Above photo: Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, co-founders of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Gay Pride Parade, New York City, June 24, 1973. Taken by Leonard Fink, from the LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
Life Harvester is written by Colin Hagendorf (except as otherwise noted) and edited by Rebecca Giordano. This is the email version of a print publication available for low-cost individual subscription. Get in touch for non-Patreon options. Life Harvester subscriptions are free to prisoners. If you know an incarcerated person who would like to receive a newsletter every month, get in touch with me directly and I’ll take care of it.
For the foreseeable future I’ll be donating all Life Harvester profits to mutual aid funds. This month we donated $270 to the Bukit Bail Fund here in Pittsburgh and I matched it to donate another $270 to FTP4 Bronx Bail Fund, who received such an outpouring of support that they have shut their bail fund down. In lieu of a link for them, I’ve linked to a national bail fund master list. In April we donated $254 to the Pittsburgh Covid-19 LGBTQIA Emergency Relief Fund. In May $270 to the Mother’s Day Bail Out, though after some conversation with a friend who used to work for National Bail Out, I would encourage you to donate elsewhere.
SHALOM ALEICHEM
Life Harvester has always been and will always be against capitalism and the police, and in solidarity with protestors, rioters, and looters. Chants of “no justice, no peace” are meant to be literal.
I had written a series of light-hearted product reviews for this issue. Maybe I’ll print them next month, but not now. I asked Rebecca Giordano, my hot live-in girlfriend and the editor of this newsletter, what I should publish in its place. “I think the most powerful thing you can do is to share other people’s words. What are you returning to right now? What are you moved by? What inspires you?”
I initially encountered the first text, Black feminist thinker Frances Beal’s 1969 self-published pamphlet Double Jeopardy: To Be Black And Female, in Kimberley Springer’s Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980(Duke University Press 2005). The passage from which Springer took the name of her book has been a guiding principle in my life for 15 years: “To die for the revolution is a oneshot deal; to live for the revolution means taking on the more difficult commitment of changing our day-to-day life patterns.” Beal’s challenge, to commit to revolutionary action in a deliberate and sustained manner, with an eye for the long haul, is contained within “The New World,” the utopic envisioning of her pamphlet’s conclusion. I’ve also included the preceding section, “Relationship to White Movements” because though 50-years-old, its concerns mirror those I’ve heard expressed by black women activists today about white women foregrounding ourselves in revolutionary struggle.
The next text, an interview with Sylvia Rivera, excerpted from Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antogonist Struggle (Untorelli Press, 2015), feels especially potent to reread during Pride Month. My interest in the Stonewall Rebellion dates back to the mid-90s when I learned about it from an article in SPIN Magazine. (And led to my being given the jocular nickname "Gay Bar" by some of my 8th grade classmates. See Life Harv #12, “Switching Genders.”) Even so, it wasn’t until the past decade that I learned of the role of trans revolutionaries Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson in the events that took place outside the Stonewall Inn in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, thanks to the tireless efforts of Black trans historian and filmmaker Tourmaline, in collaboration with friend to the Harv, Sasha Wortzel. This interview serves as a succinct rebuttal to all who would plead for civility in the face of repressive police violence.
Finally, I’ve included a single paragraph from Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. I first read Benjamin in 2002. I was nowhere near done processing my 9/11 trauma. I was furious watching the Bush administration use the violent attacks against my city as fodder for further surveillance of citizens and militarization of our police. I watched our country’s precipitous slide towards fascism in stunned horror. I felt powerless and inconsequential. Benjamin may have been writing about the rise of fascism in 1930’s Europe, but his words are pertinent now. “The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible…is not philosophical,” could easily be an indictment of liberal complacency in the face of a world that has grown more and more inhospitable to anyone who is not cis, white, and wealthy. His call to “bring about a real state of emergency” is just as urgent today. Chants of “no justice, no peace” are meant to be literal.
Excerpts from FRANCES BEAL’S “DOUBLE JEOPARDY: TO BE BLACK AND FEMALE”
RELATIONSHIP TO WHITE MOVEMENTS
Much has been written recently about the white women's liberation movement in the United States and the question arises whether there are any parallels between this struggle and the movement on the part of black women for total emancipation. While there are certain comparisons that one can make, simply because we both live under the same exploitative system, there are certain differences, some of which are quite basic.
The white women's movement is far from being monolithic. Any white group that does not have an anti-imperialist and anti-racist ideology has absolutely nothing in common with the black women's struggle. Are white women asking to be equal to white men in their pernicious treatment of third world peoples? What assurances have black women that white women will be any less racist and exploitative if they had the power and were in a position to do so? These are serious questions that the white women's liberation movement has failed to address itself to.
Black people are engaged in a life and death struggle with the oppressive forces of this country and the main emphasis of black women must be to combat the capitalist, racist exploitation of black people. While it is true that male chauvinism has become institutionalized in american society, one must always look for the main enemy... the fundamental cause of the female condition. In fact, some groups come to the incorrect conclusion that their oppression is due simply to male chauvinism. They therefore, have an extremely anti-male tone to their dissertations.
Another major differentiation is that the white women's liberation movement is basically middle class. Very few of these women suffer the extreme economic exploitation that most black women are subjected to day by day. If they find housework degrading and dehumanizing, they are financially able to buy their freedom—usually by hiring a black maid. The economic and social realities of the black woman's life are the most crucial for us. It is not an intellectual persecution alone; the movement is not a psychological outburst for us; it is tangible; we can taste it in all our endeavors. We as black women have got to deal with the problems that the black masses deal with, for our problems in reality are one and the same.
If the white groups do not realize that they are in fact, fighting capitalism and racism, we do not have common bonds. If they do not realize that the reasons for their condition lie in a debilitating economic and social system, and not simply that men get a vicarious pleasure out of "consuming their bodies for exploitative reasons," (This kind of reasoning seems to be quite prevalent in certain white women's groups) then we cannot unite with them around common grievances or even discuss these groups in a serious manner, because they're completely irrelevant to black women in particular or to the black struggle in general.
THE NEW WORLD
The black community and black women especially, must begin raising questions about the kind of society we wish to see established. We must note the ways in which capitalism oppresses us and then move to create institutions that will eliminate these destructive influences.
The new world that we are struggling to create must destroy oppression of any type. The value of this new system will be determined by the status of those persons who are presently most oppressed—the low man on the totem pole. Unless women in any enslaved nation are completely liberated, the change cannot really be called a revolution. If the black woman has to retreat to the position she occupied before the armed struggle, the whole movement and the whole struggle will have retreated in terms of truly freeing the colonized population.
A people's revolution that engages the participation of every member of the community, including men, and women, brings about a certain transformation in the participants as a result of this participation. Once you have caught a glimpse of freedom or tasted a bit of self-determination, you can't go back to old routines that were established under a racist, capitalist regime. We must begin to understand that a revolution entails not only the willingness to lay our lives on the firing line and get killed. In some ways, this is an easy commitment to make. To die for the revolution is a oneshot deal; to live for the revolution means taking on the more difficult commitment of changing our day-to-day life patterns.
This will mean changing the traditional routines that we have established as a result of living in a totally corrupting society. It means changing how you relate to your wife, your husband, your parents and your coworkers. If we are going to liberate ourselves as a people, it must be recognized that black women have very specific problems that have to be spoken to. We must be liberated along with the rest of the population. We cannot wait to start working on those problems until that great day in the future when the revolution somehow miraculously, is accomplished.
To assign women the role of housekeeper and mother while men go forth into battle is a highly questionable doctrine for a revolutionary to profess. Each individual must develop a high political consciousness in order to understand how this system enslaves us all and what actions we must take to bring about its total destruction. Those who consider themselves to be revolutionary must begin to deal with other revolutionaries as equals. And so far as I know, revolutionaries are not determined by sex.
Old people, young people, men and women must take part in the struggle. To relegate women to purely supportive roles or to simply cultural considerations is dangerous doctrine to project. Unless black men who are preparing themselves for armed struggle understand that the society which we are trying to create is one in which the oppression of ALL MEMBERS of that society is eliminated, then the revolution will have failed in its avowed purpose.
Given the mutual commitment of black men and black women alike to the liberation of our people and other oppressed peoples around the world, the total involvement of each individual is necessary. A revolutionary has the responsibility of not only toppling those that are now in a position of power, but more importantly, the responsibility of creating new institutions that will eliminate all forms of oppression for all people. We must begin to re-write our understanding of traditional personal relationships between man and woman.
All the resources that the black community can muster up must be channeled into the struggle. Black women must take an active part in bringing about the kind of world where our children, our loved ones, and each citizen can grow up and live as decent human beings, free from the pressures of racism and capitalist exploitation.
‘I’M GLAD I WAS IN THE STONEWALL RIOT’: AN INTERVIEW WITH SYLVIA RIVERA
I left home at age 10 in 1961. I hustled on 42nd Street. The early 60s was not a good time for drag queens, effeminate boys or boys that wore makeup like we did. Back then we were beat up by the police, by everybody. I didn’t really come out as a drag queen until the late 60s. When drag queens were arrested, what degradation there was. I remember the first time I got arrested, I wasn’t even in full drag. I was walking down the street and the cops just snatched me.
We always felt that the police were the real enemy. We expected nothing better than to be treated like we were animals—and we were. We were stuck in a bullpen like a bunch of freaks. We were disrespected. A lot of us were beaten up and raped. When I ended up going to jail, to do 90 days, they tried to rape me. I very nicely bit the shit out of a man. I’ve been through it all.
In 1969, the night of the Stonewall riot, was a very hot, muggy night. We were in the Stonewall [bar] and the lights came on. We all stopped dancing. The police came in. They had gotten their payoff earlier in the week. But Inspector Pine came in—him and his morals squad—to spend more of the government’s money.
We were led out of the bar and they cattled us all up against the police vans. The cops pushed us up against the grates and the fences. People started throwing pennies, nickels, and quarters at the cops. And then the bottles started. And then we finally had the morals squad barricaded in the Stonewall building, because they were actually afraid of us at that time. They didn’t know we were going to react that way. We were not taking any more of this shit. We had done so much for other movements. It was time.
It was street gay people from the Village out front: homeless people who lived in the park in Sheridan Square outside the bar—and then drag queens behind them and everybody behind us. The Stonewall Inn telephone lines were cut and they were left in the dark.
One Village Voice reporter was in the bar at that time. And according to the archives of the Village Voice, he was handed a gun from Inspector Pine and told, “We got to fight our way out of there.”
This was after one Molotov cocktail was thrown and we were ramming the door of the Stonewall bar with an uprooted parking meter. So they were ready to come out shooting that night.
Finally the Tactical Police Force showed up after 45 minutes. A lot of people forget that for 45 minutes we had them trapped in there.
All of us were working for so many movements at that time. Everyone was involved with the women’s movement, the peace movement, the civil-rights movement. We were all radicals. I believe that’s what brought it around. You get tired of being just pushed around.
STAR came about after a sit-in at Weinstein Hall at New York University in 1970. Later we had a chapter in New York, one in Chicago, one in California and England.
STAR was for the street gay people, the street homeless people and anybody that needed help at that time. Marsha and I had always sneaked people into our hotel rooms. Marsha and I decided to get a building. We were trying to get away from the Mafia’s control at the bars.
We got a building at 213 East 2nd Street. Marsha and I just decided it was time to help each other and help our other kids. We fed people and clothed people. We kept the building going. We went out and hustled the streets. We paid the rent. We didn’t want the kids out in the streets hustling. They would go out and rip off food. There was always food in the house and everyone had fun. It lasted for two or three years. We would sit there and ask, “Why do we suffer?” As we got more involved into the movements, we said, “Why do we always got to take the brunt of this shit?”
Later on, when the Young Lords [revolutionary Puerto Rican youth group] came about in New York City, I was already in GLF [Gay Liberation Front]. There was a mass demonstration that started in East Harlem in the fall of 1970. The protest was against police repression and we decided to join the demonstration with our STAR banner. That was one of first times the STAR banner was shown in public, where STAR was present as a group. I ended up meeting some of the Young Lords that day. I became one of them. Any time they needed any help, I was always there for the Young Lords. It was just the respect they gave us as human beings. They gave us a lot of respect. It was a fabulous feeling for me to be myself—being part of the Young Lords as a drag queen-and my organization [STAR] being part of the Young Lords.
I met [Black Panther Party leader] Huey Newton at the Peoples’ Revolutionary Convention in Philadelphia in 1971. Huey decided we were part of the revolution—that we were revolutionary people.
I was a radical, a revolutionist. I am still a revolutionist. I was proud to make the road and help change laws and what-not. I was very proud of doing that and proud of what I’m still doing, no matter what it takes.
Today, we have to fight back against the government. We have to fight them back. They’re cutting back Medicaid, cutting back on medicine for people with AIDS. They want to take away from women on welfare and put them into that little work program. They’re going to cut SSI. Now they’re taking away food stamps. These people who want the cuts—these people are making millions and millions and millions of dollars as CEOs. Why is the government going to take it away from us? What they’re doing is cutting us back. Why can’t we have a break?
I’m glad I was in the Stonewall riot. I remember when someone threw a Molotov cocktail, I thought: “My god, the revolution is here. The revolution is finally here!”
I always believed that we would have to fight back. I just knew that we would fight back. I just didn’t know it would be that night.
I am proud of myself as being there that night. If I had lost that moment, I would have been kind of hurt because that’s when I saw the world change for me and my people.
Of course, we still got a long way ahead of us.
THESIS VIII from WALTER BENJAMIN’S “THESES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY”
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.