Sylvia Rivera, born on July 2 in 1951, was a Latina American queer rights activist, member of the Gay Liberation Front, and community worker from the state of New York.
Rivera, who identified as a “half-sister”, participated in demonstrations with the Gay Liberation Front. With her close friend Marsha P. Johnson, Rivera co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a socialist group dedicated to helping homeless young drag queens, gay youth, and trans women.
At different times in her life, Rivera battled substance abuse and lived on the streets, largely in the gay homeless community at the Christopher Street docks. Her experiences made her more focused on advocacy for those who, in her view, mainstream society and the assimilationist factions of the LGBT community were leaving behind.
Rivera died during the dawn hours of February 19th, 2002, at St. Vincent’s Hospital, of complications from liver cancer. Activist Riki Wilchins said this of her: “In many ways, Sylvia was the Rosa Parks of the modern transgender movement, a term that was not even coined until two decades after Stonewall”.
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Remember the radicalism of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson
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“Our armies are rising:” Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson
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Yeah. In blue states I can go in whenever, usually weeks before the official date of the election, and fill out a ballot. I can also mail one in. I’m pretty sure I could whisper my votes to the birds in the air and the beasts of the earth and they’d carry it to a polling place.
Meanwhile, poor black neighborhoods in the US south have 9 hour waits for polling and it is a literal actual crime to give anyone in line water.
Federalism is the dumbest fucking thing. We’re going to have 50 different countries that each have a say in electing the king of earth, but groups of those countries can collude however they want to subvert the “process” to elect their chosen turd and we all just accept that this is normal and sensible instead of crushing them and hanging their leaders in crow-cages across the length of I-70.
In CAN every registered voter gets mailed a ballot, no postage required, weeks before the election. If you are uncomfortable mailing it back, staffed drop boxes are available for 2 weeks prior. If you forget until the day of, you have to go drop it off but of course I have never spent more than 15 minutes waiting at a polling location.
If anything Biden could’ve focused his first term on shoring up our broken election system.