At the 1973 rally, when Sylvia Rivera took the stage and began to harangue the crowd about its lack of support for street queens, some of the lesbians had had enough. Jean O’Leary took the mike after Rivera and read a prepared statement denouncing transvestites as “men who impersonate women for entertainment and profit.” O’Leary delivered a scathing attack on not only Rivera but any male-bodied person who wore makeup and women’s clothes. Wearing dresses was not a revolutionary act, as some of the early (male) leaders of the gay liberation movement had asserted; it was instead an insult to women. O’Leary was challenged by Lee Brewster, who defended Rivera and reminded the crowd that “today you’re celebrating what was the result of what the drag queens did at the Stonewall.” But the damage had been done. Gay leaders were beginning to publicly dissociate themselves from cross-dressers, drag queens, and transsexuals. Some viewed this as pragmatism, others as selling out. Rivera, rejected by the movement she had helped found, “crawled into a whiskey bottle,” says her friend and STAR daughter Chelsea Goodwin. It would take decades for her to reemerge as a public figure. When she did, the gay rights movement’s betrayal of its transgender allies would be her major theme.
“We liberated them. They owe us,” she shouted in June 2001, at a rally held in Sheridan Square, near the site of the original Stonewall bar. “I want to call on all the dykes and fags who think that transpeople are a separate community to come out in support of us. It’s still open season on transpeople in New York City,” she said, referring to the recent murder of twenty-five-year-old Amanda Milan in front of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The rally itself was a call for justice for Milan and other transgendered victims of violence, and Rivera used the occasion to contrast the gay community’s visible public support for Matthew Shepherd—killed in Laramie, Wyoming—and his family with the noticeable absence of such support in the case of transgender hate crime victims. “New York is the birthplace of so many battles for civil rights. Well, it’s our turn. We stand here in the cradle of the gay rights movement, but trannies have been left behind. We’re still in the back of the bus. We’ve been silent and invisible for too long.”
At the rally, Rivera called for the passage of a trans-inclusive civil rights bill in New York City. “I’ve been working in this movement for thirty years and I’m still begging for what you’ve got,” she shouted at pedestrians on Christopher Street, the heart of gay Greenwich Village. Rivera, like many transgendered and transsexual people, was infuriated by the passage of civil rights protections for gays that failed to include protections for people whose “real or perceived gender identity” made them targets of violence and discrimination. This strategy had been initiated in New York City in the seventies, when gay leaders, aware of the difficulties of passing any kind of legislation protecting the civil rights of gays and lesbians, had removed language from the bill that explicitly protected cross-dressers and transsexuals.
Continued gay resistance to the inclusion of gender-variant people in local and national civil rights legislation today is perhaps best exemplified by a syndicated article that appeared in GLBT newspapers after Rivera’s death, in 2002. In “The Myth of a Transgender Stonewall,” author Dale Carpenter objects to the “guilt-ridden commentary about how the gay civil rights movement has pushed aside ‘the people that started it all,’” which followed in the wake of Rivera’s death. “This commentary is wrong as a matter of history and unsupported as a matter of policy,” says Carpenter, who adds that “historical disputes have no bearing—either way—on whether ‘gender identity’ ought to be included in gay civil rights legislation. Even if Stonewall was the casus belli of the gay struggle and even if transgenders were the only people there kicking shins and uprooting parking meters, so what?” Carpenter argues that “gay civil rights legislation would be stalled or effectively killed in many places if transgenders were included. The choice is often between a more inclusive bill that goes nowhere and a less inclusive bill that actually becomes law. These are hard realities. We should not feel guilty because we want to make progress, least of all because someone is telling us fairy tales about our past.”
A law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity was finally passed in New York City on May i, 2002. Hours before she died, Rivera met with a group from the Empire State Pride Agenda to negotiate trans inclusion in a civil rights bill then being debated in the New York State legislature (the bill was passed without a gender-identity clause). When National Public Radio’s All Things Considered ran a program titled “Remembering Stonewall” in 2001, Sylvia Rivera sent the following update: “Since May, I’ve been the food director at the Metropolitan Community Church food pantry. My girlfriend, Julia, is my assistant and my computer person (because I still don’t know a damn thing about these new modern contraptions of yours!). We have been rather busy with the resurrection of street Transgender Action Revolutionaries and are planning protests around the trial of Amanda Milan’s assassins. So between the jobs and politics, you know how frantic it is. One of our main goals right 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. The bitch on wheels is back.”
She signed her note (dated July 4), “Revolutionary Love.”
Sylvia Rivera remained proud of her participation in the Stonewall riots for all of her life. “I am proud of myself for being there that night. If I had lost that moment, I would have been kinda hurt because that’s when I saw the world change for me and my people. Of course, we still got a long way ahead of us.”
The lack of trust between gays, lesbians, and the various groups generally lumped together today under the adjective “transgendered” became a public rift in 1974 for reasons that were partly political and partly aesthetic. Overtly gender-variant people were viewed with suspicion and distaste by some politically savvy gay men focused on gaining civil rights. For people whose goal was integration, not revolution, men in dresses were a decided handicap to public acceptance. The former advocated a right to privacy in the bedroom and tended to oppose flamboyant public displays of “difference” as counterproductive. They also increasingly rejected the view that gay men were more feminine than the average straight man. Instead, they emphasized their masculinity, a trend that was to become even more pronounced as the androgynous seventies gave way to the muscular eighties. In the nineteenth century “there was this very strong association formed between gender nonconformity and homosexuality,” says Simon LeVay, who sees an “overcorrection” of that association in the late-twentieth-century gay and lesbian communities, where “there’s been an almost excessive denial between homosexuality and gender nonconformity.” This attitude has been particularly acute among gay men, he says. “There’s definitely a femmephobia in the gay male community, generally a dislike of men who seem feminine.”
The political position of lesbians was complicated by their allegiance to feminism; neither gay men nor straight feminists fully understood or shared lesbians’ concerns. But lesbians, too, were incubating a new kind of sexual chauvinism. Lesbian culture in the fifties had been just as wedded to the concept of gender dimorphism as the medical profession, dividing lesbian women into “butches” (masculine lesbians) and “femmes” (feminine lesbians). But a new aesthetic was forged in the late sixties and early seventies as young people of all sexual orientations began to reject the values and behaviors of their parents. “Gender issues stood at the forefront of the radical challenge. Antiwar activists rejected the masculine warrior ideal and feminists led a frontal assault on cultural injunctions that demanded feminine behavior among women,” writes historian Joanne Meyerowitz in How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. The sexual revolution was also a gender revolution, and the two aspects of the upheaval were inextricably entwined. For a brief period, fin de siecle sexual anarchy was reborn.