Her portrait in this collection has a blank space where a signature would be.
It is not an oversight. It is not an accident. It is the most honest thing we could put on the garment.
Sylvia Rivera was erased — from photographs, from accounts, from the official histories of movements she helped build — so many times and by so many different hands that the erasure became its own kind of testimony. The blank space is our acknowledgment of that testimony. We are not pretending it didn't happen. We are wearing it.
Sylvia Rivera was born in 1951 in New York City to a Venezuelan father and a Puerto Rican mother. Her mother died when Sylvia was three years old. Her father abandoned her. She was raised briefly by her grandmother, who rejected her for wearing makeup, and by the age of eleven she was living on the streets of Greenwich Village, surviving the way children with nowhere to go have always survived in cities that don't want them.
She found community among the drag queens and street kids of Times Square and the Village — people who were also surviving, also building chosen family from the materials available, also learning to exist in a world that had made abundantly clear they were not welcome in it. She met Marsha P. Johnson, who became her closest friend and collaborator. She was seventeen years old when the Stonewall uprising began.
What Sylvia Rivera did at Stonewall has been disputed, minimized, and in some accounts erased entirely. She insisted until her death that she was present, that she fought, that she threw the first bottle. Other accounts place her elsewhere. The dispute itself is instructive — the energy spent questioning her presence at the event says something about whose presence was considered credible, whose testimony was considered reliable, whose body was considered worth including in the story.
After Stonewall, Rivera and Johnson founded STAR — Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries — and STAR House, providing shelter and support for homeless LGBTQ+ youth. Rivera marched, organized, was arrested, was released, kept working. She fought not just for gay rights but for the rights of the most marginalized within the community — transgender people, people of color, sex workers, the poor — at a time when the mainstream gay rights movement was increasingly focused on respectability and increasingly willing to leave those people behind to achieve it.
She was explicitly pushed out. At the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day rally, Rivera was physically blocked from the stage. When she finally got up to speak, she was booed by a crowd that had decided her presence was inconvenient. She spoke anyway. She told the crowd about the people in prison who had written to her, who were fighting for their lives, who needed the movement to fight for them too. She was booed throughout. She finished what she had to say.
She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s estranged from the movement, struggling with addiction and homelessness, living in some periods under the piers near the Hudson River. She came back. She always came back. She continued advocating for transgender rights and working with organizations that served homeless LGBTQ+ youth until her death in 2002 from liver cancer. She was 50 years old.
A statue of Rivera and Johnson now stands in Greenwich Village. It was unveiled in 2021. It is the first monument in New York City to honor transgender people of color.
The blank space on her portrait is for everything else that was taken. We leave it empty because it cannot be filled. We make it visible because it should not be hidden.
The Sylvia Rivera Embodiment of Pride Tank and Tee are part of the Identité et Humanité collection. A portion of proceeds from each sale supports LGBTQ+ organizations continuing the work she began.