She was given a place of honor in the 25th Anniversary Stonewall Inn march in 1994. She also reconciled with the gay rights movement that was now expanding to embrace the LGBTQ+ community. She started Transy House, modeled off STAR House, in 1997 in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Once back in the city, Rivera got involved again with the fight for the inclusion and recognition of transgender individuals. She returned to the city in 1992 after the death of Johnson. After this experience, Rivera left New York City and activism behind for a bit. Her friend Johnson brought her to the hospital and helped her get healthy again. Rivera frequently experienced homelessness and had problems with substance abuse. The troubles she experienced as a child followed her into adulthood. While short-lived, STAR House was an important space for those who needed it. We paid the rent.” Although only 19, Rivera became a mother to many of the residents of STAR House. Rivera explained in 1998 that she and Johnson “decided it was time to help each other and help our other kids. The group became a space to organize and discuss issues facing the transgender community in New York City and they also had a building, STAR House, that provided lodgings for those who needed it. Johnson, Rivera started the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) around 1971. The final bill passed in 2002 and prevents discrimination “on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation in employment, housing, public accommodations, education, credit, and the exercise of civil rights.”Īlong with Marsha P. Rivera also fought against the exclusion of transgender people from the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act in New York. The Gay Activist Alliance (GAA), which formed in response to Stonewall, frequently rejected the role transgender people-the majority of whom were people of color-had played in the uprising.
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Throughout the 1970s, she frequently tangled with gay rights leaders who were hesitant to include transgender people in their advocacy work. We’re the front-liners.” She was booed off the stage. She grabbed the microphone anyway, telling the spectators and other marchers, “If it wasn’t for the drag queen, there would be no gay liberation movement.
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In 1973, Rivera participated in the Gay Pride Parade but was not allowed to speak, despite the amount of work and advocacy she had done. The first pride parades started in 1970, but Rivera and other transgender people were discriminated against and discouraged from participating. The Stonewall Inn uprising was also a turning point in the visibility of the gay rights movement. My revolutionary blood was going back then. She said in a 1989 interview that, “Before gay rights, before the Stonewall, I was involved in the Black Liberation movement, the peace movement.I felt I had the time and I knew that I had to do something. Yet this was not the first time Rivera was directly involved in activism.
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Rivera resisted arrest and subsequently led a series of protests against the raid.
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For six nights, the 17-year-old Rivera refused to go home or to sleep, saying “I’m not missing a minute of this-it's the revolution!” Rivera said in an interview in 2001 that while she did not throw the first Molotov cocktail at the police (a long-enduring myth), she did throw the second. Rivera said of Johnson that “she was like a mother to me.” The two were actively involved in the Stonewall Inn uprising on Jwhen patrons of the Stonewall Inn-a gay bar in Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan-rebuffed a police raid and set a new tone for the gay rights movement. Johnson, an African American self-identified drag queen and activist, was also battling exclusion in a movement for gay rights that did not embrace her gender expression. Rivera ran away from home at age 11 and became a victim of sexual exploitation around 42nd Street. She was beaten for doing so and, after being attacked on a school playground in Sixth Grade by another student, suspended from school for a week.
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Raised by her grandmother, Rivera began experimenting with clothing and makeup at a young age. Her father was absent and her mother died by suicide when Rivera was 3 years old. Rivera had an incredibly difficult childhood. She was assigned male at birth and given the name Ray. Rivera was born in New York City in 1951 to a father from Puerto Rico and a mother from Venezuela. Throughout her life, she fought against the exclusion of transgender people, especially transgender people of color, from the larger movement for gay rights.