Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

San Francisco’s first Gay Pride parade in 1972 (which commemorated the Compton’s Cafeteria riot along with Stonewall and welcomed drag participation) degenerated into fistfighting when the Reverend Raymond Broshears, one of the gay male organizers, punched a member of a lesbian separatist contingent that insisted on carrying signs that said “Off the Pricks!” in violation of the parade’s “no violence” policy. At the postparade rally, feminists and some of their gay male supporters denounced the fight as an example of stereotypical gender roles and patriarchal oppression of women, and they announced that they never again would participate in a Gay Pride event organized by Broshears or in one that permitted drag queens to “mock” women. In 1973, two separate San Francisco Pride events were organized, one by Broshears, and the other by gays and lesbians who opposed drag and expressly forbid transgender people from participating. Broshears never organized another Gay Pride event, while the anti-drag event became the forerunner of the current San Francisco LGBTQ Pride celebration. That same year, across the continent in New York, event organizers tried to prevent Sylvia Rivera, the founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, from addressing the annual commemoration of Christopher Street Liberation Day. Rivera took the stage anyway and issued a devastating critique of the cisgender whiteness of the gay and feminist movements: I’ve been trying to get up here all day. I h...