27 Facts About Sylvia Rivera

Sylvia Rivera was an American gay liberation and transgender rights activist who was a noted community worker in New York.

Sylvia Rivera was born and raised in New York City and lived most of her life in or near the city; she was born to a Puerto Rican father and a Venezuelan mother.

Sylvia Rivera was abandoned by her birth father Jose Rivera early in life, and became an orphan after her mother died by suicide when Rivera was three years old.

Sylvia Rivera was taken in by the local drag queens, including Marsha P Johnson, who became Rivera's best friend and protector.

Sylvia Rivera's activism began in 1970 after she participated in actions with the Gay Liberation Front's Drag Queen Caucus and later joined the Gay Activists Alliance at 18 years old, where she fought for not only the rights of gay people but for the inclusion of drag queens like herself in the movement.

Rivera's older friend Marsha P Johnson had been Rivera's protector and friend since Rivera arrived in the city, and the two were close friends from 1961 through 1973.

Stonewall historian David Carter questioned Rivera's claims of even being at the riots, based on contradictory statements that Rivera made, and on testimony relayed to him by early gay rights activists, such as Marsha P Johnson, who denied in multiple interviews that Rivera had been there.

Kohler told Carter that although Sylvia Rivera had not been at the uprising, he hoped that Carter would still portray her as having been there.

Finally Kohler agreed to lie and say Sylvia Rivera had been there and had at some point thrown a bottle.

Randy Wicker, who was part of the Mattachine Society and a witness to the riots, said that Marsha Johnson had told him that Sylvia Rivera had not been at Stonewall "as she was asleep after taking heroin uptown".

Johnson's friends and supporters, Sylvia Rivera included, insisted Johnson had not been suicidal, and a people's postering campaign later declared that Johnson had earlier been harassed near the spot where Johnson's body was found.

In May 1995, Sylvia Rivera tried to end her life by walking into the Hudson River.

At various times in her life, Sylvia Rivera battled substance abuse and lived on the streets, largely in the gay homeless community at the Christopher Street docks.

Sylvia Rivera's experiences made her more focused on advocacy for those who, in her view, were left behind by the mainstream society and the assimilationist sectors of the gay community.

Sylvia Rivera fought partly for herself for those reasons but most importantly for the rights of people of color and low-income LGBT people.

Sylvia Rivera amplified the voices of the most vulnerable members of the gay community: drag queens, homeless youth, gay inmates in prison and jail, and transgender people.

Sylvia Rivera traveled to Italy for the Millennium March in 2000, where she was acclaimed as the "mother of all gay people".

Sylvia Rivera attacked Human Rights Campaign and Empire State Pride Agenda as organizations that were standing in the way of transgender rights.

Sylvia Rivera was angered that in the late 1990s and early 2000s she perceived the significance of drag queens and drag culture being minimized by the ostensibly assimilationist gay rights agenda, particularly by new would-be "gay leaders" who were focusing on military service and marriage equality.

In 1995, Sylvia Rivera was still hurt: "When things started getting more mainstream, it was like, 'We don't need you no more'".

Sylvia Rivera writes of having considered gender-affirming surgery much earlier in life, but of ultimately choosing to reject it, taking hormone therapy only near the end of her life.

Ray Rivera left home at the age of 10 to become Sylvia.

Sylvia Rivera died during the dawn hours of February 19,2002, at St Vincent's Hospital, of complications from liver cancer.

Activist Riki Wilchins noted, "In many ways, Sylvia Rivera was the Rosa Parks of the modern transgender movement".

In 2015, a portrait of Sylvia Rivera was added to the National Portrait Gallery, making Sylvia Rivera the first transgender activist to be featured in the gallery.

In May 2019, it was announced that LGBT rights activists Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera would be commemorated with a monument in New York's Greenwich Village, near the epicenter of the historic Stonewall riots.

In June 2019, Sylvia Rivera was one of the inaugural fifty American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York City's Stonewall Inn.