were not respectable queers, nor were they poster-children for the modern image of "gay" or "transgender." They were poor, gender-variant women of color, street-based sex workers, with confrontational, revolutionary politics and, in contrast to the often abstract and traditionally political activists of Gay Activists Alliance, focused on the immediate concerns of the most oppressed gay populations: "street gay people, the street homeless people, and anybody that needed help at that time" (Sylvia Rivera quoted in Feinberg). Within the predominantly white, non-gendervariant, middle-class, reformist gay liberation movement, Sylvia and Marsha were often marginalized, both for their racial, gender, and class statuses, and for their no-compromise attitudes toward gay revolutionary struggle.After the initial rupture of Stonewall -which, as Sylvia describes, "was street gay people from the Village out front -homeless people who lived in the park in Sheridan Square outside the bar -and then drag queens behind them and everybody behind us" (Feinberg interview) -the gay liberation movement had to deal with uppity street queens who rejected abstract politics in favor of streetlevel concerns. Those with nothing to lose are often those who push hardest when the time comes; this was true at the Stonewall riots, and continued into the gay liberation movement, much to the dismay of those whose idea of "gay liberation" was either inclusion in straight society or managed revolution. These forces of gay normativity and revolutionary management marginalized, erased, and silenced those whose bodies, histories, or ethical orientations refused dominant models. Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance meetings became battlefields. As Martin Duberman describes in Stonewall: "If someone was not shunning [Sylvia's] darker skin or sniggering at her passionate, fractured English, they were deploring her rude anarchism as inimical to order or denouncing her sashaying ways as offensive to womanhood." The particular position Sylvia and Marsha occupied was, by nature of their very identities, resistant to the goals of the increasingly-assimilationist gay movement. Revolutionary street queens of color were an impediment to the goal of assimilation into the white straight capitalist world, leaving the general membership of GAA "frightened by street people" (Arthur Bell quoted in Gan).This marginalization continues today in the revisionist history favored by the modern equivalents of GAA assimilationists. The presence of gendervariant people, people of color, poor people, and street people at Stonewall and in the gay liberation movement that followed has been erased or minimized by assimilationists who wish to present a respectable movement of reformist white gays seeking inclusion in capitalism and state institutions.
