I think Marsha and Sylvia represent a better image for the queer theory (and critical theory in general) crowd, which fetishizes dysfunctional people. There is an attitude that unkempt, mentally unbalanced people are more "authentic" than people who are not. I'm not saying Rivera and Johnson were bad people, but based on how their lives played out, there were obvious mental health issues. Johnson was taken in for the remainder of his life by a friend who recognized Johnson's inability to live independently.

I was about the post the same thing, and I was trying to think about how to put it.

If you're involved in grassroots/amateur activism, at some point you have to confront the fact that it will attract a certain number of extremely dysfunctional people, and since it's volunteer, you have to figure out some way to cope with them. It's not an easy thing. In one group I was involved with, we had a gay guy who was in the initial stages of schizophrenia. We tried to help him, arranging places for him to stay and eventually getting him back to his family who got him hospitalized. Problem was, when he was released from the hospital, he just disappeared one day. That was almost 20 years ago. Even his family doesn't know if he's alive or dead. No efforts to find him have been successful.

But back to the main point, you can't really organize a successful movement for social progress if your own life is so profoundly disordered that you can't even take care of yourself. A friend of mine whose son had cancer gave me this advice once: You have to take care of yourself so you can take care of other people.

With Johnson, it's obvious that he was extremely mentally ill. In interviews I've seen with Rivera, it's more subtle, but she sets off my "personality disorder" detector. In a 1995 interview with Randy Wicker, they show that Rivera is living in a makeshift shelter on the street. She talked about wanting to get a job doing something, but you have to wonder if she was even minimally employable or if she would have been too much trouble to have around.

I think I remember reading in David Carter's book that Craig Rodwell was actually meeting with people in the NYC mayor's office to try to get the police to stop harassing gay bars before Stonewall. Can you imagine Sylvia Rivera or Marsha P. Johnson trying to meet with a public official in 1968 or 69 and being taken seriously? They would have thought, "Who are these nutjobs?"

The people who actually made progress on gay rights were people who had functional lives. They got law degrees or ran businesses. They understood how to sustain organizations and use them to achieve goals.