Duberman’s description of the primarily white middle-class gay response to Sylvia Rivera echoes the reaction of the aristocratic Christopher Isherwood to the cross-dressers in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science. Bell’s GAA members and Isherwood may have been queer, but they weren’t that queer. They may have dressed in drag on special occasions, but they didn’t wear a full face of makeup on the street. They were radical, but they adhered to certain social niceties and conducted themselves in meetings according to middle-class codes of behavior. The members of the Gay Liberation Front, the first group formed in the wake of Stonewall, were (in the words of a local street figure) “a bunch of stoned-out faggots” who believed that their struggle must necessarily be joined to the struggle of blacks, women, antiwar protesters, and everyone else working for the Revolution. By contrast, the members of the Gay Activists Alliance (formed six months later) were dedicated solely to achieving civil rights for gays—and they were willing to work the system even as they “zapped” it. In Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, Dudley Clendenin and Adam Nagourney point out that the GAA, unlike the GLF, was far from a hippie enclave. “The more daring activists who had sprung forward in the months after Stonewall were joined by professional, middle-class homosexuals, people who understood government, business and the media, and who had connections throughout the establishment world. They found the Gay Activists Alliance as ideologically non-threatening as its founders had hoped.”
In this context, a working-class Latina drag queen who wasn’t afraid to bellow her opinions and agitate for her sisters on the street was a polarizing figure, tolerated and even respected by some members and loathed by others. Still, Sylvia Rivera was active in both the GAA and the GLF until 1973. “She would throw herself into every meeting, party, or action with such passion that those who insisted on remaining her detractors had to shift their vocabularies,” says Martin Duberman. “She was no longer Sylvia, the flighty, unreliable queen, but rather Sylvia, the fierce harridan, ready to run any risk and run through any obstacle in order to achieve her frequently shrieked goal of freedom.” As someone who had lived by the hustle since the age of eleven, Rivera knew the dangers of the life—the homelessness and drug addiction, random violence and police harassment. “Back then, we were beat up by the police, by everybody,” Rivera recalls in Leslie Feinberg’s Trans Liberation. “We expected nothing better than to be treated like a bunch of animals—and we were.” When arrested “we were stuck in a bullpen like a bunch of freaks,” she writes. “We were disrespected. 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 bit the shit out of a man. I was an evil queen. I was strung out on dope.”
Rivera knew the kids working the streets because she was one of them—though at nineteen, she was more like an elder sister than a peer. Her maternal instinct was strong and it led her to found STAR House, a refuge for homeless transgender youth. “Their first home was the back of a trailer truck seemingly abandoned in a Greenwich Village outdoor parking area; it was primitive, but a step up from sleeping in doorways,” writes Martin Duberman. “The ground rule in the trailer was that nobody had to go out and hustle her body, but that when they did, they had to kick back a percentage to help keep STAR House going. Marsha and Sylvia took it upon themselves to hustle on a regular basis and to return to the truck each morning with breakfast food for everybody.”
After the “abandoned” trailer was hauled away, the group rented a house from a Mafioso who owned a gay bar in the Village. The building was falling apart, but Sylvia and her supporters made it habitable. “Marsha and I had always sneaked people into our hotel rooms,” Rivera says in Trans Liberation. “And you can sneak fifty people into two hotel rooms. Then we got a building at 213 East Second Avenue. Marsha and I just decided it was time to help each other and help our other kids. We fed people and clothed people. We kept the building going.” Keeping the building going was tough, however, and Rivera and Johnson were not always able to make the rent. Duberman notes that when Rivera asked for help from the Gay Activists Alliance— rental of their stereo equipment to use during a benefit dance for STAR House—she was turned down. Later, when she was behind on the rent, she once again approached GAA for help and was once again turned down. Rivera and her “children” were eventually evicted and back out on the streets. “There was always food in the house and everyone had fun,” Rivera says nostalgically in Trans Liberation. “It lasted for two or three years.”
By then, the fragile post-Stonewall alliance between the street, the classroom, and the closet was beginning to fall apart. Most middle-class gays and lesbians didn’t look or behave much differently from their heterosexual peers. They shared similar values; politically, some were quite conservative. In Out for Good, Clendenin and Nagourney quote a 1972 editorial in the gay paper The Advocate: “It is possible for all homosexuals to favor freedom and justice for homosexuals. But it is the wildest and most improbable jump to say that therefore they should all be against the Vietnam war, against capitalism, or in favor of destroying society.”
Street people like Sylvia Rivera, on the other hand, were radicals in every sense of the word. Rivera herself had ties with the Black Panthers and the Young Lords and attended the People’s Revolutionary Congress held in Philadelphia in 1970, where she met Huey Newton. “ Huey decided that we were part of the revolution—that we were revolutionary people,” she says proudly in Trans Liberation. One of the first occasions at which STAR marched as a group was a 1970 protest against police repression in Harlem. “I ended up meeting the Young Lords that day. I became one of them. Any time they needed any help, I was always there for the Young Lords. It was just the respect they gave us as human beings.”
That respect was sorely lacking in other contexts. The lifestyle of a street queen was in many ways a flagrant challenge to traditional social mores. Surviving by prostitution and drug dealing, in and out of jail, the cross-dressing street queen was a figure of the underworld, viewed with distaste by many upscale gays who lived in an orderly, affluent world utterly inaccessible to people like Sylvia Rivera. “When attacked by a GAA man—who, in trying to liberate himself from traditional ridicule about being a surrogate woman, could be impatiently moralistic about cross-dressing ‘stereotypes’—Rivera would attack back,” says Martin Duberman. “She would remind him how tough you had to be to survive as a street queen, how you had to fight, cheat, and steal to get from one day to the next.”
The tension between middle-class gays and lesbians and the street exploded at a June 1973 march and rally in commemoration of the Stonewall riots. The Gay Pride march, held annually, “was being seized by drag queens as their holiday, a chance to celebrate their role in the original uprising at the bar,” report Clendenin and Nagourney in Out for Good. “They were demanding a prominent place in the line of march, and they wanted to be the centers of attention at the rally.” The high visibility of the drag queens and the way that they drew the attention of the media rankled many gay men and lesbians who were increasingly convinced that these “extreme” members of the community were holding back the progress of the whole. Furthermore, many lesbians continued to be angry at what they viewed as the disrespectful parody of femaleness embodied by drag queens.