LGBDropTheT

One thing I've learned over the last 30+ years about civil rights work is that the people who do the work and the people who claim to have done the work are often two quite different sets of people. For example, in college, I and three others co-founded the first public Gay & Lesbian organization on campus. We advertised our meetings, and a successor to that organization still exists (although now taken over by TQ+). I had my picture on the front of the school newspaper protesting ROTC's policy of kicking out students if they found out they were gay.

But when the school started doing an LGBT history project ten years ago, no one knew our names at all. All the paperwork related to us had been lost.

One thing that Sargeant fails to mention is the story that when Rivera learned that people like Duberman and Carter were rigorously researching Stonewall, he tried to get others who'd been there when it started to lie and say he'd been there -- because it was Rivera who'd gradually been inflating his own activist résumé over the intervening decades. He knew he'd be caught.

Rivera does deserve some credit for trying to help gay street kids, but, as Sargeant points out, it was a short-lived shit-show. And there were other people in the gay community helping street kids at the time who don't get any credit.

Add to that the fact that Rivera was obviously mentally-ill. He couldn't even take care of himself. Anyone who's seen any film footage of interviews with him should be able to suss that out pretty easily. All the relatively normal, average people with jobs who worked for Gay Rights . . . we're just not interesting enough.

But Rivera checks the right boxes, so the current generation will give him credit. It's the story they've been told is the right kind of story.