queersinhistory:

Civil rights pioneer Sylvia Rivera was one of the instigators of the Stonewall uprising, an event that helped launch the modern gay rights movement.

“I’m not missing a minute of this, it’s the revolution!”

Seventeen-year-old drag queen Sylvia Rivera was in the crowd that gathered outside the Stonewall Inn the night of June 27, 1969, when the Greenwich Village gay bar was raided by the police. Rivera reportedly shouted, “I’m not missing a minute of this, it’s the revolution!” As police escorted patrons from the bar, Rivera was one of the first bystanders to throw a bottle.

After Stonewall, Rivera joined the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) and worked energetically on its campaign to pass the New York City Gay Rights Bill. She was famously arrested for climbing the walls of City Hall in a dress and high heels to crash a closed-door meeting on the bill. In time, GAA eliminated drag and transvestite concerns from their agenda as they sought to broaden their political base. Years later, Rivera told an interviewer, “When things started getting more mainstream, it was like, `We don’t need you no more’.” But, she added, “Hell hath no fury like a drag queen scorned.”

Sylvia Rivera (né Ray Rivera Mendosa) was a persistent and vocal advocate for transgender rights. Her activist zeal was fueled by her own struggles to find food, shelter, and safety in the urban streets from the time she left home at the age of ten. In 1970, Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) to help homeless youth.

The Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), an organization dedicated to ending poverty and gender identity discrimination, carries on Rivera’s work on behalf of marginalized persons.

In 2005, a street in Greenwich Village near the Stonewall Inn was renamed in Sylvia Rivera’s honor.

“While [Syliva] Rivera is credited with throwing the “first brick” during the Stonewall Riots, she claimed she actually threw a Molotov Cocktai, declaring, “This is the Revolution.” 

—That’s Revolitng Queer Strategies For Resisting Assimilation, pg 110

“Published in 1993, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis is a meticulously researched study of lesbian culture in Buffalo, New York, from 1930s to 1960s. The authors use interviews with dozens of women, interspersed with narrative and analysis, to paint a vivid picture of what life was like for these mostly working-class lesbians in the days before there was any form of cultural acceptance of gayness. From house parties to gay bars, from butches to femmes, we are witness to the details, both mundane and marvelous, that made up day-to-day existence for these women. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the book is the level of comfort many of the subjects seemed to feel in their own identities, and the degree to which they felt free to express their preferences openly, at least within their own social circles. The authors argue that self-confident gay communities such as this one, though not explicitly political themselves, provided the true basis for the gay rights movement. 

This archives contains digital copies of the original audio-taped interviews on which Lapovsky and Davis based their book. Scratchy and acoustically flawed as they are, they remain compelling; hearing these women’s voices brings them to life in a whole new way.”

jenfemmeinist:

The historical narrative that surrounds the American Thanksgiving feast is fairly recent.

The purportedly idyllic partnership between the European Pilgrims and New England Indians is actually only about 120 years old. After WWI, the story that we learn in school today became THE story. I believe deeply in the power of re-appropriating racist and sexist traditions, but I do not believe that we can effectively do that if we do not know the history of what we’re re-appropriating. So, today I’m sharing some links that I’ve used as resources over the years that have helped me understand the holiday, the story and get a little closer to the truth. We know that victors write history books, but we also know it’s our job to correct and re-write them. Read More

r-i-o-t:

The Mujeres Libres (Free Women) of Spain emerged as a way “to empower women to make of them individuals capable of contributing to the structuring of the future society, individuals who have learned to be self- determining, not to follow blindly the dictates of any organization.”

They recognised that although “it’s necessary to work, to struggle, together because if we don’t we’ll never have a social revolution,” they also “needed our own organisation to struggle for ourselves.” In facing the twin oppression of sexism and Spain’s peasant society, they “set up literacy programmes, technically oriented classes, and classes in social studies.” They “ran a lying-in hospital, which provided birth and post-natal care for women, as well as classes on child and maternal health, birth control and sexuality.” And they “helped to establish rural collectives” with the anarchists of the CNT and FAI.

But their challenge to sexism and patriarchy occurred within the revolutionary movement as well as alongside it;

In order to gain mutual support, they created networks of women anarchists. Attending meetings with one another, they checked out reports of sexist behaviour and worked out how to deal with it. Flying day-care centres were set up in efforts to involve more women in union activities.

This demonstrated an awareness of the discrimination, both direct and indirect, that can plague even a struggle to reorder society, must be addressed proactively.

dollyx:

Elizabeth Báthory is one of the most prolific serial killers in all of history.

She was born into nobility and was highly educated but also very vain.

One day, infuriated, Elizabeth struck one of her servant girls so hard that some blood dripped from her face onto Elizabeth’s hand and she immediately thought that her skin took on a glowing freshness of her young maid.

Elizabeth believed she had found the secret of eternal youth. After this, women were abducted and hung upside down, while they were still alive and their throats were slit to prepare Elizabeth’s bath.

The Countess of Transylvania and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls, with one witness attributing to them over 650 victims, though the number for which they were convicted was 80. Elizabeth herself was neither tried nor convicted.

bradicalmang:

“Any occupied territory is a police state; and this is what Harlem is. Harlem is a police state; the police in Harlem, their presence is like occupation forces, like an occupying army. They’re not in Harlem to protect us; they’re not in Harlem to look out for our welfare; they’re in Harlem to protect the interests of the businessmen who don’t even live here,”

—Malcolm X

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