A Times Square Runaway Who Changed Civil Rights

Sylvia Rivera was born in 1951 in New York to a Puerto Rican father and a Venezuelan mother. Her early childhood was marked by hardship. She began wearing makeup in fourth grade, which her grandmother strongly disapproved of.

At about ten years old she left her family and went to Times Square in Manhattan. A group of drag queens took her in. They called her Sylvia, and the name stayed with her for the rest of her life.

Rivera became involved in the political movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She opposed the Vietnam War and was linked with the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. She is known for her reported role in the 1969 Stonewall uprising, and she once said of those who were there, we were the frontliners. She was an early member of both the Gay Activists Alliance and the Gay Liberation Front.

After Stonewall she and her friend Marsha P. Johnson founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, known as STAR. The group provided housing and support to homeless queer young people and sex workers in Manhattan, and housing for homeless LGBTQ youth stayed at the centre of its work.

Rivera died in 2002 at the age of 50, from complications of liver cancer. A street in New York carries her name, and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project works for the rights of gender-nonconforming people. In 2019 New York City officials announced that she and Johnson would be honoured with a public monument.