Sylvia Rivera was a Puerto Rican and Venezuelan trans activist and revolutionary who fought for the most marginalized members of the queer community: street youth, sex workers, trans people of color, and the poor. Born in the Bronx in 1951, she was raised by her grandmother. Rejected for her gender expression, she left home as a child and survived on the streets of Times Square, where an underground community of drag queens and street people took her in. That experience shaped her lifelong commitment to the people mainstream movements left behind. By her own account she was among those who resisted the police at the Stonewall Inn in June 1969, the uprising that launched the modern gay liberation movement.

In 1970, with her friend and comrade Marsha P. Johnson, Rivera founded STAR, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. STAR opened a house in the East Village to shelter homeless trans youth, paid for by the two women's own work on the streets. Rivera saw queer liberation as part of the wider revolutionary movement of her time. She marched with the Young Lords and built ties with the Black Panther Party. At the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day rally, she fought her way to the stage and confronted a crowd that booed her, demanding that the movement remember the trans people and prisoners it was abandoning in its push for respectability.

Pushed out of the movement she had helped build, Rivera endured years of homelessness, living at times on the Christopher Street piers, but she never stopped organizing. In her final years she revived STAR and fought against the exclusion of trans people from New York's gay rights legislation. She died in 2002, and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project was founded in her name that same year to provide legal services to low-income trans people and people of color. Her legacy is a reminder that liberation must begin with those at the bottom, and that no movement is free while it leaves its most vulnerable behind.