A monument in the Greenwich Village will honor the memory of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, transsexual women and key figures of the LGTBI liberation movement
GAYLES.TV.- It has just opened a international contest to erect a monument to transgender people, the first in the world. It will be erected in memory of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. These two transgender women fought until the end of their days for the rights of the most marginalized among the marginalized: young gays, lesbians and transgender people who had been expelled from their families and also people without resources who had been infected with HIV.
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera shared in addition to a great friendship, the street, contempt, prostitution, drugs and marginalization because of their race (Marsha was black and Sylvia of Latino origin) and a tough childhood.
Today the city of New York wants to pay tribute to them with a monument that will most likely be located in Greenwich Village, specifically in the Triangle of Ruth Wittenberg very close to Stonewall, the place where the struggle for the rights of LGTBI people began already 50 years ago.
And precisely Sylvia Rivera He was one of the main protagonists of that revolt. The night the police tried to enter Stonewall's bar to practice one of the usual raids and found opposition and the boredom of the customers who stood up to them, Sylvia fought for her rights as a lioness, with nails, teeth and with molotov cocktails made with local alcohol. Three days that joined a group that later would have little memory for those who with gays and lesbians had left the skin fighting: transsexual people like Marsha and Sylvia.
Rivera herself exploded against the activists of the LGTBI movement with memorable phrases and speeches like the one that at 1973 made her exclaim: "You tell me to go and hide my tail between your legs. I will not take this shit anymore. I have been beaten, my nose has been broken, I have been imprisoned, I have lost my job and my apartment. And all for gay liberation and do you all treat me this way? What the hell is wrong with everyone? ".
The disappointment caused him to move away from the LGTBI movement but he did not end his sense of justice for that, together with his friend Marsha, he founded "Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries" which, among other things, created a shelter to give shelter to young transgender people that society had condemned to prostitution and misery.
The monuments dedicated to LGTBI people are practically non-existent in the world and in New York itself, where one stands in memory of the Stonewall revolt, it is anonymous figures and painted in white, the work of the pop artist George Segal. Therefore, in an interview given last week, Chirlane McCray, first lady of the city, said: "It is important that a monument like this has a name and face. The LGBTQ movement was portrayed as a masculine, white and gay movement. This monument (to two women of color and transsexuals) counteracts this tendency to whitewash history. "
It is worthwhile to delve into the lives of these two women who went through life briefly but leaving an indelible mark and with whom we will always be in debt. And we can not close this article without remembering another memorable quote attributed to Sylvia: "There is no fury in hell like that of a queen who is despised".
Source: notesperiodismopopular.com, nytimes.com
Photography: Justin Sutcliffe / Associated Press, Netflix
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