By Moses H.M.
In a 2024 article for the University of the Poor Journal, we laid out the history of the rising anti-trans movement in the United States, laying out the foundation of the significant shift towards anti-trans and anti-gay policy and violence within the last few years. As the answer for where the “sudden rise” of this violence came from can be found in history, the answer for how to resist this violence can be found in the long history of how poor transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people have long since struggled for freedom.
One of the major beginnings of transgender activism in the United States can be found in August of 1966, with The Compton Cafeteria riot in San Francisco Tenderloin District. Police violence was common in San Francisco and the staff at Compton Cafeteria often called the police on poor trans women and drag queens who were frequent customers of the cafe. Drag queens and poor trans women would be harassed and subject to genital checks and subsequently arrested for crossdressing, which was illegal at the time.
One night, tired of the constant oppression, violence, and harassment, trans women – especially the youth – resisted arrest, sparking an uprising throughout the Tenderloin district, eventually leading to a picket line presence at the cafe as the establishment continued to ban drag queens and trans women. Evidence of this early trans resistance was nearly erased from historical memory, but the work of transgender woman and historian Susan Stryker and other transgender activists and organizers confirmed the existence of such early transgender resistance and strength.
In Los Angeles, the Mattachine Society was founded in 1950 by communist Harry Hay, but in the wake of the Red Scare he and other communists in the organization were pushed out. From there, the Mattachine Society, along with its lesbian counterpart the Daughters of Billitis, spread throughout the country, but often opted to focus primarily on assimilation into society.
Three years later, across the country, the Stonewall Uprisings of 1969 were led primarily by poor people, especially poor gender-expansive folks of color, who continued to face police harassment, violence, and discrimination. In the early 1960s, the New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. sought to get rid of all gay bars in order to clean up the city’s image before the 1964 World’s Fair. To do this, the city revoked liquor licenses of all gay bars, and conducted raids on bars like Stonewall.
Plainclothes police entrapped as many gay men as possible, and often raided bars or other places where gay people frequented, arresting people for engaging in survival sex, in acts of cross-dressing (at the time, you had to have at least three articles of clothing that aligned with your assigned sex), or for simply dancing and existing. Most gay bars were owned and controlled by organized crime that paid off police and operated as “private clubs” to evade prosecution. Stonewall was a dingy and dirty bar owned by the mob and the manager, Ed Murphy (also known as the Skull), was an ex-convict who ran blackmail ring entrapping gay men and extorting money from them in order to keep their gay identity from their friends, family, and employers.
Employees at Stonewall regularly engaged in blackmail, with pamphlets from the Mattachine Society warning patrons not to use their real names in the guestbook. Stonewall clientele was a mix of just about everyone – wealthier businessmen, drag queens, and homeless gay youth, and it was one of the only gay bars where dancing was permitted.
In the summer of 1969, New York City was embroiled in a mayoral election, increasing the amount of raids on bars like Stonewall. In the evening of Saturday, July 28th, 1969, 8 policemen arrived for a routine police raid, entrapping patrons by taking them into bathrooms and performing genital checks. But, that night, folks were pushed to their limit, and as people were arrested, a crowd grew outside the bar from inside the bar and around the West Village. From there, the crowd grew into sporadic riots, drawing crowds from across the neighborhood. The next evening throughout the week, rioting continued with thousands of people gathering near Stonewell.
There are several myths about Stonewall, but what remains the most important is who was at the center of the events that night and the next few days. While Stonewall was a mix of clientele, poor people, especially poor gender-nonconforming people, and particularly gay homeless youth, were at the center of the uprisings. Witnesses at the riots agree that “the most marginal groups of the gay community fought the hardest – and therefore risked the most – on this and the following nights” (Stonewall, David Carter, p.163).
Lanigan-Schmidt, an artist who took part in the uprisings said, “What I know definitely from my own experience is the people who did the most fighting were the drag queens and hustlers. [They] fought with the same ferocity they would fight with when any situation of survival put their sense of dignity on the line, very much like Bob Dylan’s ‘When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose’” (Stonewall, David Carter, p.162).
After Stonewall, the The Gay Liberation Front was formed, modeled on the Communist Vietnamese National Liberation Front. The Gay Liberation Front was a radical response to the organizing that was going on before Stonewall, which people saw as too tame for what was needed. However, soon after its inception, the Gay Liberation Front split. Dissident members formed the Gay Activist Alliance, which focused primarily on cisgender gay and lesbian rights, and was primarily concerned about assimilation into the capitalist system (i.e. the struggle for marriage equality and the right to be in the military). The Gay Liberation Front, which consisted of several different groups, was a meeting place for primarily poor, Black and brown, and trans people who aligned themselves with organizations such as the Black Panther Party.
Two of these leaders, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, were poor, homeless drag queens, sex workers, and organizers that were struggling towards a real revolution. Marsha and Sylvia were a part of the drag queen caucus of the Gay Liberation Front, and in 1970 after a GLF action, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson founded the S.T.A.R. House (Street Transvestite* Action Revolutionaries) where they met the material and community needs of poor trans youth. The pair operated a S.T.A.R. house where folks could stay in and be cared for, holding monthly political education meetings, offering bail support for queer folks who were arrested and couldn’t pay bail, offering jail support and street support, and organizing poor trans folks into a larger movement for a revolutionary change – STAR House operated as a true political project of survival. Their manifesto in 1970 signaled their commitment to revolutionary change:
“We want a revolutionary peoples’ government, where transvestites, street people, women, homosexuals, blacks, puerto ricans, indians, and all oppressed people are free, and not fucked over by this government who treats us like the scum of the earth and kills us off like flies, one by one, and throws us into jail to rot. This government who spends millions of dollars to go to the moon, and lets the poor Americans starve to death.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
-S.T.A.R.”
While the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activist Alliance initially supported STAR, their support did not last long. STAR then found connection with revolutionary groups who saw poor trans leaders as revolutionary leaders such as the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. In an interview with Leslie Feinberg published after her death, Rivera recounted the connection to revolutionary groups:
“I ended up meeting one of the Young Lords that day. I became one of them. Any time they needed any help, I was always there for the Young Lords. It was just the respect they gave us as human beings. They gave us a lot of respect. It was a fabulous feeling for me to be myself–being part of the Young Lords as a drag queen–and my organization being part of the Young Lords. I met [Black Panther Party leader] Huey Newton at the Peoples’ Revolutionary Convention in Philadelphia in 1971. Huey decided we were part of the revolution-that we were revolutionary people.” (“I’m glad I was in the Stonewall riot,” an interview with Sylvia Rivera from Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle.)
Rivera continues in her interview to align herself as a revolutionary, linking the trans rights struggles to larger struggles:
“I was a radical, a revolutionist. I am still a revolutionist. I was proud to make the road and help change laws and what-not. I was very proud of doing that and proud of what I’m still doing, no matter what it takes.Today, we have to fight back against the government. We have to fight them back. They’re cutting back Medicaid, cutting back on medicine for people with AIDS. They want to take away from women on welfare and put them into that little work program. They’re going to cut SSI. Now they’re taking away food stamps. These people who want the cuts-these people are making millions and millions and millions of dollars as CEOs.”
In 1973, New York City’s Pride Festival excluded transgender people. Sylvia, after fighting her way on stage, condemned the gay rights movement abandonment of trans people, and queer people:
“I’ve been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail that write me every motherfucking week and ask for your help and you all don’t do a god damn thing for them … They write [to] STAR because we’re trying to do something for them … The people are trying to do something for all of us, and not men and women that belong to a white middle class white club. And that’s what you all belong to.” – Sylvia Rivera “Y’all Better Quiet Down,” 1973 Gay Pride Rally, NYC
After the speech and a fall out with Marsha P. Johnson, she left the city and activism for 20 years. Without her, STAR disbanded. In 1992, when she received news that Marsha P. Johnson had died under mysterious circumstances, Rivera returned to New York City, where she continued activist work until her death in 2002.
In her final essay “Queens in Exile, The Forgotten Ones” published posthumously in 2006, Sylvia Rivera recounted the failure of and abandonment of mainstream gay rights organizations:
“But I will not give up because I won’t give the mainstream gay organizations the satisfaction of keeping us down. If we give up, they win. And we can’t allow them to win. The reason we, right now, as a trans community, don’t have all the rights they have is that we allowed them to speak for us for so many damn years, and we bought everything they said to us: ‘Oh, let us pass our bill, then we’ll come for you.’ Yeah, come for me. Thirty-two years later and they’re still coming for me. And what have we got? Here, where it all started, trans people have nothing. We can no longer let people like the Empire State Pride Agenda, the HRC [Human Rights Campaign] in Washington, speak for us. And it really hurts me that some gay people don’t even know what we gave for their movement.” (“Queens in Exile, The Forgotten Ones” from Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle.)
Looking back at the history of queer and trans struggle, there are two major lessons to take. First, we need to acknowledge the difficulty in identifying and understanding these histories, which in many cases have been largely diluted or outright erased. Mainstream interpretations of the gay rights movement fail to uphold the leadership and organizing of poor people, including the role of trans people. We need to continue to study these leaders and histories to better understand our current struggles.
Second, this history shows the deep irony that the struggle for the legalization of gay marriage and the assimilation of gay people into the millitary and other social structures, have been fulfilled. And yet, this can feel like a hollow victory for queer and trans people right now. In 2025, 937 anti-trans bills have been introduced at the state and federal level, up from the 701 anti-trans bills introduced in 2024.
On June 18th, 2025, the US Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors in US vs. Skrmetti, indicating a continued dire shift in the livelihoods of trans and nonbinary people, especially children. Within a month of Donald Trump’s administration, the Trump Administration issued an executive order that had far-reaching effects on the livelihoods of queer and transgender people, especially youth.
As we can see, the strategy of assimilation and upholding the capitalist structure that causes violence only produces small and easily revoked victories. They also tend to only benefit a few: the rights won by the gay liberation movement do not extend to many trans and queer people. And those rights are always in danger of being revoked, as we see with current rumblings around overturning Obergefell v. Hodges, the right to same sex marriage.
As leaders like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson understood, the only solution to the issues that transgender and gay people continue to face today is to destroy the social structures that cause this violence.
Additional Sources:
David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, Griffin, 2010.
Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle, Untorelli Press, 2006.
*Language for how individuals have described their gender and sexual identity has and continues to evolve. During the time of the gay liberation movement the term “transgender” was not widely used, and individuals often identified as gay, transvestites, or drag queens. It is widely accepted that leaders such as Marsha P. Johnson – who at the time referred to herself as a transvestite and drag queen – was a transgender woman. Later in her life, Sylvia Rivera would identify both as transgender and as a transvestite. Today, the term “transvestite” is seen as outdated and inappropriate, and “transgender” has replaced this terminology, although whatever term one chooses to identify themself should be used. If you don’t know, it’s always best to ask.
