The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [91]
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