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Johnson and Rivera helped start today’s conversation about gender nonconformity and civil rights, and were the first people who “conceptualized the idea that the trans community was a distinct community,” with its own goals and needs.
Fighting for the right to gender self-identify when social and criminal persecution of gay people was still common in the state of New York in the 1950s and ’60s.
Johnson was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1945. She was the fifth of seven children.
Johnson first began wearing dresses at the age of five but stopped temporarily due to harassment by boys who lived nearby.
Marsha P. Johnson was born Malcolm Michaels Jr but changed it to the name “Black Marsha,” initially. She eventually settled on Marsha P. Johnson. She got Johnson from the Howard Johnson’s restaurant on 42nd Street, stating that the P stood for “pay it no mind” and used the phrase sarcastically when questioned about gender, saying “it stands for ‘pay it no mind'”, the response given when she was questioned about her gender.
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 in 1951. She was abandoned by her birth father. When she was three years old, her mother died by suicide.
Consequently, she was raised by her Venezuelan grandmother who strongly disapproved of her effeminate behavior.
She began to wear makeup and experiment with her dresses.
However, there was a lot of abuse and disdain.
She couldn’t cope and left home in 1962 when she was just 10 years old.
She began living on the streets of New York and Like many other homeless youth in the community, she engaged in survival sex as a child prostitute.
Johnson met Rivera in 1963.She was taken in by the local drag queens, including Marsha P. Johnson, who became Rivera’s best friend and protector. The pair formed a close bond as outsiders not only to the social norms of the time, but within the burgeoning gay community itself.
Johnson, a self-identified drag queen (the term transgender was not commonly used in Johnson’s lifetime), had by then become a prominent figure in the downtown LGBTQ+ community, revered for her unique, ethereal, often scavenged attire and for her role as a gracious, caring “drag mother” helping struggling and homeless youth. “I was no one, nobody, from Nowheresville, until I became a drag queen,” Johnson said in a 1992 interview. “That’s what made me in New York, that’s what made me in New Jersey, that’s what made me in the world.”
Rivera and Johnson co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). STAR offered services and advocacy for homeless queer youth and fought for the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act in New York. SONDA prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in employment, housing, public accommodations, education, credit, and the exercise of civil rights.
Johnson and Rivera worked to provide food, clothing, emotional support and a sense of family for the young drag queens, trans women, gender nonconformists and other gay street kids living on the Christopher Street docks or in their house on the Lower East Side.
Stonewall riots
Johnson was among the first drag queens to go to the Stonewall Inn after the establishment began taking business from women and drag queens; it was previously a bar only for gay men. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the Stonewall uprising occurred. While the first two nights of rioting were the most intense, the clashes with police would result in a series of spontaneous demonstrations and marches through the gay neighborhoods of Greenwich Village for roughly a week afterwards
While Johnson freely admitted to not being the one to start the Stonewall riots. Johnson is one of the few people who multiple, independent witnesses all agree was instrumental in the week of rioting and “known to have been in the vanguard” of the pushback against police once the rioting peaked late the first night. After Johnson was being praised for being involved in the Stonewall uprising, Rivera began claiming that she (Rivera) was also instrumental in the riots, even going so far as to have claimed to have started the riots herself.
Rivera kept persuading the witnesses to include her among those that began the riot. The witnesses namely, Randy Wicker, Bob Kohler, and Doric Wilson.
Stonewall historian David Carter, however, questioned Rivera’s claims of even being at the riots. This was because Marsha and some others had earlier said that she(Rivera) was at Bryant Park having a cocktail at the time of the riots.
After Marsha Johnson confronted Rivera about lying about Stonewall at the 1973 rally, Rivera left Manhattan in the mid-1970s, relocating to Tarrytown, New York.
The Friendship grew apart.
After Rivera moved, their friendship faded.
Johnson remained in New York City, where she continued to be a fixture of the gay activist community. Though she suffered mental breakdowns, arrests and continued homelessness, Johnson joined street activist groups such as ACT UP in the 1980s to raise awareness of the growing AIDS epidemic.
Shortly after the 1992 gay pride parade, Johnson’s body was discovered floating in the Hudson River. Police initially ruled the death a suicide, but Johnson’s friends and other members of the local community insisted she was not suicidal and noted that the back of her head had a massive wound.
Rivera returned to New York after her friend’s death. She took up residence on the “Gay Piers” at the end of Christopher Street, and became an advocate for homeless members of the gay community.
In 1997, Rivera founded Transy House in Park Slope, Brooklyn to honor Johnson’s memory. In 2001 Rivera resurrected STAR as an active political organization, with the word Transvestite in the title being changed to the more recently coined nTransgender.
Rivera’s struggles did not relate exclusively to gay and trans people, as they intersected with issues of poverty and discrimination faced by people of color, which caused friction in the GAA as it was mainly made up of white middle-class gay people.
Rivera died on February 19,2022 at St Vincent’s hospital of complications from liver cancer.
In 2015, Rivera became the first transgender activist to have her image appear in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC., and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project continues her legacy to guarantee “all people are free to self-determine their gender identity and expression, regardless of income or race, and without facing harassment, discrimination or violence.”
