Sylvia Rivera Quotes

this movement has become so capitalist... this is no longer my pride, I gave them their pride but they have not given me mine

cheers to the bisexuals the lesbians, gays, and queers cheers if you liked to be called all three cheers to the trans folks to marsha p. johnson and sylvia rivera thank you for letting me be here cheers to the two-spirit to the nonbinary the questioning the not sure yet cheers to the allies cheers to everyone who did work so i could fully be me sexual experiences don’t have to define your sexuality

The only reason they tolerated the transgender community in some of these movements was because we were gung-ho, we were front liners. We didn’t take no shit from nobody. We had nothing to lose. You all had rights. We had nothing to lose. I’ll be the first one to step on any organization, any politician’s toes if I have to, to get the rights for my community.

I’m not even in the back of the bus. My community is being pulled by a rope around our neck by the bumper of the damn bus that stays in the front. Gay liberation but transgender nothing!

Where is the great social movement in the streets that will help support and strengthen our demand for trans liberation? Will we see it in our lifetime? No crystal ball exists to predict mass awakening. But laws of motion and development do exist: Repression breeds resistance. That's the lesson of Stonewall. And remember what Sylvia Rivera said about that rebellion? 'I always believed that we would have a fight back. I just didn't know it would be that night.

When we do disability justice work, it becomes impossible to look at disability and not examine how colonialism created it. It becomes a priority to look at Indigenous ways of perceiving and understanding disability, for example. It becomes a space where we see that disability is all up in Black and brown/queer and trans communities—from Henrietta Lacks to Harriet Tubman, from the Black Panther Party’s active support for disabled organizers’ two-month occupation of the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation to force the passage of Section 504, the law mandating disabled access to public spaces and transportation to the chronic illness and disability stories of second-wave queer feminists of color like Sylvia Rivera, June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, and Barbara Cameron, whose lives are marked by bodily difference, trauma-surviving brilliance, and chronic illness but who mostly never used the term “disabled” to refer to themselves.

They have been brainwashed by this fucked up system that has condemened us and by doctors that call us a disease and a bunch of freaks. Our family and friends have also condemned us because of their lack of true knowledge.

If I had taken the initiative to seek out information about the LGBT rights movement, I would have found that it was a Black trans woman, Marsha P. Johnson, a Latinx trans woman, Sylvia Rivera, and a butch lesbian, Stormé DeLarverie, who were the catalysts of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City, which led to the first ever Pride march, which birthed the Gay Rights Movement, which became the LGBT movement. But I didn’t, largely because I assumed that, much like the majority of the history that we are taught in the British academic syllabus, it was cisgender, white, gay men that initiated that movement.

When I think of disabled literature and writing, I can think of a breadth of writing that spans decades and generations, that uses the D-word and does not. I think of Audre Lorde—Black Lesbian poet warrior mother, legally blind, living and dying with cancer, whose work shines with the knowledge she gained from living with bodily difference and fighting the medical industrial complex. I think of Gloria Anzaldúa, queer Latinx maestra who started her period at age three and lived with bodily and reprogenital differences, living and dying with diabetes. Some of my work as a disability justice writer has been to look at the legacies and work of those foundational second-wave queer and trans feminist writers and creators of color—Audre Lorde and June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa and Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, Chrystos and Sapphire, to name a few—and to witness the disability all up in their work, even if they did not use that word because of any number of factors including the whiteness of the disability rights movement of the time. June's last decade of writing was all about her cancer. Gloria's writing had everything to do with her diabetes and neurodivergence and life-long bodily differences. Marsha and Sylvia were both neurodivergent Trans Black and Latinx activists and creators whose writing, performance, and art was at the center of their lives and activism. Chrystos and Sapphire's Indigenous and Black feminist incest survivor stories and poetry write from spaces of surviving extreme trauma, chronic pain from stripping and cleaning houses, CPTSD, grief, and psychiatrization. "I also think of the deep legacy of disabled writers (some dead, some still living but having done this for a while) who intentionally, politically identified as disabled. Laura Hershey. Leroy Moore. Qwo-Li Driskill. Aurora Levins Morales. Billie Rain. Dani Montgomery. Nomy Lamm. Cheryl Marie Wade. Emi Koyama. Pat Parker. Tatiana de la tierra. Raymond Luczak. Anne Finger. Leslie Feinberg, who died of Lyme disease. Peggy Munson. Beth Brant. Vickie Sears. Writers who are small press, micro-press, self-published, indie press, out of print. Writers I know and cherish, whose names I call when I talk about disabled writing. We are so often kept apart, we disabled people, and kept from knowing each other's names. We are told not to hang out with the other kid with cerebral palsy, told to deny or downplay our disabilities or Deafness or ND. We often grow up not learning disabled history, Deaf literature, or that those are even a thing.