The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [92]
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