Whitehot Magazine

Saint Sylvia’s Feast Day: A Reflection on MCCNY’s Tribute to a Trans Icon

Works of art created by Grayson Izekiel Colbert; their art centers around trans bodies, queer relationships, and gender. Photo by Iris Delany. 

By EMMA CIESLIK August 4, 2024

“Sylvia, I believe, was always a deeply spiritual person,” Rev. Pat Bumgardner said in a 2002 recording of Sylvia Riveria’s memorial service at New York City’s Metropolitan Community Church (MCCNY). The video footage played on a screen on the third floor of the MCCNY, the “gallery space” for “I have a lot to do,” a community tribute to Saint Sylvia held on June 26th. 

“Very, very connected to the spiritual realm and especially devoted to Saint Barbara. And in the last few years of her life, she found a home and what she called her true family here in the church, where she not only worshiped but worked.” Senior MCCNY pastor Bumgardner’s words rang out on the grainy archival video 22 years after they were first spoken at Rivera’s memorial service in 2002. The video was part of an interactive archival exhibit exploring the life and afterlives of Sylvia Rivera at MCCNY, highlighting the Saint Sylvia Collection as part of a tribute celebrating Rivera’s legacy at Sylvia’s Place and the Sylvia Rivera Memorial Food Pantry. 

Photo of multimedia exhibition, featuring handmade memorials to Rivera, newspaper articles remembering her legacy, and photographs. Photo by Iris Delany. 

Alongside this interactive archival exhibit featuring newspaper clippings about Rivera’s life, photographs of Rivera, and art imaging Rivera along with her friend Marsha P. Johnson, the tribute featured trans storytellers, performers, an interfaith ritual, trans art and fashion marketspaces, zine making, and lots of food in Rivera’s memory catered by the People’s Cafe NYC. “I have a lot to do” was organized by Sam Davis, a trans public historian and Union Theological Seminary graduate along with the MCCNY Queer Events team to give thanks for Rivera and her legacy at MCCNY. This legacy brought together people from across the country last June. 

This exhibition aimed to tell the relationship Sylvia had to her faith and the MCCNY community through the eyes of one of their queer saints. To understand this exhibition is to understand Rivera’s own story, and how she became, was, and transformed MCCNY in her own image, in the image of queer youth. 

Sylvia Rivera was an American and Puerto Rican trans community organizer born in New York City. She had a difficult childhood. Her Puerto Rican father was absent, and her Venezuelan mom died by suicide when she was young. She was raised instead by her grandmother who regularly beat her for presenting as femme. As a result, Rivera left home at age 10 and began life as a sex worker. She soon found and would later lead a community of poor trans young people, and she would christen herself Sylvia Rivera in a community ceremony. 

She was part of the Gay Liberation Front’s Drag Queen Caucus in 1970 and along with Black trans organizer and Stonewall Riot veteran Marsha P. Johnson and friend Bubbles Rose Lee, founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) group around 1971. Eventually, STAR operated a house to feed, shelter, and clothe queer youth. “Everybody in this house called her Ma, I mean she was,” Rivera’s friend Chelsea Goodwin paused and took a breath in the home style video recording playing on the pop-up projector screen in MCCNY’s third floor. “Well that’s what she was.”

But three or four years later, Rivera’s activism began to slow. At a rally following the fourth Gay Pride March in New York City, Rivera stepped on stage to speak but was booed. Underteered, friend Bob Kohler shared in a video recording titled “Mother of the Movement,” Rivera roared “REVOLUTION NOW!” into the mic and led the crowd in spelling GAY POWER! Kohler recalls how the moment affected Rivera in the long term. 

“I’ve never seen anyone so, so lost, I mean. Sylvia’s world had suddenly just collapsed, and Sylvia left the movement for twenty years.” In another video, Rivera’s partner Julia Murray and friend Chelsea Goodwin acknowledge Rivera’s struggle with alcoholism, and Rivera herself calls out her complacency in one of the final clips. She returned to activism many years later; STAR inspiring Sylvia’s Place, an LGBTQ+ youth shelter run out of the first floor of the MCCNY. 

But as Rivera started organizing again, she had to overcome hesitations surrounding church communities. In an oral history recording conducted by Davis, Rev. Bumgardner shared that she actually first met Sylvia by accident. Both were marching towards City Hall and ended up next to one another, and Rivera started up a conversation “because I had a collar on and she was angry at The Church.” Bumgardner made air quotes with her fingers. After dispelling some of the myths surrounding the church, she extended an invitation for Rivera to join her the next Sunday. 

Rivera showed up and was greeted by a standing ovation, as Bumgarden introduced her “in the way I thought she should be introduced, as the mother of the queer rights movement at the Stonewall Inn.” Soonafter, Rivera began attending MCCNY services regularly and became involved with Gender People, a spiritual support group for trans and gender diverse people and the church’s food pantry. In a recording of her words at Rivera’s 2002 memorial service, Bumgardner shared that Rivera was deeply spiritual. In fact, she was “very connected to the spiritual realm and especially devoted to Saint Barbara,” fitting as the patroness of front line fighters and prisoners. 

Rivera was eventually baptized into the church. In another recording with friend Michelangelo Galloza, Galloza shared that he, Rivera, and Moshay Moses wanted to be baptized on Three King’s Day. Bumgardner joked that the day they were all baptized that it would be “two queens and a wise guy.” They were baptized to “cement the faith that we had developed in the spirit and that we wanted to start our lives anew on that basis. We recognized that it was through Spirit that we survived, thrive, and were able to face all the challenges with love and renewed strength,” Galloza smiled. 

Photos of Sylvia on display in the exhibition. Photo by Iris Delany. 

Visitors only had to look up to see a picture of Rivera at her baptism hung on the sanctuary wall. In it, she’s dressed like royalty for her “rebirthing day,” according to Galloza. And with this rebirth came the start of Rivera’s ministry at MCCNY, the start of putting pulpit preaching into hands and mouths of people across the New York City area. When the food pantry director resigned, MCCNY hired Rivera. Bumgardner recalls how Rivera’s leadership and visibility drew in more people, and providing food to individuals needing housing, clothing, and medical care became her ministry. Rivera saw herself in the people she served. 

In her final years, Rivera became a fierce and unstoppable activist once more but liver cancer crept closer. Less than 24 hours before she died, Rivera was hosting political meetings calling for a trans-inclusive version of the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA) from St. Vincent’s Hospital, and she used some of her final words to ensure that Bumgardner would make good on her promise to open a shelter for LGBTQ+ youth experiencing home instability. Sylvia’s Place was born at the edge of her hospital bed right as she passed away on February 19, 2002 from complications with liver cancer. 

Following her wishes, Rivera had an open-casket memorial before being cremated. “Not one to relinquish the reins easily,” Bumgardner chuckled in an oral history interview played at the tribute, “we are still following her orders.” Some of her ashes were scattered at Stonewall and some at the Hudson River, which Rivera fondly called “the River Jordan” because this is what Marsha referred to the river, while the rest remained at MCCNY. Bumgardner’s former assistant Malcolm Smith made up the shelf where she sat in church. Now, Rivera lives in Bumgardner’s office, but people can make appointments to visit her. Kohler’s ashes are also at MCCNY, keeping Sylvia and the person she called her father together. 

And Rivera is carried to the sanctuary every Sunday for church services at 9 and 11 am EST. 

At her memorial service, Bumgardner beatified Rivera as the first Saint Sylvia. “She is a Saint,” Bumgardner proclaimed, “not because she was perfect--Saints are notoriously not-so. I’m not going to share the details of Sylvia’s life, that’s confessional matter.” 

A laugh rippled among the crowd on the fuzzy recording, filling the stained glass sanctuary with warmth. “But, she did have, as I presume your laughs indicate, kind of an up-and-down life. Sometimes because of this world’s cruelty, and sometimes, if the truth be told, because of her own short-comings. And Sylvia was the very first to admit that. But she rises to Sainthod now because in good times and in bad, no matter the circumstances of her life or how she got there, she lived this Gospel tonight and left none of our siblings in the queer community behind.”

Bumgardner takes comfort, she shared in an oral history interview played during the tribute, in Rivera's visitation. After she died, Rev. Bumgardner dreamed she saw Rivera dressed radiantly. Rivera said to them, “You were right about heaven, everybody gets to go, but wrong about Jesus, he’s one among many.” Rivera, Bumgardner is sure, is up in heaven as much as she remains alive within the walls of MCCNY. 

Rivera was deeply felt at “I have a lot to do.” Rivera was seated on an ornate gold pedestal, next to a photo of her carrying a sign, “God Save the Queens.” Around her were also quotes from this video collection and Rivera’s obituary in the MCCNY newsletter, along with colorful portraits of Rivera and Marsha created by Grayson Izekiel Colbert, a Black, trans, and nonbinary queer visual and tattoo artist based in New York City. One of these portraits even showcasesa a full-length Rivera with a crimson heart, strikingly similar to iconography of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and another shows Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson arm in arm with stars in the background to denote their STAR. 

As opposed to traditional museum spaces, hushed galleries or memorials, this interactive archival exhibition was contextualized by the lives it featured. Performances by R&B and Neo Soul singer-songwriter Raquel Amonett Scott, rapper K.K de la Transcendence, community/family/nightlife/sex work educated artist Viva Ruiz, and Lexii Fogg, the Black trans performer who founded Stop Killing US Global--an organization and campaign raising awareness about the murder of Black trans women--recalled Rivera’s joy in performance art. At the same time, organizers Victoria Von Blaque, Linda La, MaKaliah Hayes, and Tonie Boykin with Lexi Fogg moderating told stories not only about Rivera but also about Black and Latina trans joy across time and space. They also talked about the violence that trans women face, what “safety means.” Hayes is the director of the food pantry and Boykin is a trans elder and lay preacher at MCCNY. 

It highlighted how this interactive exhibition itself challenged the historical whitewashing of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, and narratives that erase queer spiritual power. “There’s also a tendency for our mainstream LGBTQ+ histories and our movement histories to erase or leave out or not even know about the spiritual lives of these people, and for myself and the MCCNY community, we understand and we believe that trans women deserve to be upheld in our whole community and in their whole personhood,” Davis said. “Sylvia's spiritual life was also her organizing life. I don’t think she’d make the distinction between the two honestly.” 

These histories are sadly few and far  between because LGBTQ+ histories were destroyed, not deemed important enough to collect, or purposefully not recorded to protect its actors. But what histories do exist are precious, Davis explained, and they are the result of community driven historical activism. Davis does this archival work partially because MCCNY is their spiritual home and partially because they feel spiritually called to record and share stories like these that have largely lived in the attics of queer churches, drag bars, and ballrooms for decades. 

A gathering of trans elders, performers, and ritualists. Photo by Iris Delany. 

While attending Union Theological Seminary, Davis’s friend Margot Wagner introduced them to MCC where they were interning. After becoming more involved, Bumgardner mentioned the vast archival material at MCCNY that remains unorganized. Davis was drawn to public history work through Dr. Jorge Rodriguez, Visiting Assistant Professor of Historical Studies at Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York. and encouraged by their PhD supervisor, Dr. Laura McTighe, Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University. Davis referenced McTighe’s framework of community-driven, mutual-aid-based scholarship in co-creating the tribute and the emerging MCCNY community archives; McTighe’s most recent publication is Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South from Duke Press.

With the spiritual impetus behind recording and sharing these histories, and rituals and meditations by artist River L. Ramirez and practitioner and yoga instructor Nordia Bennett, a marketplace full of trans art and upcycled clothing from the Transcendant Punk Costume Closet, and food by People’s Cafe NYC, “I have a lot to do” felt like Saint Sylvia’s first feast day. A community gathered together to rejoice in the saint who continues to protect them, cherishing her relics and carrying out her ministry. Instead of a somber memorial, this tribute was filled with the very life that Rivera brought to the MCCNY and wider LGBTQ+ community. 

It is hopefully the start of more queer saint feast days, along with more celebrations of queer saints like Rivera. The best recent example is Cecilia Gentili whose life and legacy was celebrated this past March following her passing. Gabriel García Román crafted a portrait, titled “Cecilia,” of the queer saint surrounded by the words “Transvesti,” “Puta,” “Benedita,” and “Madre” in her own handwriting. Despite the condemnation or rather in spite of queerphobia from the Archdiocese of New York CIty, Gentili’s life was celebrated in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Both her and Rivera’s memorials represent the importance of holding tight to queer saints. 

“She didn’t let people go ignorantly into the positions that they took, she wanted to make sure that you understand what you were saying,” Bumgardner recalled fondly in one of the oral history recordings,” what you might be giving up, what you might be sacrificing in order to stand with her, and I really admire that kind of not only forthrightness, but that kind of honesty and integrity.” It was this commitment to action that made Rivera a pillar of the MCCNY community, and made this exhibition--which is sadly not open to the public right now; it was a one day event at Rivera’s tribute--a model for collecting, sharing, and celebrating queer holy histories. 

A candle, lit for Saint Sylvia on MCCNY’s altar. James Admans, who leads church services in drag as Marge Erin Johnson, created this candle. Photo by Iris Delany. 

If you are able, please supportSylvia’s Place and the Sylvia Rivera Memorial Food Pantry.

Special thanks to Iris Delany for the opportunity to use her photos of the event in this review. You can find more about her work on her website or Instagram. WM

 

Emma Cieslik

Emma Cieslik (she/her) is a queer, disabled and neurodivergent museum professional and writer based in Washington, DC. She is also a queer religious scholar interested in the intersections of religion, gender, sexuality, and material culture, especially focused on queer religious identity and accessible histories. Her previous writing has appeared in The Art Newspaper, ArtUK, Archer Magazine, Religion & Politics, The Revealer, Nursing Clio, Killing the Buddha, Museum Next, Religion Dispatches, and Teen Vogue

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