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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βOur armies are rising:β Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson
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:(
Really weird how she was normal yesterday, talking normally and stuff.
death is a sad affair, dunno fortunately or unfortunately haven't been hit with sudden one yet, only prolonged sicknesses
death is such a sad affair I can't bear to think about it. I'm wondering if it's going to turn me away from being able to tolerate violence in media, because it gets harder and harder to not think about on a visceral level, especially if I see someone die in a slow, horrible way
god the last episode of The Boys fucked me up, I could not stop fucking crying, and I know that's kind of stupid because it's just dumb cape shit but everything that happened to Simon Pegg's character was just horrifying, I almost had to get up and leave at numerous points
I really hope that I am spared having dementia, or seeing it in my parents or in any of my loved ones. I don't know how I'm going to be able to handle any of their deaths either way, though. I can't even think about my cats and how they're already like, a third to halfway through their lifespans. And so am I (being optimistic about climate change and nuclear war and the long term accumulation of damage to my vascular system from drug abuse and covid). It's fucked.
I hope someday whatever part of my brain that is unable to have faith in religion breaks and lets me believe in some sort of balm to ease the horrified anticipation I feel of spending my last moments in agony and then..... [ ]
Don't beat yourself up over that, The Boys is very much above cape shit (well, not above being lib but you get the point). I think with a show where someone is going to die each episode that they actually made this episode's subplot really land.
I think death in media has always disturbed me on some level, and it doesn't help when works are structured where a bunch of low level goons get killed/harmed horribly and no one stops to think about it (looking at every shooter game made in the last 20 years).