I think that time and place have lot to do with it. I grew up in a very rigid, very conservative family. I’m the only person that’s still alive in my family that’s not a born-againer. I talk to my mother maybe once a year. What’s to talk about? She’s kind of gotten over it, but she used to attribute my being transgendered to demonic possession. So once a year, at Christmas, I’d send her a card and sign it “Chelsea, Princess of Darkness,” and forget about her for the rest of the year. What are you going to do?
You’ve got to keep the books in balance. The gender thing was a bit more extreme. She thought that smoking pot and listening to the Grateful Dead were signs of demonic possession too. I used to be a Deadhead, and I was playing punk rock at CBGBs too.
Q: Let’s talk a bit about Transy House. How did Transy House get started?”
RUSTY: Transy House grew out of our thoughts on The Ramones. [Laughter] Actually, it just sort of evolved. The genesis of it was that Chelsea had been out for a long time. I was coming out around ’91 or ’92 and was basically heavy into transition then. And Chelsea told me that she was one of the last daughters of Sylvia Rivera, and Chelsea told me about STAR House [a refuge for homeless transgender youth], and that was sort of filed away in the back of my mind. We were living in Bellmore, Long Island, then, in an apartment, and after I came out definitively in ’93 and was teaching as a woman at Hofstra, I wanted to buy a house rather than live in an apartment. Since my daughter and son were living in Brooklyn then, with their other parent, I wanted to be close to them. Chelsea and I walked the streets of Brooklyn looking for a cheap place and we found the house that we live in now, and I bought it. And another person, Julia Murray, was living with us and she went through transition about the same time I did. So Julia, Chelsea, and I moved in around August 1, 1994, and then gradually other people … it was sort of unique for trans people to own a house in New York, so other people started to say, “I need a place to live. Can I come and live with you?” I think that one of the first was Christiana, and there’s been a dribble of people that have come and gone over the years.
Transy House just gradually evolved because it was a safe space for transpeople. A lot of transpeople who were fighting their way through their lives would come in and all of a sudden … Bingo! In this house transpeople are in the majority, and no longer is it “You’re weird,” but this is a normal environment for you. And people really appreciated that. They came during transition. A lot of lesbians also stopped by too, people who were just gender variant in any way.
Then also Chelsea and I were the mainstays of an organization called the Metropolitan Gender Network [MGN]. Because we had computers and telephones and fax machines and an office, we became sort of like an informational center for political activism. Definitely we were doing that from ‘96 on. And then, around 1997 Chelsea reconnected with Sylvia. And Sylvia at that time was living on the piers. She came and spoke at MGN, and that’s when I met her. And she came over a lot to the house quite often and eventually she came there to live, in around ‘98 or late ‘97. When Sylvia came she was really bottoming out. She had a lot of drug problems and she had decided that she would concentrate on one drug, alcohol, and she drank like a fish. Honestly, Chelsea harassed her so much about drinking. I was putting pressure on, but I put less pressure on people. Chelsea had these knock-down, drag-out battles with her. I wrote this devastating story about her, sort of contrasting her power when she was sober with when she was drunk. So Sylvia finally decided about eighteen months ago to stop drinking. She went cold turkey and stopped drinking. So she came back into her power after she realized that she was destroying herself. [Note: Sylvia Rivera died in October 2002 of liver disease. This interview was conducted before her death.]
But when she came to live at the house, I used to say that Chelsea’s and my role in life was to deliver Sylvia to her speeches. We would get her there sober, but she might not come away sober. So we would take her down to Washington or other places. I remember being in Washington at the AIDS parade with her, and someone said “You’re Sylvia Rivera. I thought you were dead!”
Q: She is such a huge folk hero.
RUSTY: I would say that now that Sylvia has got it together again, she is definitely the most well-known transperson in the queer community, if you include gay and lesbian people.
CHELSEA: Sylvia was at Stonewall. She was doing stuff [organizing] with Lee Brewster; These people were doing stuff from ‘69 to ’74. But then all this so-called lesbian feminist bullshit. Let me go on record about that. There’s nothing wrong with being a nationalist. There’s nothing wrong with being a socialist. But when you put the two words together and become a National Socialist, that’s something else. There’s nothing wrong with being a lesbian. That’s a good thing. There’s nothing wrong with being a feminist. This is a good thing. But for some reason when you string those two words together and make it lesbian feminist, the same thing happens as when you combined “nationalism” and “socialism.” Why? I don’t know, but it does.
So what happened is that in ’74, they wanted to purge the drag queens out of the parades, out of the rallies. She apologized years later, but what happened is that one of the lesbian feminists, named Jean O’Leary, had Sylvia forcibly removed from the stage at the rally. So, basically, Sylvia went into a real funk, crawled into a whiskey bottle, and it was like ‘90-somethmg before she crawled out.
The other thing that happened in ’74, though, is that when the original gay rights bill was drafted in New York it included trans—it actually said “transvestites and transsexuals” in the parlance of the day.
In 1974, a bunch of people from the GAA [Gay Activists Alliance] cut a deal with the politicians, who said that if they took us out [drag queens and transsexuals], it would get the bill passed faster. That was ’74. The bill didn’t pass till ‘86 anyway, but we’ll let that slide for now. So the point is that in ’74 Sylvia just gave up; she wasn’t going to do anything else.
But I thought what Sylvia was doing made sense, because I was hanging out with people like Abbie Hoffman. I was part of the New Left that’s now called the Old Left. Anyway, my message has always been that this came out of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and it started as something visible that could be seen in the press with Sylvia. Actually it started with Magnus Hirschfeld and what happened in Berlin in the ‘20’s. But after that unpleasantness in the 1930s and ‘40s, all that got wiped out. And coming after the fifties cold war thing, the next visible figure was Sylvia.
Five
LIBERATING THE RAINBOW
We were led out of the bar and they cattled us all against the police vans. The cops pushed us up against the grates and the fences. People started throwing pennies, nickels, and quarters at the cops, and then the bottles started. And then we finally had the Morals Squad bamcaded in the Stonewall building because they were actually afraid of us at that time. They didn’t know we were going to react that way. We were not taking anymore of this shit.
Liberation. Revolution. In the summer of 1969, those were more than just words. As the song by Thunderclap Newman put it, “Call out the instigators / because there’s something in the air / We’ve got to get together sooner or later / Because the revolution’s here, and you know it’s right.” For gay men, lesbians, drag queens, and other gender outlaws, the revolution arrived on a hot night in June when, as so often happened, cops attempted to arrest the patrons of a gay bar—possibly because the owners were late in making their biweekly payoff to the Police Department. The Stonewall Inn, in Greenwich Village in New York City, was to become on that night, and the days that followed, ground zero for gay liberation, the rock thrown into the stagnant pond of social mores. The ripple effects of Stonewall are still being felt today as a steadily increasing number of cities and the states ban housing and employment discrimination based on sexual orientation; as gay men become the stars of a hit television show; as at least one state permits gay couples to marry while another approves civil unions— and as the medical diagnosis of homosexuality as mental illness fades into history. This transformation in cultural attitudes was interrupted by a backlash in 2004, with eleven states passsing ordinances banning gay marriage, and gay rights itself becoming a major wedge issue in the presidential campaign. Yet the backlash itself (like a similar backlash against feminism in the 1990s) points to the success of the movement, not its failure.