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The Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries Manifesto, 50 Years Later

The Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries Manifesto, 50 Years Later

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In 1970, prominent, Stonewall-era queer activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera formed the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a radical, queer, political organization that provided housing for Manhattan queer youth and sex workers. In the modern queer liberation movement, STAR is considered to be a groundbreaking, collective in the history of queer liberation and is often cited as a seminal example of post-Stonewall queer political activism.

Despite the prominence and popularity of STAR in the modern popular consciousness of those fighting for queer liberation and the LGBTQ community more broadly, many have not read the STAR manifesto, published the same year as the group’s founding. The manifesto outlines the organization’s purpose, political ideology, and demands; it consists of two parts, a preamble and a list of nine demands for queer liberation, explaining what exactly the group was fighting for.

The manifesto reads thus:

“The oppression against Transvestites of either sex arises from sexist values and this oppression is manifested by heterosexuals and homosexuals of both sexes in the form of exploitation, ridicule, harassment, beatings, rapes, murders.

“Because of this oppression the majority of transvestites are forced into the street and we have formed a strong alliance with our gay sisters and brothers of the street. Who we are a part of and represent we are, a part of the REVOLUTIONARIES armies fighting against the system.

“1. We want the right to self-determination over the use of our bodies; the right to be gay, anytime, anyplace; the right to free physiological change and modification of sex on demand; the right to free dress and adornment.

“2. The end to all job discrimination against transvestites of both sexes and gay street people because of attire.

“3. The immediate end of all police harassment and arrest of transvestites and gay street people, and the release of transvestites and gay street people from all prisons and all other political prisoners.

“4. The end to all exploitive practices of doctors and psychiatrists who work in the field of transvestism.

“5. Transvestites who live as members of the opposite gender should be able to obtain identification of the opposite gender.

“6. Transvestites and gay street people and all oppressed people should have free education, healthcare, clothing, food, transportation, and housing.

“7. Transvestites and gay street people should be granted full and equal rights on all levels of society, and full voice in the struggle for liberation of all oppressed people.

“8. An end to exploitation and discrimination against transvestites within the homosexual world.

“9. We want a revolutionary peoples’ government, where transvestites, street people, women, homosexuals, Puerto Ricans, Indians, and all oppressed people are free, and not fucked over by this government who treat us like the scum of the earth and kills us off like flies, one by one, and throws us into jail to rot. This government who spends millions of dollars to go to the moon, and lets the poor Americans starve to death.

“POWER TO THE PEOPLE
S. T. A. R.”

The words and ideas of STAR are just as true and vital today as they were in 1970. Though the battlefields have shifted, the war remains the same: the queer community is still oppressed; our liberation is not yet realized regardless of the progress that has been made.

At a time in the history of the United States in which the government is drawing ever nearer to a trillion-dollar military budget yet does not have such things as universal healthcare, reparations to oppressed peoples, ensured non-discrimination, ensured universal hate protections, etc., some of which being largely standard operating procedure in other nations, it is blatantly clear that the modern queer liberation movement is fighting for the exact same things—the exact same liberation—that Stonewall-era activists were.

In the modern era, a time of such heightened visibility of the blatant oppression of the LGBTQ community and many others, a time wherein the queer community is under siege with discrimination and bigoted hate as the weapons, it becomes clear that the revolutionary efforts of liberation done by STAR and many other queer collectives are desperately needed.

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