Eliding trans Latino/a queer experience in U.S. LGBT history: José Sarria and Sylvia Rivera reexamined

This essay examines the place of trans Latino/a queer pioneers José Sarria and Sylvia Rivera in U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender historiography over the past two decades, specifically how their Latino/a identities have been conveyed and elided in professional and popular historical texts, in documentary films, in cinematic fictions, and on newly-erected street signs. It further explores how such scholarly developments as transgender history, new accounts of queer Latino/a San Francisco and New York, and diaspora studies, particularly with regard to Rivera′s Puerto Rican heritage in the context of 1960s New York City, have provided new vantage points from which to assess their significance to the always tentative project of queer history.