Stonewall To Campaign For Transgender Rights

Well, I guess I shouldn't be too hard on the Human Rights Campaign.  Turns out, they're not the only gay-headed organization that's been throwing trans people under the bus.  Nor are they the first to do so:  Jim Fouratt and his cohort seemed to take the first possible opportunity to kick Sylvia Rivera out of the Gay Liberation Front, which she helped them found in the days after the Stonewall Rebellion.  

Nor, for that matter, is the US the only country in which leaders of gay and lesbian organizations have ignored, or even openly disdained, transgender people.  Ironically, a British organization called Stonewall--yes, after that Stonewall---has excluded trans people since its founding in 1989. Now Ruth Hunt, its chief executive, has announced that the organization will change its policies and start campaigning for transgender rights.

To be fair, Stonewall--an organization devoted to charity and education--has always billed itself as an LGB organization.  Unlike HRC and other organizations in the US, it didn't hypocritically append a "T" to the other letters of the community it purported to serve.  In other words, it neither solicited from, nor claimed to represent, transgender people.  And, I might add, Stonewall wasn't a single-issue (i.e., same-sex marriage) organization that the HRC, in effect, became.

On another note:  Wouldn't Jim Fouratt and Janice Raymond make a lovely couple?

What Was Lost In The Lost Generation of Transgenders

Yesterday, I wrote about the African-American and Latino gay and transgender world of the 1980's that was depicted in Paris Is Burning.  As I mentioned, some of the young people shown in the film are dead; if you watch the film now, you can't help but to wonder which ones, if any, are still living.

In that very literal sense, they are a lost generation of transgender people.  But even the ones who have survived are part of the lost generation I've described, for they were not able to pass on what they learned, whether from a previous generation of trans people or from their own lives.  They taught each other how to shoplift, find places to "crash" (Most of them had little or no money; if they had any, they were saving it for surgery.) and deal with cops and tranny-chasers as well as tranny-bashers.  

In other words, they were only learning how to survive for the moment.  Now, of course, that is important, for if we don't live through this moment, we won't have others in which we can live.  But, as we have seen in history, people who expend--whether through choice or necessity--all of their energy in immediate survival tend not to make advancements in their consciousness, let alone in the ways they do things.  And they tend not to live very long.  In those senses, young trans people in the 1980's were not so different from almost anyone who lived in Europe during the millennium or so that followed the disintegration of the Roman Empire.

But the young people who were living in the ball culture shown in Paris Is Burning were marooned in a moment of history.  Most of them did not know about pioneering transgender activists like Sylvia Rivera, who were shunted aside when LGBT organizations and movements were taken over by, and therefore focused on, gay white men.  (Lesbians found themselves stuck in their own kind of limbo in the feminist movement.)  Although they were less than a generation removed from the Stonewall Rebellion, they were as unaware of it as most American college freshmen are of John Brown and the slave rebellions.

What was even worse was that they were stuck without the knowledge of how to deal with the struggles they faced in a society and nation (at least in its political leadership) that had grown more hostile to them. Sylvia Rivera herself was all but forgotten, homeless and battling addiction, as transgenders and drag queens were shunted aside to make the gay-rights movement (which was dealing with the stigma of AIDS) more attractive to straight people and others in the mainstream.   

In brief, the young people who were competing in those balls had already lost what little history they had.  We all know that one of the easiest ways to destroy a people--or to make it an underclass--is to separate it from its history.  I'm not talking about History in the academic sense (although that matters, too); I mean a person's own history and that of the family and community from which he or she came.  

The older trans and drag queens could teach them how to "boost" designer purses and eyeliner.  But they couldn't teach them the things a previous generation would have been able to teach them.  That is what was lost with the lost generation of trans people.

For Alexis Rivera

Just before I started my transition, I attended the wake and funeral of Sylvia Rivera.  (I can't believe a decade has passed since then!) She died at the same age at which I had my gender-reassignment surgery.  At the time, I remember thinking that she had died (relatively) young but had accomplished--and lived through--so much.


That seems to be the story for so many trans people who manage to find the strength of their voices.  I am going to talk about one such person in a moment. However, there are far too many others who, for various reasons, simply die young--like the person I'm going to mention.


Alexis Rivera (no relation to Sylvia, to my knowledge) was only 34 years old when she died on Wednesday, 28 March.  She'd become a grandmother only a month before her death.  In California, she  was one of the leaders of the transgender community, fighting for our equality.  She also worked on issues relating to AIDS.  According to reports, complications from that disease resulted in her death.


Now, I have had people in my life die that way.  Even though treatments have improved, and the length and quality of the lives of those affected have improved, it's still a terrible way to die.  On the other hand, the fact that people do live longer (I remember when people lived no more than a year after being diagnosed.) and can spend at least some of that time in much the same ways as people who aren't infected has much to do with the work of Ms. Rivera, not to mention any number of dedicated scientists and medical professionals.


Still, I couldn't help but to think about things that I didn't understand when Sylvia Rivera died.  For one thing, the fact that both she and Alexis died relatively young had, ironically and sadly, much to do with the fact that they  "came out" and transitionsed (at least in Alexis' case) at a young age.  Sylvia, from what I know about her, seemed not to have a choice; somehow I think the same was true of Alexis.  What that meant for Sylvia--and I susupect, for Alexis--is that they didn't have access to some of the care and support we can find (even if we are of modest means) when we're in our 40's and 50's.  Plus, more people are more aware of what it means to be trans now than when we were young.   


Also, I suspect that being leaders of the activist movements for transgenders and people afflicted with HIV/AIDS made it more difficult for Sylvia and Alexis to care, or get care, for themselves.  People like them feel--rightly, I believe--the need to be strong and to seem brave for us, and to the rest of the world.  Part of that has to do with not wanting others to see chinks in the armor.  People like the Riveras--especially Alexis--do not want our detractors to see their (and, by extension, our) vulnerabilities.  


Plus, I think having to overcome the adversities they experienced may have led both of them to trivialize whatever medical or other problems they may have had.  I think now of an activist who is a dear friend:  Jay Toole.  He has had various health problems which, I suspect, are due to having lived a more stressful life (a family situation so terrible I can scarcely imagine it, and having to live in a world even more hostile to "butches" than the one I have experienced as a trans woman) and to his attempts to be strong for all of those for whom he is working.  There is also, of course, the issue of getting health care that is appropriate for his physical needs as well as sensitive toward the ways in which he differs from most people.  


In the end, though, I believe the most important parallel between Jay's and Alexis' health problems is this:  They put others before themselves.  Alexis said that everything she did was motivated by love; knowing Jay, I believe that he has similar, if not identical, motivations.  He never demeans those against whom he has to fight; instead, he sees them as people who can be educated and won over.  From what I've heard about Alexis, she had a similar way of seeing her opponents, whom neither she nor Jay would label as enemies.


Although I never had the opportunity to meet Alexis Rivera and have only heard and read about her work, I feel I owe her a debt of gratitude.  We may have lost her "too soon," but wherever she is going will be better for her energy and spirit.

When You Can't March, You Can Still Follow In Their Footsteps

I'd wanted to go to the Pride March today.  But I got sick:  Something I ate last night didn't agree with me, or with something else I ate.  My condition would have been utterly incompatible with marching.


I feel a little sad about that, mainly because I got a bit of a rush from marching in last year's procession.  Then again, that was a special march, for the LGBT community as well as me personally.  Last year, we marched on the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion.  And I was "counting down":  Only nine days stood between me and my surgery.


Maybe it was a good thing, in a way, that I couldn't go this year.  Would  following, or trying to follow,  the footprints of a memory have been a good idea?  Perhaps that works collectively, but for me personally, it usually doesn't work very well.  


Here's a definition of frustration:  I am a person who holds on to, and treasures, memories.  But doing something "for old time's sake" usually has disastrous consequences for me.  Or, at least, it has unintended consequences.


This year is the 40th anniversary of the first march.  I guess that's significant, but it doesn't have quite the same resonance as the anniversary of the rebellion.  Maybe it's because last year's march passed in front of the Stonewall.  Of course, nearly all of us stopped, or at least slowed down, there.  Many marchers, of course, had firsthand memories of the event.  All I had was what I've read about it, and my imagination.  All I could think about was the story, perhaps apocryphal, of Sylvia Rivera tossing out her red patent stiletto-heeled shoe at the cops as they were about to storm the tavern.


With that toss, or whatever else she did that night, she helped to launch the gay rights movement as we know it.  And she became one of its first victims.  Perhaps, in a way, that's not surprising, as rebellions and revolutions have a way of cannibalizing themselves.  


Even though she and other transgendered people played important roles in the Rebellion and the early days of the LGBT rights movements, they were left behind or tossed under the bus, depending on who's narrating the history.  It didn't take long for LGBT organizations--indeed, the entire community--to be dominated by white professional gay men.  Marginalized as they were, they still had much more wealth and influence than lesbians, let alone transgendered people.  


I met Sylvia Rivera once, briefly, not long before her death.  Plenty of people were put off by her, and I could see why.  For one thing, she was very loud and often combative, if not belligerent.  Plus, she lived a hard life and didn't age well:  No one was going to do a fashion shoot with her.


But there was something else, which I have not been able to articulate until now:  She not only used the seductive rhetoric which succesful movements generate in their early days (Think of "Power to the People!"); she helped to make the rhetoric--and, in turn, was shaped by it.  Even after the battles are won or lost, or at least changed, it's hard to give up those slogans and chants of one's youth, even if they are no longer the lingua franca of the people for and by whom revolutions are fought.  


There's a prof in my department who, in that sense, reminds me of her.  He still refers to female students and colleagues as "sistas" and their male counterparts as "brothas."  When he introduced me, at a poetry reading, as "Sista Justine," I was, in a way, flattered.  But at the same time I felt sorry for him (even if he has tenure!).  The battle has not been won; rather, it has moved on and re-formed.  Yet he still talks about people--and movements--as if Huey Newton and Stokey Carmichael were running the show.


Likewise, in some way, Sylvia never moved on from those heady early days.  In one sense, I can understand why:  It could be argued, and I would agree, that the direction the movement took benefited a relatively small part of the community.  Sylvia was not one of those who benefited, just as I would not have been.  


I can't help but to wonder what her role--and, more important, what kind of person she would be now.  Although she was born only seven years earlier than I was, there is more than a generation's remove between us.  When she was igniting the Rebellion, I was unaware of it:  I would not learn of it until many years later.  She was fighting battles that I and others are just beginning to learn how to fight, much less win.  


And, I sometimes feel that she's shadowing me, or that I'm following her shadow:  I met her at the end of her life, and attended her funeral just as I was starting toward the life I lead now.  And, she died at the same age at which I had my surgery.


While I wish I could have marched today, I am still following in her footsteps, and those of other Stonewall veterans.  That, I suppose, is the best homage I can pay to them.