The post-Stonewall activist organizations:
Queens Liberation Front (QLF)
StreetTransvestite Action Revolutionaries. (also Part III of Sylvia Rivera)
Gay Liberation Front (GLF) - New York
Gay Activists Alliance (GAA)
Gay Liberation Front (GLF) - London
---------------------
Sylvia Rivera
Part I:
beginnings
Part II:
GAA
& Weinstein Hall
Part III: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries
Part IV:
Other activities to 1973
Part V:
Later years
After the demonstration following the eviction from Weinstein Hall,
Bubbles,
Sylvia, Marsha,
Bebe
Scarpi,
Bambi
L’Amour, Andorra and others continued with what became Street Transvestite
Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) which attempted to provide shelter, food and
legal support for street queens.
Their first home was a trailer truck seemingly abandoned in a Greenwich
Village outdoor parking area. This was a step up from sleeping in doorways, and
a couple of dozen young street transvestites moved in. One morning Sylvia and
Marsha were returning with groceries, and found the trailer starting to move.
Most of the queens were woken by the noise and movement and quickly jumped out,
although one, stoned, was half-way to California when she woke up.
Bubbles knew a Mafia person, well-known in the Village,
Michael
Umbers, manager of the gay bar, Christopher’s End, operator of various
callboy and porno operations and also a friend of future Dog Day Afternoon bank
robber,
John
Wojtowicz. Bubbles spoke to him and for a small deposit the S.T.A.R. commune
was able to move into 213 East 2nd Street in November 1970. There was no
electricity or plumbing, not even the boiler worked, nor did the toilets.
However with help they got the building working and it became StarHouse. This is
probably the first communal shelter that explicitly served street transvestites.
Sylvia:
“We had a S.T.A.R. House—a place for all of us to sleep. It was only four
rooms, and the landlord had turned the electricity off. So we lived there by
candle light, a floating bunch of 15 to 25 queens, cramped in those rooms with
all our wardrobe. But it worked. We’d cook up these big spaghetti dinners and
sometimes we’d have sausage for breakfast, if we were feeling rich” (quoted in Cohen p131-2)
Several of them hustled.
“The contribution of the ones who didn’t make it out into the streets, who
wanted something different, was to liberate food from in front of the A&P. .
. . So the house was well-supplied, the building’s rent was paid, and everybody
in the neighborhood loved StarHouse. They were impressed because they could
leave their kids and we’d baby-sit with them. If they were hungry, we fed them.
We fed half of the neighborhood because we had an abundance of food the kids
liberated. It was a revolutionary thing.” (Cohen p 132-3)
Expenses were supplemented by dances and a bake sale.
S.T.A.R. put out a manifesto:
The oppression against Transvestites of either sex arises from sexist values
and this oppression is manifested by heterosexuals and homosexuals of both sexes
in the form of exploitation, ridicule, harrassment, beatings, rapes,
murders.
Because of this oppression the majority of transvestites are forced into the
street and we have formed a strong alliance with our gay sisters and brothers of
the street. Who we are a part of and represent we are; a part of the
REVOLUTIONARIES armies fighting against the system.
1. We want the right to self-determination over the use of our bodies; the
right to be gay, anytime, anyplace; the right to free physiological change and modification of sex on demand; the right to free
dress and adornment.
2. The end to all job discrimination against transvestites of both sexes and
gay street people because of attire.
3. The immediate end of all police harrassment and arrest of
transvestites and gay street people, and the release of transvestites and gay
street people from all prisons and all other political prisoners.
4. The end to all exploitive practices of doctors and psychiatrists who work
in the field of transvestism.
5. Transvestites who live as members of the opposite gender should be able to
obtain identification of the opposite gender.
6. Transvestites and gay street people and all oppressed people should have
free education, health care, clothing, food, transportation, and housing.
7. Transvestites and gay street people should be granted full and equal
rights on all levels of society, and full voice in the struggle for liberation
of all oppressed people.
8. An end to exploitation and discrimination against transvestites within the
homosexual world.
9. We want a revolutionary peoples’ government, where transvestites, street
people, women, homosexuals, puerto ricans, indians, and all oppressed people are
free, and not fucked over by this government who treat us like the scum of the
earth and kills us off like flies, one by one, and throws us into jail to rot.
This government who spends millions of dollars to go to the moon, and lets the
poor Americans starve to death.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
S. T. A. R.
Sylvia continued her concern with the incarcerated. In 1970 over 4,000 boys
were held in Riker’s Island, mainly because they could not afford bail. S.T.A.R.
publicized what happened when transvestites were arrested, often several times:
long waits in remand, beatings by guards, rape, attempted suicide. Street
transvestites on the outside joined the Gay Community Prison Committee,
organized protests, interviewed prisoners and attempted to provide legal aid.
Sylvia and Arthur Bell discovered dancer
Chris
Thompson who had gone to Bellevue Hospital because of asthma, and was held
because of gender deviance. They wrote up her situation in the radical
publication
Gay Flames.
Other
Gay Flames headlines were: “U.S. Justice = Gay is Guilty,”
“Street Transvestite Murdered,” “Support Lesbian, Transvestite, & Gay
Inmates,” “Killers Go Free While Gays Rot in Jail".
There were prison visits and demonstrations outside prisons – especially the
Women’s
House of Detention on Greenwich Avenue where the prisoners could talk to
passersby, and which was targeted on a weekly basis until it was closed in June
1971. (Testimony by
Angela
Davis and
Andrea
Dworkin contributed to its closing).
The national lesbian organization,
Daughters of
Bilitis, welcomed the S.T.A.R. members, but other lesbian feminists rejected
‘anachronistic’ butch and femme roles. GAA attempted to debunk stereotypes of
‘femme queens’ and ‘butch dykes’ and this undercut transvestite needs and
concerns.
Sylvia could be a formidable presence, and could intimidate. Cohen tells of a
petite Japanese GLF woman who thought “she was going to die.” She saw Sylvia as a
“very angry, very strong Puerto Rican man.” Despite Bob Kohler’s counsel, Sylvia
denied holding male privilege and its aggressive misuse.
There were tragedies. One transvestite, June, died after drinking her mixture
of methadone and alcohol. In March, Marsha was overwhelmed when her husband, Cantrell, was
shot dead by an off-duty cop while out to get money so that they could buy drugs. Sylvia, who had
started heroin when in Riker’s Island prison, eventually locked herself in
Marsha’s place and went cold turkey during several excruciating days.
On 14 March 1972 S.T.A.R., QLF, GAA and other groups went to the New York
State Capital, Albany to demonstrate for repeal of laws against sodomy,
solicitation and impersonation as well as to ask for housing and employment
protections. Sylvia and
Kate Millet were among the
speakers.
Many of the S.T.A.R. members were religious:
“We’d all get together to pray to our saints before we’d go out hustling. A
majority of the queens were Latin and we believe in an emotional, spiritualistic
religion. We have our own saints: Saint Barbara, the patron saint of
homosexuality, St. Michael, the Archangel; La Calidad de Cobre, the Madonna of
gold; and Saint Martha, the saint of transformation. St. Martha had once
transformed herself into a snake, so to her we’d pray: ‘Please don’t let them
see through the mask. Let us pass as women and save us from harm.’ And to the
other three we’d kneel before our altar of candles and pray: ‘St. Barbara, St.
Michael, La Calidad de Cobre: We know we are doing wrong, but we got to live and
we got to survive, so please help us, bring us money tonight, protect us, and
keep evil away.’ We kept the sword of St. Barbara at the front door and the
sword of St. Michael at the back door to ward off evil. We were watched over.”
(Cohen p134)
Feminist
Ti-Grace
Atkinson wrote an indictment of the Catholic Church which was endorsed by
the Daughters of Bilitis. The church was denounced as a “ruthless foe of
abortion, sexual law reform, divorce, birth control and human dignity”. This
position was supported by S.T.A.R. and Gay Youth, along with GAA, GLF,
Mattachine Society, NYU Gay Students’ Liberation, and Radicalesbians.
A Conference of Gay Liberation was held at
Rutgers University
in New Jersey in March 1971 with forums on sadism, masochism, and leather;
bisexuality; and transvestism. Speakers from S.T.A.R., Queens Liberation Front
and GAA addressed the inaugural event on transvestism.
In July 1971 Mike Umbers came around about the three months rent that he had
not received. Bubbles mumbled something about the cost of repairs. Umbers said
that if he didn’t get his money, Bubbles was as good as dead. Sylvia screamed
that if he killed her, she would go to the police. Bubbles skipped town soon
after, possibly for Florida.
Umbers decided against violence and simply had S.T.A.R. put out on the street
for non-payment of rent. Sylvia and the others reversed the improvements and
threw the refrigerator out of the back window.
Arthur Bell wrote an article for the
Village Voice in July 1971 about
StarHouse.
S.T.A.R. “is mainly into whoring and radical politics. Their philosophy is to
destroy the system that’s fucking us over. They’re a sub-culture unaccepted
within the subculture of transvestism and looked down at in horror by many of
the women and men in the homosexual liberation movement. Sylvia and Marsha and
Bambi and Andorra with their third world looks and their larger-than-life
presences and their cut-the-crap tongues do not ‘fit’ at a GAA meeting. ‘We
don’t relate to each other,’ says Sylvia. Marsha says, ‘Why should I go to their
dances? No one asks me to dance. I freak them out.’ S.T.A.R. didn’t do too well
with the Gay Liberation Front toward the end, either. The S.T.A.R.s relate very
well to themselves, and to a certain segment of the ‘live and let live’ street
people. But by and large, they’re the great unwanteds.”
Perhaps he said too much about how the inhabitants hustle. Its publication
was followed by a flurry of arrests on 42
nd St.
 |
| Sylvia and Marsha |
Sylvia found temporary refuge with friends on 109th Street. Marsha returned
to her 211 Eldridge Street apartment that once again became S.T.A.R.’s de facto
address.
