A cold day for a rally, trans, AIDS, and queer activists descended on One Police Plaza to
declare that trans lives matter. The
days of trans people being thrown out of SRO hotel windows, beaten on 148th
street, or discarded in Times Square – have to stop. Not one more declared the crowd. Not one more.
“We will not be silent,
we will not stand by while trans youth are murdered without recourse,” says
Lourdes Ashley Hunter, an organizer and founder of Trans Women of Color
Collective (TWOCC) of Greater New York.
“The NYPD and the District Attorney’s
office must be held accountable for their biased and botched investigation.”
Actions speak louder than words and
I have been in motion NON-STOP seeking Justice for Islan Nettles for 5 months!
Today the Community will ROAR for Justice!!! How SWEET the sound!!
Luz's Daughter Cares message at tomorrows protest is:
"JUSTICE FOR ISLAN NETTLES" & "NOT ONE MORE"!
JOIN US & LET'S GET LOUD!!!
One Police Plaza at 4:00pm SHARP
Today the Community will ROAR for Justice!!! How SWEET the sound!!
Luz's Daughter Cares message at tomorrows protest is:
"JUSTICE FOR ISLAN NETTLES" & "NOT ONE MORE"!
JOIN US & LET'S GET LOUD!!!
One Police Plaza at 4:00pm SHARP
HOW MANY
MORE ??? NOT ONE MORE !!! asked Terry Roethlein
Jim
Eigo posted:
Today I will be rallying with ACT UP/NY & a coalition of
community groups to say: THE LIVES OF TRANSGENDER WOMEN MATTER! I hope you can
attend.
NOT ONE MORE!!! NOT ONE MORE!!! NOT ONE MORE!!!
Transgender woman Islan Nettles was savagely beaten on August 17th, 2013 in Harlem and died from her injuries five days later. The case has gained national notice but justice is, yet again, elusive, for another trans* woman of color.
Let's change that.
Protest to demand that Police Chief William Bratton and the NYPD explain failures to fully question witnesses, gather evidence, check the victim's condition, and retain surveillance footage for FIVE DAYS!!!
Protest to demand the NYPD explain why the mother of the assailant seen attacking Nettles was not charged with obstruction of justice, even after she coerced a falsified confession from another inebriated individual!!!
Protest to demand that D.A. Cyrus Vance update the community fully on its 2-month homicide investigation!!!
Protest to demand that Bratton and the NYPD audit all precincts for their capacity to conduct unbiased investigations of all transphobic crimes!!!
This protest was organized by a coalition of social justice groups, including:
The Transgender/Cisgender Coalition
ACT UP NY
Luz's Daughter Cares
TWOCC: Trans Women of Color Collective of Greater NY
STARR: Strategic Trans Allliance for Radical Reform
LGBT Faith Leaders of African Descent
BRING YOUR SIGNAGE, CHANTS, AND VOICES:
Thursday, January 30th 2014, 4 p.m.
One Police Plaza, Manhattan
Transgender woman Islan Nettles was savagely beaten on August 17th, 2013 in Harlem and died from her injuries five days later. The case has gained national notice but justice is, yet again, elusive, for another trans* woman of color.
Let's change that.
Protest to demand that Police Chief William Bratton and the NYPD explain failures to fully question witnesses, gather evidence, check the victim's condition, and retain surveillance footage for FIVE DAYS!!!
Protest to demand the NYPD explain why the mother of the assailant seen attacking Nettles was not charged with obstruction of justice, even after she coerced a falsified confession from another inebriated individual!!!
Protest to demand that D.A. Cyrus Vance update the community fully on its 2-month homicide investigation!!!
Protest to demand that Bratton and the NYPD audit all precincts for their capacity to conduct unbiased investigations of all transphobic crimes!!!
This protest was organized by a coalition of social justice groups, including:
The Transgender/Cisgender Coalition
ACT UP NY
Luz's Daughter Cares
TWOCC: Trans Women of Color Collective of Greater NY
STARR: Strategic Trans Allliance for Radical Reform
LGBT Faith Leaders of African Descent
BRING YOUR SIGNAGE, CHANTS, AND VOICES:
Thursday, January 30th 2014, 4 p.m.
One Police Plaza, Manhattan
I rode my bike across the Brooklyn Bridge, over the cold East River to One Police Plaza. Listening to the crowd when I arrived, I recalled walking through there for Occupy events and even getting out of jail after the Matthew Shepard political funeral, some fifteen years prior.
The screams from ACT UP echoed
through the air and the plaza filled with trans activists, supporters with lipstick, many carrying signs.
Andy Velez lead the crowd in chants.
Speaker after speakers took their turn, as police
watched silently.
“Having survived a violent assault, I know what a
struggle it can be to get justice in NY.
Not one of my attackers was charged – and I was almost treated by the
police as though I deserved to be assaulted,” explained Madison St Claire, of
TWOCC. “Now the same thing is happening
in the Island Nettled case – and that sends the wrong message: that trans women
of color are disposable- that our lives don’t matter,” says Madison.
“Today, we send our own message NYPD
& DA’s office: TRANS LIVES MATTER!”
My friends Venus and Michael and Jim were there.
Carl
Siciliano, of the AliForney center, stood up, recalling four Ali Forney center participants who
have lost their lives to anti trans violence in the last fifteen years,
including Forney.
Ali Forney |
Comparing Islan’s experience
on 148th street, where she was killed right outside a police
precinct office with that of the kids of the former Mayor, he wondered, if it
was Bloomberg's kids the police would be doing something about it.
He recalled Sylvia screams
of "trans power" in Washington Square in 1973 when she had to fight for the
microphone to speak. The crowd echoed
her words. Trans power. Listening, I
recalled
recalled Rivera’s rally
for
Rivera and Marsha P Johnson on the streets fighting for power for the people. |
My friend Venus, an
Occupier who was punched in the face by a member of the NYPDduring Occupy, walked over to say hello.
Top, Venus today and lower pictures of the scene of the police violence two years ago. And Carl-and-Wayne-from VOCAL showing solidarity. |
Trans lives matter
screamed the crowd. Not one more death.
Melissa Schlarz, the
next speaker, had been at the Milan rally fifteen years earlier. The story today felt the same and Milan’s story all
those years ago.
I wrote this about Milan
back in the summer of 2000.
Amanda Milan and the Rebirth of the Street Trans
Action Revolutionaries
by
Benjamin Shepard in
From
ACT UP to the WTO, 2002.
We
met in the park across from Stonewall Inn (in July of 2000). A group of club
kids with Afros, guys with loop earrings, high heels, and May West sunglasses
lead the crowd as we stepped off:
“One: we are the people!!!!!!!!
Two: a little bit louder!!!!!!!!!
Three: we want justice for Amanda!!!!!!!!!”
we chanted over and over again. The infectious chant carried us most of the
way from the Sheridan Square downtown to 100 Center Street, where Amanda
Milan’s trial was being held the following day.
Milan, a Transgender woman, had been murdered in Times Square the
previous June 20, 2000, days before Manhattan Pride March. Shortly after her
death Stonewall legend Sylvia Rivera’s had successfully reformed her Street
Trans Action Revolutionaries (STAR) to make sure Milan was not forgotten. In the year since her death, Milan’s memory
has come to symbolize the unfinished business of a GLBT movement, which has all
too often left transgender people at the back of the bus. Once at Center
Street, we began reading names of transgender folks who, like Amanda, had been
lost, some to bigots' violence, some whereabouts unknown, others to drug over
doses, and others casualties of a subterranean black market economy where so
many transgenderred people find themselves, at the margins of our cities and
history.
“It was believed for
centuries that it was necessary to hide sexual matters because they were
shameful,” Michel Foucault (1980, x-xi) pontificated on the question of gender
insubordination and its implications for a repressive culture. “We now know
that it is sex itself which hides the most secret parts of the individual: the
structure of his fantasies, the roots of his ego, the forms of his relationship
to reality. At the bottom of sex there
is truth.” Certainly, sex structured the
form of Amanda’s relationship to reality. Rumors abounded about Milan’s
death. In the weeks after, the papers
ambiguously dropped hints about a “transpanic….”
Melissa Schlarz, a long
time trans advocate, had seen it before: “My time hanging around the Times
Square transsexual scene goes back to the mid-1970’s. Amanda Milan was just the latest. People from all over the world, transgenders,
come to Times Square. Everyone knows
that’s where something is happening. In
the past it was always the West Village or Times Square. What exactly was she doing? The trial is coming, we’ll have to wait and
see.”
According to the Audre
Lorde Project, 25-year old Amanda Milan was brutally murdered in front of Show
World, a former porn house, where many trannies worked in the Times Square
neighborhood of Manhattan. Milan was an
African American woman of Transgender experience. According to accounts, two men began to
verbally assault Amanda Milan in front of the Port Authority terminal, with one
man exclaiming, "I know you're really a man".... While Amanda tried to get into a cab,
eyewitnesses say that one man handed the other a knife that was used to slash
her throat. She bled to death on the way
to St. Vincent's Hospital. Some reports
indicated that several onlookers laughed and applauded as the assault took
place.
Transsexuals have been
dying in New York for years. What makes
the Milan case significant is that, until Amanda Milan no one responded. Transgender folks, loosely defined as moving
from one gender to another, have always been misunderstood and quite often
marginalized. “They have always been
people of the shadows, people of the night,” Schlarz explained, “I knew a lot
of friends when I was younger, they never went out during the daytime. It was a life filled around the night. Transsexual people are still illegal in New
York State. There is no protection. You can be thrown out of your home, thrown
out of your job, you can be denied healthcare.
So we’re fighting for basic civil rights now. I’ve known lots of people who died of drug
overdoses, people who died of violence, people who drank themselves to death,
and some of them I remember very vividly.
So I would like this to be about her and about us. I did not know her but I’ve known hundreds of
girls like her.”
When Rivera heard about
Milan, she told herself this time it was going to be different. This was not going to be an unresolved murder. So she made sure, “the girls came out.” In the days before the demo, Bob Kohler,
Sylvia Rivera’s long time friend, put out the call for the pre-trial demo: “I
know you all realize how important this action is and if you multiply that by
100 you come close to what it means to the Trannie community. For what it's worth, it is also extremely
important to me -- I have been involved in Trannie issues for a very long time
and, of course, Sylvia has been a part of my life for over 30 years… It is an extremely important event for a
community whose time, as Sylvia says, "has come." In my mind, it is
equally as important to the LGBTQ community as a whole.” Bob continued… “Sylvia has been there for us
at every turn and she is counting on us to help support her now.” Bob was referring to Sylvia’s lifelong
willingness to put herself on the line for the cause of gay liberation. As Sylvia will tell you, in the year after
Stonewall, drag queens petitioned and were arrested fighting for the gay rights
bill. “Drag queens could be out there,”
Sylvia, who was one of the arrestees, explained.
Back then, Rivera was a
young street kid, who’d risen to fame through a willingness to engage in direct
action. When she was arrested during the
Matthew Shepard political funeral, an unresolved 25-year-old charge from that
era popped up. It was one of countless
charges faced by an activist who’d first been arrested as a teenager back in
1963. She explained, “Yea, it was a 25
year old warrant. It was for breaking
the window at Silver Dollar Restaurant in the Village, from a fight with the
owners. Most of my arrests have been in
a lot of political things. And part of
my arrest record was loitering with the intent of prostitution. And out of all them arrests all the times that
I have been in and out of jail, I have only served time once. I did ninety days for possession of
heroine. That’s the only time and I
promised that I would never visit Rikers Island again and I haven’t.”
Rivera co-founded the original Street
Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1971 with the late Marsha P.
Johnston as a caucus from the Gay Liberation Front. The feeling was that the nascent Gay
Liberation Movement needed to bring a little bit more focus to the transgender
community. In addition, there were a lot
of transgender youth who needed both services and a public voice. When STAR was formed, it was nation’s first
trans political organization. The Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries would
serve as a radical street action group to promote the rights of Transgender
people. They did this by forming a space for transgender people to live and by
maintaining a visible trans presence in the streets.
I
asked Rivera why Street was in the title.
“Because we were street kids. And
we needed to emphasize on that.” Sex
work remained as a subtext for much of our conversation, which I asked Sylvia
about, ”Well, it happens historically because the mainstream gay community who
have obtained their rights have left us off of all of their bills. People do not have to hire the transgender
women or men because there are no laws protecting us. And this is part of one of my arguments with
the community right now. And that’s one
of the reasons why at the beginning of this year I decided to resurrect
STAR. If we continue to be invisible
people are not going to listen to us.
And if we ourselves don’t stand up for ourselves, nobody else will do
that for us. And we have allowed them to
speak for us. There was nobody out there
that was willing to step on their toes.
And this is why STAR has had to come back to existence and we have to
push people like the Human Rights Campaign, the Empire State Agenda, the
Community Center. Every big corporate
group that is gay and lesbian has to be put in their place.”
“I’m just tired of
seeing our children, our future out there prostituting their lives away, taking
drugs, being turned away from proper housing or medical care. I will turn 50 July second. I have been out there on the streets for 40
years and nothing has changed for my community.
It makes me very angry to know that there are women out there that have
college degrees that are standing on drugs, selling their bodies on the street
corners. It does not make any
sense. And the same thing with the
youth. Everybody praises the Hetric
Martin Institute. Hetric Martin is the
worst institution there could be for a transgender child. The staff there are not trans friendly and
the gay and lesbian children are less than the staff as far as friendly. And
they are more abusive than the heterosexuals.
And so these children go to the street.
We have no other choice. It’s the
only way to survive. The law says it’s a
crime. It’s a victimless crime.”
Beyond
Matthew Shepard
Shortly after Milan’s
death, STAR organized a call for an end to anti-Trans violence, and also to
recognize the intersections of how transphobia, racism, sexism, classism and
homophobia. The message was the lives of
Trans People of Color are not expendable.
On July 24, 2000, the memorial service for Amanda united the trans
community as never before. There were powerful testimonials from her friends
and family, and a particular call for trans self-reliance from Octavia St
Laurent. Then there was a march to the murder site. Activist after activist spoke, the refrain
the same: “We were on the streets in Matthew Shepard's memory -- Now is the
time to be on the streets for Amanda!”
Yet, the mainstream gay
communities have not been in the streets for transgender people. In the years after STAR’s demise as the
movement assimilated, the guys in the Brooks Brother’s suits distanced
themselves from, in Larry Kramer’s words, “those guys, girls whatever you call
them…” (see Crimp, 1988:251, Shepard,
2001). And the Transgender legacy of
Stonewall was left behind. Yet, there is
progress on certain fronts. The Sex and
Gender Liberation Institute of the 1999 National Lesbian and Gay Task Force
Meetings in Oakland was a highlight of the weekend. Yet, the problems on the streets
persist.
Under
Attack in the West Village
Much
of the current anti-trans violence begins with a tolerance for anti trans
rhetoric, even in gay communities.
Melissa Sklarz suggests: “The initial problem started in the far West
Village, which strangely enough is still going on today where the community,
the people that own homes there, feel that they are being victimized by the
transgender prostitutes.” The result has
become a class war between home owners at the center of New York’s affluent gay
West Village and transgender sex workers, many homeless, who have traditionally
worked the meatpacking district on the periphery the city. Yet with the move toward privatization, once
accessible public areas, such as Times Square, have become hot commodities for
real estate. “The doors have already
been closed, sex clubs shut down, youth centers closed. The places for trans
youth to go, places where this stuff used to go on, such as the Chelsea Piers,
were fenced off,” one advocate argued at one of the increasingly vocal West Village
community forums on prostitution. “Most
of these hookers are not white. They are
black and Hispanic,” one observer screamed.
The subtext at many of these meetings a cultural sexism and racism, with
a transphobia at its center. “These are
not our regular Greenwich Village queens that we’re enjoyed and appreciated,” a
member of a local street association, noted.
“These are low-class, vulgar transvestites that come from other areas of
the city,” (Horowitz, 1998).
I attended one of these
forums, where I mentioned that New York state was approaching its five year
time limit on Welfare Reform and these were just workers, making a living like
anyone else. I was booed. “Tell ‘em to go work at McDonalds!!!!!!!!!”
one man screamed. When I replied that
the job market for applicants without general equivalency degrees has absorbed
more workers than it can absorb (see Wilson, 1996) and that there are ten
applicants for every one job opening for workers without GED’s (see Carlson and
Theodore, 1995), the screaming just got louder.
And
the attacks continued. While the
mainstream gays on the “left” demonized transgender sex workers, the city’s
real estate driven Quality of Life Campaign successfully pushed for the closure
of several clubs, including Eldeweiss, the Greenwich Pub and Butterfield, where
trans folk worked and hung out, shut down because of obscure city
ordinances. As Stonewall teaches us,
attacks on queer spaces are also attacks on queer identity.
The
attacks on transgender identity function on many levels. While the APA did away
with diagnosing homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder in the early 1970’s,
the term, “gender identity disorder,” used to refer to trans folks, remains a
psychiatric classification within the current APA Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, volume 4 (see APA,2000). The over inclusive category pathologizes
gender nonconformity in its broadest terms, classifying anything from “cross
dressing” to "involvement in a transvestic subculture" among symptomatic
criteria for mental illness. Psychiatric
diagnosis on the basis of social, cultural, or political affiliation evokes the
darkest memories of medical abuse in American history (Wilson, 2001). Recall that women suffragettes who demanded
the right to vote in the early 1900s were diagnosed and institutionalized with
a label of "hysteria" (Mayor
1974). Bolsheviks, immigrants and labor organizers of the same period were
labeled as socially deviant and mentally defective (Dowbiggin 1997). In truth,
transgender support organizations, such as STAR, are the primary source of
support, education and civil rights advocacy for gender variant people,
families, friends, and allies (Wilson, 2001, Wilson and Hammond, 1996).
Building
a Community
For
a number of years in the 1970’s and 80’s, Sylvia, who suffered from chemical
dependence, was homeless herself. (She’s
been sober for over two years now). Nonetheless, she continued organizing,
organizing a community of trans squatters who lived on the piers on the West
Side of Manhattan. Like many of the
street kids, they have since been pushed out of that space. But the process was just a part of Sylvia’s
lifetime of building spaces, such as the original STAR House, where transgender
people can be part of a community.
As activists will
contend, the idea of a unified community is still very new. Until ten years
ago, there were transvestites and cross dressers and transsexuals and pre op
and post op and there was no single unifying identity. The concept of a social and political
identity for transgender people is still fresh.
Yet activists have worked to turn it from an idea into something that is
real. Once you can define it, you can
start defending it.
The new mobilization
among trans folks is already bearing results.
Spring 2001 when a transgender dancer was dismissed from a local dance
club, STAR organized a midnight picket line outside the club. Building on a nascent queer/labor alliance
(see Krupat and McCreery,
2001) members of STAR, the Housing Works Transgender Working Group, and
the New York Direct Action Network Labor Group packed a rambunctious line,
successfully turning almost all patrons away while offering suggestions for
some better spots to go to. The club closed
within a few weeks.
Sklarz
ponders, “Would the police have worked on a murder like this in the past, we
don’t know. I knew transsexuals, who
were sex workers, who would get in fights with straight men who would go to
prison. I knew girls who would go to
men’s prison even though they had been living as women for years. I think its only with this heightened
political environment that police, specifically, and our culture, in general,
are beginning to look at all these people differently and the right of these
people, however odious sex work may be, it’s something. You pointed out when you sat down, what do
you do with people that have been thrown out of their schools, they are
incapable of working, yet you’ve got to survive?”
A
Call for Social Justice
Martin Luther
King (1986) once said that "Human salvation lies in the hands of the
creatively maladjusted." Perhaps. However, labeling any person's gender
expression as mental illness is oppressive, with a widening segment of gender
nonconforming youth and adults subject to diagnosis of psychosexual disorder,
stigma, loss of civil liberty, and political violence (Wilson, 2001, Wilson and
Hammond, 1996).
“For many, Amanda Milan
has become, not a martyr, but a rallying cry.
The activism around her death showed the world transgender people belong
in the queer community and that what happens to one transgender girl at four in
the morning outside the Port Authority is about everyone,” Sklarz
concluded. The message from activists is
there is no difference between Matthew Shepard and Amanda Milan. The response to her death tells the non-queer
community that enough, today the violence stops. “It is not OK anymore. It is not OK for people to die because they
are sex workers or die because they have AIDS or die because of drugs and
alcohol.”
STAR was born from Gay
Liberation Front and its vision of global solidarity. Throughout the years, Sylvia Rivera has
maintained that spirit. While she was considers the Matthew Shepard political
funeral, where she spent the night in jail, one of the best demonstrations she
ever attended; she considers sleeping in the street to protest cutbacks on
homeless services, as she did last January, just as important. “We’re not free till everyone is free…”
Rivera maintains. “Part of our mission
statement is to be out there for all oppressed people.”
The challenge of sex and gender liberation requires
building spaces for countless genders and identities on a foundation of social
justice. To the extent that we challenge
today’s culture of sexual privilege, we are all offered the possibility of
social transformation. These are things
we can all benefit from. Gender fluidity
is a truly revolutionary idea. Its
between the ears,” Schlarz repeated.
“Free your ass and your mind will follow,” Brother George preached. When that is free, STAR’s work will be
done.
Finishing the rally, activists trickled into a
coffee shop across the street. We all
ate and talked about the police and the tenor of the rally. Venus talked about the ways he has explored
community building efforts since Occupy, as well as the movements growing since
then. I was glad ACT UP was there. These are some of the best days in the
history of ACT UP.
Venus and I said goodbye and I rode back over the
bridge to beloved Brooklyn.
Thanks for the post, Ben, for the excellent photographic documentation, and for the historical perspective. I saw you from a distance yesterday, but didn't get a chance to say hi. -- Jim Eigo
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