The Lives of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera

Brut America

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera will be immortalized in a monument down the street from the Stonewall Inn for their work as transgender activists. Here's what you need to know about them.    Special thanks to Making Gay History - The Podcast.

Transcript

00:00I would describe Sylvia and Marsha as revolutionaries, as pioneers.

00:18She would come home, get clothes, read the closets, take everything, and then go to New York,

00:24come back the next week. A month later, she would have nothing.

00:28My grandmother said, where's everything at? There were more people less fortunate than me

00:32that needed this stuff, so I gave it to them.

00:50Sylvia was the fire, and my uncle, you know, was the soft spot, was the talker, the thinker.

00:58And together, they worked.

01:05And every time we'd go, you know, like going out to hustle all the time,

01:10they would just get us and tell us we were under arrest. Yeah, they'd say, all you drag queens

01:15under arrest. So we start, you know, we were just wearing a little bit of makeup down 42nd Street.

01:28The police came in, they came in to get their pay off as usual. I don't know if it was the

01:37customers or was the police. It's just, everything clicked.

01:46There's been a persistent myth that she threw the first shot glass, which she herself said

01:50didn't happen. She said herself in an interview with Eric Marcus that she didn't arrive at the

01:54Stonewall Inn that night until 2 a.m. By then, things were already in full effect.

02:16Star did a lot of street action. They also ended up having

02:19several apartments that they would use to house, they called them transvestites at the time.

02:25Marsha and I fought a lot for the liberation of our people. We did a lot back then.

02:45Marsha and I had a building on 2nd Street, which is called Star House.

02:50When we asked the community to help us, there was nobody to help us. We were nothing.

02:57We were nothing. There's a really hard-to-watch but important video of

03:02Sylvia Rivera berating the crowd at the Gay Liberation March in Christopher Street Park

03:07in 1973, talking about how dare you exclude me when I've given so much to this movement.

03:20So

03:29it's hard to say that we've made all these leaps and bounds and strides in 50 years when the

03:51reality is trans people were getting murdered in 1969 and trans people are still getting

03:57murdered in 2019.

04:19Putting up statues doesn't change everything, but it sends a powerful message. It starts to

04:24change things. It starts to change hearts and minds.

04:27The fact that we are still sitting here today is a testament to who they are because they fought

04:31for me and for other trans people, for other queer people to be able to be out in the streets and be

04:35proud. And none of that would have happened without both POC, sex workers, transgender,

04:42non-conforming folks, all of whom came before me.

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