WHO WAS SYLVIA Rivera?

A. An active participant in the Stonewall riots (which sparked the gay liberation movement).

B. A Puerto Rican drag queen, founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a cell of the original Gay Liberation Front/New York and the country's first transgender-rights organization.

C. A tireless fighter for transgender rights.

Answer: All of the above.

I only met Sylvia once or twice, back in the early 1970s. I was involved with the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance in Philadelphia, my hometown. We used to go to New York to dance at the community center the Gay Activists Alliance had set up at an old Greenwich Village firehouse it had bought from the city. I don't remember the exact circumstances of our meeting.

Sylvia's work on transgender issues, especially with STAR, influenced my friend Cei Bell and I as we founded Radicalqueens, a pro-feminist group promoting the rights of transgender people.

I was doing drag a lot in those days. I knew I wasn't transsexual, but I needed to explore exactly who I was. It was a wonderful time but scary, especially when, on more than one occasion, I was bashed for being in the wrong outfit in the wrong place. It was the kind of thing Sylvia lived with all the time.

Sylvia is gone now. She died in St. Vincent's Hospital in New York on Feb. 19 of complications due to liver cancer. Her ashes will be scattered at the waterfront. Her funeral carriage will stop at the site of the original Stonewall bar, according to her wishes, for a memorial service. The Stonewall is closed now, but it's commemorated with an official plaque marking the spot where drag queens first fought back against a routine raid, on a hot summer night at the end of June 1969. That act of fighting back sparked three days of rioting in Greenwich Village, rioting that turned the low-key homophile movement into a high-profile gay-liberation struggle that changed the way America looks at queers. Sylvia fought hard that night. She continued fighting right up to her death.

A legend has left us.

My fondest memory of Sylvia is from the June 1973 New York Gay Pride March, where she fought her way onto the stage to implore the thousands gathered there to support the queens who had been arrested that weekend in a police sweep of prostitutes along 42nd Street. The burgeoning gay-liberation movement wasn't always comfortable with transgender folks, let alone those who made a living on the streets. She was yanked offstage.

A young Jewish singer who was making a name for herself on the gay bathhouse circuit came onstage a while later and implored the crowd to stop the infighting. "Ya gotta get along!" she said in a thick Brooklyn accent, before launching into one of her trademark songs – "Ya gotta have frien-ends." The singer was, of course, Bette Midler, who borrowed heavily from the dress styles of New York's finest drag queens.

Sylvia Rivera borrowed from no one. She was an institution unto herself. She knew who she was and what she had to do. She fought so that others could live their lives being who they were. That is her greatest legacy.

All too often these days, we in the queer struggle forget pioneers like Sylvia, who still make many of us uncomfortable. While we readily glorify personalities such as Chastity Bono for the mere act of coming out, we don't acknowledge the braver actions of the working-class Sylvia Riveras who don't have superstar parents but who give up their lives to fight for those who don't have a voice.