i am sassa

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I couldn’t paint Marsha without painting Sylvia.

Sylvia Rivera was born in a taxi cab. Her mother committed suicide when she was just three years old, leaving Sylvia in the care of her grandmother, who beat her when she caught here wearing makeup as a child. She was a runaway and a prostitute when she was eleven years old. According to Sylvia, Marsha P. Johnson saved her life by becoming her mentor and getting her off the street.

Sylvia battled addiction and was in and out of homelessness her entire life, like many other trans people at the time. Despite having no shortage of her own problems, she dedicated her life to LGBTQ rights. She is credited, along with Marsha P. Johnson, as having started the Stonewall riots that were the catalyst of the Gay Liberation Movement.

The Stonewall riots started in the early morning of June 28, 1969, at a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. Police raids of the Stonewall were extremely common, and extremely brutal and demeaning. Those presenting as women were forced by police to verify their sex so that arrests could be made for cross-dressing. Tension had been rising over increasing violence and sexual harassment by police during these raids, and on this night the patrons of the bar fought back. Hard. There are all kinds of fun internet rumors about who threw the first brick/rock/high heel, and also about a kick line of drag queens that faced off with police. I mean I wasn’t there, but I imagine these to be embellishments of the best possible kind. The important thing is, it happened. And it really truly had to happen in order for anyone to start paying attention. This was a population of people that were bing treated like the scum of the earth by just about everyone, and they were not being protected by the law when that treatment very often turned violent or deadly. I would have fought like hell too. There’s only so much people can take.

Sylvia’s activism didn’t stop with the riots. It didn’t stop when she was booed off stage at a gay pride parade, though she was working for gay rights. She moved in and out of difficult times, homelessness, and addiction, but those hard times were ALWAYS punctuated with times of sincere giving. And it wasn’t always the shiny package of philanthropy you might be picturing. Sometimes she went back to prostitution just to earn enough money to keep a young trans person from having to do the same. Toward the end of her life, Sylvia had been sober for some time and was working as Director of a church food pantry. A TIME article recently literally gave Sylvia Rivera credit for the legalization of gay marriage, saying “So why doesn’t every gay American celebrate this fact?”. I think Sylvia was a complete badass because she had so much taken from her, things most people take completely for granted, yet she still gave, often back to the same people who were doing the taking. Her compassion for a world that showed her very little is mind blowing to me. And I can’t help but wonder, what more might she have had to give without so many road blocks?

Thank you, Sylvia Rivera.