. Rivera’s stomach was pumped and she survived. Her mother, however, died 3 days later. Later, when Rivera was grown up, her grandmother said that Rivera’s mother had tried to kill her too because, quote, “she knew I was going to have a hard life.” Rivera moved in with her maternal grandmother at this point, and their relationship was always tense. Her grandmother wanted to take in Rivera’s sister, but Rivera’s stepfather had put her up for adoption. It’s unclear to me what became of the girl. According to Rivera’s essay, her grandmother was a “prejudiced…very racist woman.” She didn’t like that Rivera’s father had darker skin, and that Rivera did too. Rivera thinks her grandmother did love her, but in a very harsh way. She ensured that Rivera went to good schools, but they were all-white, and she tried to keep Rivera from learning Spanish. This happened in a lot of twentieth-century immigrant homes, unfortunately, especially in particularly racist parts of the US; I have several friends who are first-generation Americans who never learned to speak their parents’ first languages because their parents wanted them to assimilate into US white culture. It seems like this is the impulse her grandmother was trying to follow. In the fourth grade, Rivera began wearing makeup to school. Her teachers asked if her grandmother knew and she said yes, which was a lie. She said her grandmother, quote, “didn’t know because there was a woman who was taking care of me out on Long Island, and I would put on my makeup on my way to school. I knew I would wear it home and take it off by 5 o’clock without having any problems because there was nobody in the house.” This was the beginning of her transition, I guess you could say. Though there’s not really a well-documented moment for when Rivera came out and began identifying as female and using she/her pronouns. Most of the other students ignored Rivera’s makeup. But one sixth-grader got angry about it, calling her a slur. The two got into a fight, and Rivera was suspended from school for a week. If hearing about child sexual abuse is something you’re not in the headspace to listen to, skip the next minute or so. Rivera’s first sexual experience came when she was just seven years old or so. She doesn’t offer much detail in her memoir, but she writes, quote, “My cousin was baby-sitting me, and I always found him attractive. He offered and I accepted.” Within a few years, she started sleeping with another friend from the Lower East Side, but she doesn’t name him. She also mentions that her uncle began prostituting her–well, actually, she says, quote, “I was turning tricks with my uncle for money.” To me the phrasing here is vague–it’s unclear to me if her uncle is assaulting her then paying her (remember, she’s under 10 years old at this time, so all sexual encounters she’s having, especially with adults, are by definition non-consensual) or if he’s selling her and splitting the money with her. Either way, it’s not a good home situation. Worse, the adults in her life seemed to be aware something was going on and didn’t step in. In her essay, quote, “A woman once time [sic] patted me on my ass and said, ‘Huh, your ass is getting big, that means you’re getting pumped,’ and I took offense at that.” Her grandmother would beat Rivera as punishment instead of stepping in and stopping anything. When her grandmother caught her wearing “feminine” clothing, she would also beat Rivera. She’d say, quote, “We don't do this. You're one of the boys. I want you to be a mechanic." Rivera would respond, "No, but I want to be a hairdresser. I want to do this. And I want to wear these clothes." I want to point out that a lot of biographies of Rivera leave out this abuse. I don’t know that it’s to protect readers, because they almost always talk about her sex work as a child. I think it’s out of a desire to discredit the link between sexual abuse and quote-unquote, “deviant sexuality,” to use a nineteenth-century term. That link was historically used to discredit homosexuality as natural, saying that it was a crime or an illness that the victims then grew up to perpetrate themselves. I think–hope–that we’ve come far enough and are enlightened enough to take Rivera at her word that the abuse she survived was not why she later was attracted to men or was in any way related to her gender identity. It seems to me that Rivera didn’t even necessarily process these abuses as traumatic events, though she could be glossing over things. So it’s probably not a surprise that Rivera ran away from home when she was nearly 11 years old. In that same 1989 interview, Rivera … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unrulyfigures.substack.com/subscribe