Gay Liberation and Trans Euphoria

Gay Liberation Front occupation of NYU

Rivera and the other pictured activists were participating in the Gay Liberation Front's week-long occupation of NYU's Weinstein Hall, enacting an anti-police and pro-gay action morally aligned with the Stonewall Riots the summer before. While the occupation was a crucial political action against carceral control, anti-queer harm, and university overreach, the image of Rivera and her comrades fairly shimmers with something not often enough discussed in the context of queer rights activism: joy, in several potential forms. 

We can see this, because gay liberation and trans euphoria are two powerful and interlinked social forces for which the images in this mini-exhibit trace some heady connections. What is it like to look at fights for liberation through a sort of euphoria lens? Where do activists find joy and support in community even as the state -- operating in and around the spaces of educational and cultural institutions -- throws all its might against them? Sylvia Rivera, the Gay Liberation Front, Audre Lorde, and Judith Butler are the teachers in this essay; but readers should look for the teachers in their own lives, too -- the people who fight for queer liberation in big and small strokes, across different arenas of private and public life.

To gazes conditioned to seeing Rivera in modes of full-on, radiating anger at injustice -- as in the famous video footage (1) of her railing against the transphobia within the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally -- the image is particularly arresting. Rivera looks so easily and victoriously happy. As we'd want her to be, and as, at least in her public image, she was so often denied the chance to be, in a resolutely trans-antagonistic, racist, and queer-phobic world. She herself frequently spoke of anger as a catalyst for change, as in her 1989 interview recently re-published in the Stonewall Reader and in the Guardian: "I had to do something back then to show the world that there was a changing world. I got involved with a lot of the different things because I had to. I had so much anger." (2)

While we can source other images where Rivera looks happy, including the now-famous image of her on the street with her dear friend Marsha P. Johnson (3), much of her later life was similarly inflected with rage and overlapping forms of injustice. In 2001, she was interviewed at Black Pride in Fort Greene Park about what Pride was from its beginnings to that point, and she firmly said, "I didn't believe that I would have to sit here, 32 years later, and basically bitch about the fact that [Pride has] become so capitalist…. This is no longer my Pride." (4) She would pass away the following February.

The world we live in two decades after her death has, in recent months especially, been amping up its layers of structural harm against queer people and trans people in particular, from the metastasizing number of state laws attempting to legislate trans freedom away to the virulent attacks against trans rights in British and American legacy media. The state, in Jules Gill-Peterson's terms, is constantly at work trying to make itself cis, and that gruesome fact is constantly upheld by the current state of anti-trans state power (5). Rivera's work, with the Gay Liberation Front, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (known as S.T.A.R.), and as a figure on her own, will never be in vain; in fact, the increasing layers of anti-trans harm make all forms of trans rights activism even more important to remember, support, and advance. 

As the New-York Historical Society frames the September 1970 NYU occupation,

the initial idea for S.T.A.R. came out of a sit-in at New York University's Weinstein Hall. On September 20, 1970, a coalition of radical lesbian and gay organizations, which proliferated in the immediate wake of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, occupied the hall to protest the cancellation of a gay dance. After five days, the police forcibly removed the activists from the building, though a smaller protest continued on the steps outside. (6)

The story extends much further than this telling, of course, but situated in this timeline, Rivera's raised arms in the first image take on a probable cast of victory, along with joy -- at the moment of the photo, the activists were in the middle of holding it down. Even after the police removal and the eventual dispersal of the smaller protest, the victory lasts -- because as Rivera's work ultimately teaches, revolutionary action reverberates past the events themselves. (As we'll see, she didn't agree with that assessment at the time.)

The status of an "icon" of activism (or an iconic recording of an activism moment) is, of course, necessarily questionable. Rivera didn't fight for her rights in order to end up on a t-shirt or other commodified object. As Eric Marcus put it in notes to the republication of his 1989 interview with Rivera, "Sylvia Rivera would have loved knowing that in the years since her death in 2002 she’d become an icon—a symbol of LGBTQ people fighting back against police repression and fighting for respect and equal rights. But she'd also want you to know that she was a human being." (7)

The previous summer, on June 28, 1969, police had raided now famed queer bar the Stonewall Inn, setting off riots that, until relatively recently, have been watered down in the popular imagination to the marker of a parade. What we now commemorate as a sometimes corporate sponsored event, Pride is nevertheless inextricably political and anti-police, no matter how much corporations might annually attempt to turn it into a feel-good meme.

Gay Liberation Front Meeting

The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was a radical collective of members who seceded from the Mattachine Society, one of the earliest national organizations for gay rights. As the New York Public Library's "1969: The Year of Gay Liberation" exhibit copy describes it, "GLF members openly claimed the word 'Gay,' which had been avoided by the previous generation of gay and lesbian activists in favor of cryptic, inoffensive names: Mattachine, Bilitis, Janus." (8) Shumsky's photo of a 1970 meeting , of five blurry activists standing in a line behind a microphone, evokes a theatrical audition, but the work they did was anything but. 

In October 1970, Rivera would write a lengthy flyer angrily analyzing the occupation and its, to her, failed outcomes as a result of the police's invasion of a peaceful protest. "[A]ll we fought for at Weinstein Hall was lost when we left upon the request of the pigs," she wrote. "So now the question is, do we want Gay Power or Pig Power[?]" (9) An action that had started in support of the right to hold gay dances -- maybe one of the more visible manifestations of queer joy available to queer youth at the time -- was brutalized by police. 

Nine years later, in 1979, Audre Lorde would visit NYU to deliver her paper, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," at the Institute for the Humanities Second Sex Conference, as a panelist for "The Personal and the Political." Lorde's layered exhortations, all tied up in the neatly deployable framework of the title warning (10), have become a core tool for queer (and queer-aware) activism in the years since (and, yes, commodified on t-shirts as well). As Micah White describes the now celebrated title, "her statement has such an uncanny intuitive force that it is often leveraged without the speaker even being aware of his allusion." (11)

The importance of these impacts notwithstanding, Lorde's speech dug even deeper, and modeled the use of using new rhetorical tools to dismantle power to its face. Within minutes of speaking, Lorde identified and spoke an unacknowledged presence on the panel: "I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented." 

Starting in this sharp critique of academic feminism and its hypocrisies, Lorde broadens out to indict white feminism in general -- what she denotes as "white American feminist theory" -- for who it leaves out of its supposed liberation: 

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

Lorde's iconic "master" framing is imbricated in the reality that cis white women, and especially cis white women in classed power positions, are aligned with the concerns of patriarchy rather than working against them. Although she doesn't name trans femininity, it's easy to weave it into her analysis, so resolutely forced "outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women."

Trans Pride Poster 

In 2015, the Trans Pride March (Fierté Trans in French) was held in Montreal for the second time. Morgan Sea's poster depicts a racially diverse group of marchers holding signs in French and English, under a banner in the colors of the trans flag announcing the march's associated events. As the Montreal Gazette reported, "The event, scheduled one week before Montreal’s Gay Pride Parade, was aimed against the provincial government's inaction with regard to trans rights." (12)

Iconicity is a fraught and easily troubled status, but the archives of activism offer lessons for what to do before, during, and after activist events. In the persistently harmful world we live in, a world whose power brokers are at work to make its instutitions cis at almost every turn, trans euphoria is too often trailed by or couched in the anti-trans cruelty of systems, from legislatures to hospitals and medical facilities to universities. Despite the harm that causes to trans people and their communities, trans euphoria is -- and should always be -- unstoppable.