The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [90]
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