The Day Marsha & Sylvia Came to a Gay Youth Meeting

By Mark Horn

After Mark Segal left Gay Youth, I was elected the group chair. Gay Youth was probably more diverse than GLF, with pretty much equal representation between black and white members, along with a not-small group of Latinx members. Our members ranged from those whose families lived on Central Park West to those members who had been thrown out by their families and were living on the street. Long before the phrase “non-binary” entered the vocabulary, we had members who identified across a wide spectrum of gender identity. So the day Marsha and Sylvia came to a meeting, the only reason they stood out from the rest of our membership was that they were over the age of 21.

Several of our members were close with them and were also members of the GLF sub-group they had founded: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. And a couple of them had stayed at STAR House, the apartment Marsha and Sylvia had rented with the intention of providing a place for those who were living on the street.

 So when Marsha and Sylvia asked to speak during the new business section of our meeting, we readily agreed. I knew they had come to ask for a loan, so they could run a dance that would serve as a fund-raiser. This wasn’t even going to be a question for us since our own membership benefited from their work. We had some money from our own fund raiser dances in our treasury. But they played their good cop/bad cop game anyway.

Sylvia harangued us with how the movement had treated them badly and how we owed them the money because they started the movement. There were people in the room among our members who had been at Stonewall and knew that Sylvia wasn’t in the bar that night, but they let it go. It wasn’t about the history—it was about helping people. Marsha was all sweetness, and she talked about how important it was that we help them get young people a safe place to stay.

I was annoyed that Sylvia felt she had to harangue us given that some of our members had stayed at STAR House. And because of that, all of us knew that STAR House wasn’t exactly safe either. This was long before Sylvia got clean—she was a heroin addict, and the apartment was a place for addicts to go to shoot up.

But it was a place where some of our own members could escape the danger of the streets. It had been a life saver for some of them. So we voted to loan them $300 from the Gay Youth treasury—which was pretty much almost all we had. But our only expenses were running weekly ads in the Village Voice for people to find out about our meetings; photocopy costs for the leaflets and newsletters we handed out when we went to local high schools and colleges, rent for our meeting space at the Church of the Holy Apostle, and the costs of holding our own dances to raise money to pay for all this.

In truth, we never expected to get the “loan” back. And we never did. They held their dance. We all went to support them. And we went because we loved to dance.

STAR House didn’t last very long unfortunately. Sylvia however, eventually got clean of drugs. And like so many people who had been in GLF, she devoted her life to service to the community.

Her last years were spent truly manifesting the services she so wanted to provide with STAR, working at the Metropolitan Community Church Food Pantry, now named in her honor, along with shelter services: The Sylvia Rivera Food Pantry and Sylvia’s Place.