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By Root 1933 0

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.

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