Last night, I took a book from my shelf I hadn't looked at for a long time, Eric Marcus's 1992 book Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights 1945-1990. It's a series of personal statements and recollections from many different figures, including Sylvia Rivera. What I read was somewhere between eye-opening and jaw-dropping, which just shows the importance of looking at historical sources from before the TQ+ takeover.

The first surprise was that Rivera was listed as Rey "Sylvia Lee" Rivera, so we have heresy #1 (deadnaming). The title of Rivera's account is "The Drag Queen." In the editorial preface, over which one assumes Rivera had some say, Rivera is called Rey, not Sylvia, and described as "he" (misgendering!). Among other things, Rivera reports having engaged in prostitution as young as 13 years old.

Then, of course, there are the Stonewall claims, which we now know are false. Rivera claims to have been there in the bar when it started, but if you've read David Carter's well-researched account of what went down that night, you realize that Rivera's account rings false. Rivera also makes other contradictory statements such as:

"Before GAY rights, before the Stonewall riot, I was involved in the black liberation movement and the peace movement." (190). (I believe some later historians claim there is no evidence of this.)

Then, two pages later, Rivera says, "Even though I was at the Stonewall riot, I didn't join the movement per se until February 1970. I didn't feel like I wanted to be bothered with anything organized." (192).

The only mention of trans anywhere in the whole statement is the formation of STAR, the "Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries." In all other instances, Rivera refers to himself as a "drag queen." At no point does he refer to himself as transsexual or concern himself with the idea that he's actually a woman and not a gay man in drag.

Then, about the apartment they rented for queer youth, Rivera said, " . . . we took this slum building and kept it going for about a year or two." (194). We now know that apartment was rented for a maximum of about 7 months, not "a year or two."

Near the end, Rivera singles out lesbian Jean O'Leary for special hate (Rivera's word), writing, "She was the one who had the hatred not just toward the drag queens but towards men in general." (194). Here, Rivera appears to imply that the people she's grouping as "drag queens" are a subset of "men."

Anyway, I was struck by the complete absence of any trace of modern gender ideology from Rivera's statement. Rivera only uses 'transvestite' once, in reference to STAR and only refers to himself otherwise as a drag queen. He never claims to be a woman. Of course, the TQ+ will retcon all this and claim that Rivera "simply didn't have the language" to claim to be trans, transgender, or transsexual, but Rivera was 40 at the time of this statement. He clearly had had lots of time to think over these identity issues and to make the point if he wanted to, but he didn't.

We really need to be collecting all the period sources for this stuff we can find because it exposes the rewriting of history TRAs have been trying to do for the last 15-20 years.