Sylvia Rivera

Sylvia Rivera was born in New York to Puerto Rican and Venezuelan parents, was orphaned young and raised briefly by a grandmother who disapproved of her effeminacy, and was living on the streets and doing sex work to survive by the time she was in her early teens. In June 1969 she was among the crowd, by her own account one of the early participants, in the uprising against a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, an event that became the symbolic start of the modern gay rights movement.

With her friend Marsha P. Johnson she co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in 1970, opening a shelter for homeless transgender youth and sex workers in a rundown building they largely funded themselves. She grew increasingly frustrated with a gay rights movement that, as it sought mainstream acceptance and legal reform, sidelined transgender people and the poor; at a 1973 Christopher Street rally she took the stage to confront a crowd that had booed her, describing the beatings, arrests and homelessness she had endured for the cause while feeling pushed aside by it.

She spent periods homeless and struggling with addiction over the following decades, but returned to activism in the 1990s, pushing to have transgender protections included in New York's non-discrimination law. She died of liver cancer in 2002, and the following year a New York organisation renamed itself the Sylvia Rivera Law Project in her honour.