Embodying Truth: Sylvia Rivera’s Delivery of Parrhesia at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally

Abstract

Sylvia Rivera is a critical figure in queer and activist rhetorical history. At the Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally in 1973, Rivera engaged in parrhesia to push the movement to include and amplify the voices and needs of the most vulnerable members of the gay community: drag queens, homeless youth, gay inmates in prison and jail, and transgender people. Her delivery, including voice, gesture, and interaction with the audience, emphasizes the truthfulness, frankness, and criticism of her truth. By analyzing Rivera’s delivery of parrhesia, this article draws attention to the body’s role in speaking the truth as an activist rhetorical act.

Notes

¹ I thank RR reviewers Alexandra Cavallaro and Belinda Southard for their supportive and constructive feedback. Many thanks to Michelle Murray Yang for encouraging me to write this paper in her seminar, and to Jessica Enoch for reading countless revisions of this essay.

² CUNY’s Center for LGBT Studies (CLAGS) and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project both give out awards named after Rivera.

³ This article, and many other recent texts about Rivera, would not be possible without the committed labor of Reina Gossett, the activist, archivist, and filmmaker who collected archival material about Rivera, Johnson, and STAR—including the 1973 CLDS speech— and published it on the Internet.

⁴ Both ancient Greek philosophers and Foucault described parrhesia as in opposition to rhetoric. Michael A. Peters asserts that “unlike rhetoric, which provides the speaker with technical devices to help him persuade an audience, covering up his own beliefs, in parrhesia, the speaker makes it manifestly clear what he believes” (Peters 212). Foucault makes a similar claim: “[I]n the Socratic-Platonic tradition, parrhesia and rhetoric stand in a strong opposition.” However, Arthur E. Walzer defends rhetoric’s claim of parrhesia by tracing a tradition of sincere yet artful parrhesia in classical texts such as Plato’s Gorgias, Isocrates’s To Nicocles, and the Rhetorica Ad Herennium.

⁵ Cohen writes, “For Rivera, ‘gay’ meant non-heteronormative (or ‘queer’ in today’s lexicon), crossing sexual and gender boundaries to include lesbians, gay men, and transvestites, as well as street youth who had participated in Stonewall” (2). Rivera’s usage of the term gay as an umbrella term illustrates her approach to gay liberation as a movement and community for all non-heteronormative people. In this paper, I similarly use the terms “gay liberation” and “gay community” to identify the beginning LGBT movement.

⁶ I will be writing about Rivera and Johnson’s friendship as a form of disability activism in my dissertation. Using feminist and queer archival methodologies, I will demonstrate how Rivera and Johnson modeled the importance of interdependence, care, and survival in activism.

⁷ Stephan L. Cohen writes, “STAR did more than shelter homeless transvestite youth and adults. It provided a political platform, lent legitimacy to non-traditional gender expression, and formalized a transgender identity” (161). Underscoring STAR’s historical significance to transgender history, Michael Bronski observes, “out of almost nothing Sylvia and Marsha essentially started what was to become, more than 20 years later, the transgender movement we know today” (qtd. in Cohen 93).

⁸ Indeed, as Mark Stein documents, the debate around the inclusion of street transvestites and drag queens ran rampant, “with some gay and lesbian activists expressing concern about negative responses to trans visibility and others arguing that trans liberation was integral component of, and necessarily linked to, gay and lesbian liberation” (113). Stein also writes that in San Francisco that same year, there were two gay pride events: one welcoming and another excluding transgender people (113).

⁹ For Rivera, the criminal justice system’s treatment of young gay people is personal. Gay homeless youth, especially sex workers and drug users, interacted with law enforcement frequently. Rivera herself had been arrested and jailed for heroin possession. Furthermore, at the time, people perceived to be dressed not according to their biological sex could be arrested in New York, exposing drag queens and street transvestites to increased harassment and arrest by police officers (“Arresting Dress”).

¹⁰ It’s important to note that the “no pointing rule” is not universal. For example, pointing is a grammatical feature in American Sign Language and considered acceptable in Deaf culture in the United States.

¹¹ Clendinen and Nagourney provide one of the more thorough accounts of the day. However, they also constantly misgender Rivera in their book, ignoring that Rivera used feminine pronouns throughout her adolescent and adult life.

¹² Multiple accounts report that the hostility among the factions was only tempered by an impromptu performance by Bette Midler (Clendinen and Nagourney; Stein).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Osorio

Ruth Osorio is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is currently writing her dissertation on the rhetorical strategies of disability activism.