Queer, There, and Everywhere

by Sarah Prager

  After the first year, Del, Phyllis, and a few other women wanted the DOB to take on political organizing. The Daughters split into two groups, and Del and Phyllis’s half focused on education, legislation, and litigation, and held monthly meetings. This revamped DOB organized the first national lesbian conference in 1960 in San Francisco, despite pushback from the FBI, CIA, and San Francisco Police Department. The gathering focused on education, with panels of experts explaining what the current state of lesbian acceptance was in various fields.

  The DOB also published the United States’s first lesbian magazine, The Ladder. The mailing list for the eight-page, hand-stapled newsletter was always carried around by one of the DOB members, since a security breach could endanger subscribers. The Ladder was being published at a time when the government was actively hunting down homosexuals and prosecuting them for their “crimes.” The Ladder’s first issue had an article headlined “Your Name Is Safe!” that detailed the legal precedent the DOB would use to argue their list’s privacy, and another article that gave legal advice on what to do if caught in a raid.

  Like many Ladder writers, Phyllis used a fake name—Ann Ferguson—in her byline. But by the time the fourth issue was published, Phyllis announced she had murdered Ann in cold blood and now only Phyllis Lyon remained. She was determined to practice what she preached: living as out. Most women weren’t in a position to take that bold step, though. As one subscriber wrote in about The Ladder’s call to “come out of hiding”: “What a delicious invitation, but oh, so impractical. I should lose my job, a marvelous heterosexual roommate, and all chance of finding work. . . . I would be blackballed all over the city.”

  NOW and Then

  * * *

  Unfortunate but true: at that time, gay rights groups ignored women’s issues, and women’s rights groups ignored lesbian issues. The National Organization for Women had created couples memberships so that husbands could support their feminist wives, but when Del and Phyllis joined as a couple, those couples memberships magically disappeared for any pair—lesbian or straight—who tried to join soon afterward. NOW’s leadership was afraid dominant stereotypes about man-hating lesbians would hold back their movement if they allowed lesbians to join, so they unsuccessfully tried to discover and kick out all the lesbians. For the next four years, lesbians lobbied hard, and NOW eventually expanded its policy in 1971 to allow them to be members. Del was elected in 1973 as the first open lesbian on NOW’s board of directors.

  Del and Phyllis did more and more for the lesbian community over the years after they stepped back from the DOB in 1966. They wrote the book Lesbian/Woman in 1972, a first-of-its-kind look at lesbianism with stats from The Ladder’s reader survey and other research. One of those statistics revealed that among twenty lesbians in a 1971 discussion group, only two said they had not attempted suicide as teens. Del and Phyllis became like aunties to lesbians nationwide and responded to countless letters and phone calls from closeted lesbians around the country who got in touch sometimes to say thanks and other times to be talked off the ledge of a suicide attempt. As Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun, summarized in her four-page letter to the couple in 1957, “I’m glad as heck that you exist.”

  In 2008, Del and Phyllis were the first same-sex couple to get married in California when the state ban on gay marriage was struck down. Phyllis remarked, “When [we] first got together, we were not really thinking about getting married, we were thinking about getting together. I think it’s a wonderful day.”

  “Ditto,” added Del.

  The mayor of San Francisco performed the ceremony in City Hall for the two elderly women, who both wore colorful pantsuits. After the nuptials, the ladies went out for a casual lunch, then home to watch TV.

  Del passed away two months later, a newlywed.

  SYLVIA RIVERA

  1951–2002

  tl;dr Early leader of the queer rights movement gets real about the issues

  Queens weren’t allowed at the Stonewall Inn. The Mafia-owned establishment was already considered a criminal operation, but allowing “cross-dressing” patrons inside would be a whole separate offense. In New York City, and in many cities around the country, strict laws required people to wear a minimum number of clothing items designed for the sex they were assigned at birth. In NYC, that magic number was three. But Sylvia had connections at the Stonewall, so when she showed up on June 27, 1969 wearing zero men’s clothes, she was allowed to waltz right in.

  It was a typical Friday night in Greenwich Village as people celebrated the start of the weekend. Watered-down booze was served (despite the State Liquor Authority’s absurd policy against serving alcohol to homosexuals), while a mix of “sexual deviants” danced to Rolling Stones songs pouring out of the jukebox.

  At 1:20 a.m., the bright overhead lights suddenly flicked on, killing the mood. Police. Another raid—the ultimate buzzkill. An uneasiness settled over the crowd as they waited to find out what was going on. Would they be arrested?

  One by one, after presenting their IDs, Sylvia and other club goers were allowed out of the Stonewall. But instead of dispersing like they usually did after an all-too-common police raid, they hung around outside. What’s up with everyone still inside? they wanted to know. The crowd got anxious about what was happening to the people without IDs. Were they being beaten by the police? That happened plenty during these raids.

  Tension grew, and passersby who hadn’t been inside the run-down bar stopped and joined the crowd. The anger that had been building from years of police harassment rose to the surface as queer people of all stripes were led out to the paddy wagon under arrest—as they often were after a routine raid. Then a butch lesbian was dragged out, struggling against the police who held her. Everything shifted when she yelled to the crowd, “Why don’t you guys do something!”

  Sylvia was the kind of person to do something. She was tired of the beatings, the discrimination. As the crowd grew restless and started to throw coins at the police, Sylvia was among the first to throw a bottle.

  Almost immediately, the police barricaded themselves inside the bar. Molotov cocktails sailed in through the window, and the police started to run out of water and fire extinguishers. A parking meter was used as a battering ram against the door. A thought passed through Sylvia’s head: “My God, the revolution is here. The revolution is finally here!”

  The Village

  * * *

  Sylvia, who was assigned male at birth, never got a break in life, but she never let it break her. Things were rough right from the start and worsened quickly after her mother committed suicide when Sylvia was just three years old. Ms. Rivera mixed rat poison into a glass of milk, drank it, and gave some to Sylvia. Sylvia didn’t like the taste of the milk, so she didn’t have much, but afterward she still needed her stomach pumped. One of the last things her mom said, as she lay dying in the hospital, was that she’d wanted to kill Sylvia because she knew her child was going to have a hard life.

  That turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, since Ms. Rivera’s death left Sylvia’s care in the hands of her Venezuelan grandmother. And care for Sylvia she did, if you consider “care” beating her and telling her she was unwanted, in part because she had her father’s dark Puerto Rican skin. Dear viejita also hated Sylvia’s effeminacy—but that didn’t stop Sylvia from experimenting with makeup as early as fourth grade. She’d put on makeup after leaving the house in the morning and remove it before coming home to avoid her grandmother’s wrath. Resilient, and determined to start living as the girl she was no matter what, Sylvia left home forever when she was just ten years old.

  That’s when she found Greenwich Village, her true home. It was a hub of possibility for runaway misfits like Sylvia, who fit right in with the other street kids turning tricks to get by. A few drag queens took her under their wing.

  Life was dangerous, not just because of the sex work but because of the police. Cross-dressing and homosexuality were illegal in 1960s New
York; you could get picked up for those crimes anytime. Sylvia did all she could to stay out of lockup, which she knew could be more violent for a trans woman than the street was. One time she got into a car with a john who turned out to be an undercover cop; he threatened her with jail unless she took care of him. He had a gun pointed at her and said he’d shoot if she got out of the car. But Sylvia did get out and grandly sashayed away before breaking into a sprint. Another time, an undercover cop was taking her in and she jumped out of the moving car going full speed. And the one occasion she did eventually get arrested and put in a cell, she gave the guy who tried to have his way with her a bite to remember. The other prisoners steered clear of her after that.

  Stonewall to Star House

  * * *

  The Stonewall Riots were the spark that ignited the modern LGBTQ rights movement. Sylvia said it was the moment she “saw the world change for me and my people.” Just nineteen at the time, Sylvia helped organize new queer rights advocacy groups in the aftermath. But for all her efforts, Sylvia was pissed about the direction those early groups took—like working on a gay rights bill but not including trans rights. After working her butt off for them, Sylvia kept being told to wait her turn. We’ll just get the rights for gay men first, then we’ll come for trans women, mmmkay? It didn’t take Sylvia long to figure out they were never coming for her, and it stung. Her own community, not the police or other outsiders, had turned their backs on her during this pivotal time. As Sylvia would often say, “Hell hath no fury like a drag queen scorned.”

  Sylvia and her best friend, Marsha P. Johnson, started seeing to the trans community’s concerns themselves by founding the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. STAR addressed the immediate needs of street kids just barely younger than Sylvia and Marsha. This wasn’t organizing petitions; it was finding hungry kids their next meal. Sylvia’s and Marsha’s income from sex work funded the STAR house, where trans kids could sleep safely off the street and hopefully avoid turning tricks to survive. The STAR kids stole food as their contribution to the house. If only there had been a queer advocacy group that could help. . . . Oh wait, that’s right—there was. Sylvia had already worked for them. But when she needed help, they were nowhere to be found.

  The Struggle

  * * *

  Annual parades popped up to commemorate Stonewall’s anniversary starting in 1970, the year after the infamous raid. It was at one of these events that eventually came to be known as Pride—New York City’s 1973 celebration—that Sylvia’s struggle was brought into sharp focus. After initially being invited to speak to the crowd, Sylvia was abruptly removed from the program; a lesbian event organizer thought Sylvia’s very identity was somehow offensive to cisgender women. Not one to take adversity lightly, Sylvia made her way to the stage anyway as the crowd booed her: “I had to fight my way up on that stage and literally, people that I called my comrades in the movement, literally beat the shit out of me. That’s where it all began, to really silence us. They beat me, I kicked their asses.” She called out the crowd for their shortcomings, and told them her trans sisters didn’t write to the women’s movement or the gay movement from jail for help—they wrote to STAR.

  “You all tell me, go and hide my tail between my legs. I will no longer put up with this shit. I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been thrown in jail, I have lost my job, I have lost my apartment for gay liberation, and you all treat me this way? What the fuck’s wrong with you all?”

  Indeed, Sylvia.

  A Movement within a Movement

  * * *

  Sylvia spent the rest of her life working for queer rights, swimming against the current of the mainstream gay rights movement. Ironic as it may seem, her biggest battles came from inside the queer community rather than outside it. She fought to give voice to underrepresented groups like trans youth, the incarcerated, and the homeless. She caught everyone who had fallen through the cracks.

  Sylvia’s struggles with drugs and alcohol led to her own homelessness in her later years, but she never stopped fighting for the movement. Eventually she found a place to live: Transie House, a shelter for transgender people. She found love there, too; Sylvia and Julia Murray became friends first, then lovers and partners in 1999. Sylvia reflected, “I feel that both of us being transgendered, we understand what the other has gone through. We have always been with men, but the men that we have met in our lives haven’t been able to give us the sensitivity that we share between ourselves.” Being with Julia helped Sylvia stay sober in her final years.

  Sylvia was tenacious to the end, even meeting with other activists about passing queer rights legislation while she was dying of liver failure in a hospital bed at the age of fifty. She had said she wanted to live to be a hundred years old so she could spend the time working on the post-1969 revolution and maybe live to see the changes she worked for come true. The trans community is still fighting for what Sylvia worked for, and now they often do so under organizations named for her. Today, anyone who visits the Stonewall Inn (which became the United States’s first national monument dedicated to queer history in 2016) will enter from the renamed “Sylvia Rivera Way.”

  RENÉE RICHARDS

  1934–PRESENT

  tl;dr A transsexual trailblazer wins a landmark legal victory

  Six-year-old Dick Raskind stood in his bedroom doorway, still as stone. He was listening for any movement in the house, making sure no one was around to catch him. With the coast clear, he scurried down the hallway to his sister’s room. Hands shaking, he took a skirt, blouse, shoes, stockings, garter belt, panties, and hat from her drawers and dashed to the bathroom.

  Heart racing, Dick changed into the girls’ clothes.

  That first moment when he saw his reflection in the mirror, he noticed that the clothes were too big and that he didn’t look as pretty as he would have liked. But Dick noticed something else, too: he felt so much calmer in these clothes than in his own. So much . . . better. As he quickly changed and put the clothes back, the serenity that had come over him disappeared, replaced with guilt. The six-year-old felt he’d been very wrong to do what he’d done . . . but he was also already looking forward to the next time he could do it again.

  The “Correct” Life Path

  * * *

  Another quick terminology note: Renée would later look back on her time as Dick as time spent as a man, so we’ve used male pronouns for Dick before transitioning to Renée, just as Renée does in her self description. Note that, unless otherwise preferred, using the originally assigned pronouns to describe a trans person pretransition is incorrect and disrespectful.

  Even though Richard Raskind, as Renée was known for the first half of her life, clearly knew who he really was from an early age, finding the courage to let out Renée would take years. The road would be long and very difficult, but it was the path Dick had to walk to be true to himself.

  As a teenager, Dick found a copy of Lili Elbe’s biography, Man into Woman. Once he realized a physical transition was possible, he knew it was what he wanted. To Dick, genital surgery was the only thing that would make him a woman. But it wasn’t as easy as just booking an OR for the next available date (it still isn’t). So Dick would live with his secret long before he was actually able to consider surgery. Keeping Renée hidden would be a source of depression, anxiety, and turmoil through Dick’s twenties and thirties.

  During childhood and adolescence, no one knew about Renée. In college, Dick’s girlfriend found his dresses and made him promise he wouldn’t do any of that “stuff” while she was away for vacation off campus. But the divide in his double life only grew wider from there. Dick began going out as Renée—not where anyone he knew would see him, but still in public. With an eye toward a future when he could and would have sex transition surgery, he began taking estrogen shots under a doctor’s supervision and dressing as Renée more regularly. Despite beginning to embrace his secret life, Dick maintained the same facade he had since high
school: a macho, motorcycle-riding ladies’ man who loved to play tennis.

  Following college, med school, and a federally required stint in the navy (he had deferred his draft so he could serve as a doctor after his residency), Dick chose one of the very limited options for physical transitions in the 1960s: going to Casablanca, Morocco, for surgery. No doctors in the United States were even offering transition surgery at the time. But when Dick got to Casablanca and it was actually time to go into the clinic, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was afraid of the physical risks and what life afterward would be like. Cash in hand, he flew back to New York.

  When he returned home from Morocco, Dick’s doctors in New York got cold feet and refused to continue his estrogen injections. They weren’t opposed to people undergoing transition surgery, but they felt it was an ethical violation to allow a successful man—a doctor, no less—to “throw away” a seemingly good life for a sex change. Good thing Dick was looking for a moral judgment from these guys. . . .

  Around the same time, a friend introduced Dick to a woman named Barbara. Feeling defeated, he gave up on transitioning and committed himself to a traditional life. After dating her for six months, Dick married Barbara (who thought of her new husband as a typical red-blooded American man and never suspected the secret identity he’d harbored for so long) and grew into his role as wealthy, hetero eye-surgeon guy, and two years later, he was a new father. Renée was locked away, and Dick even got breast reduction surgery to undo the effects of the estrogen. It was what his doctors wanted . . . and it made Dick absolutely miserable.