# Star
*A Biography of Sylvia Rivera* — Legendary Biographies No. 059

- **Subject:** Ray Rivera Mendoza (Sylvia Rivera)
- **Written by:** Solomon Treadway
- **Shelf:** Movements / Civil Rights
- **Published:** 2026
- **Extent:** 198 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink
- **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-492-6)
- **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Gideon Marsh (ISBN 979-8-90623-579-4)

Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/059-star.html

## About this book

The Stonewall Inn, the night of June 28, 1969, the New York Police Department coming through the door. Sylvia Rivera was in the room, and she helped throw the second bottle. She had run away to Times Square at eleven and hustled there through the 1960s. In 1970 she and Marsha P. Johnson co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.

Rivera was Ray Rivera Mendoza in the Bronx, born on July 2, 1951, to a Puerto Rican father who disappeared and a Venezuelan mother who died by suicide when Rivera was three. A Venezuelan grandmother raised her. What followed Stonewall was thirty-two years of organising at the front of a gay liberation movement that, for most of her life, did not consider her welcome.

Solomon Treadway's biography follows all of it. The Bronx childhood and the Times Square hustling years of the 1960s. Stonewall, and then the STAR house with Marsha P. Johnson. The 1973 Gay Pride parade, where Vito Russo introduced her and the crowd booed. The long years of homelessness on the Hudson River Pier 11. The late-1990s return to organising, with the Metropolitan Community Church and the Transy House collective. The liver-cancer diagnosis of 2002, and the long stay at St. Vincent's that ended on February 19, 2002, at fifty.

The rooms are the argument. A raided bar. A house she shared with Johnson. A pier where she slept. Rivera was a Bronx-born Latina trans woman and she was there from the first night; she did front-line work in every one of those places, and the movement she helped found took thirty years to acknowledge it.

## Contents

1. The Bronx
2. Grandmother's House
3. Forty-Second Street
4. Queens of the Night
5. The Inn
6. The First Night
7. After the Riot
8. Gay Liberation Front
9. STAR
10. STAR House
11. Christopher Street, 1973
12. The Betrayal
13. Under the Pier
14. The Plague
15. The Long Way Back
16. SONDA
17. The Last Podium
18. February 19, 2002

## Questions

**Who is Star about?**

Ray Rivera Mendoza (Sylvia Rivera). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Star — and the name goes on the line underneath.

**Is this an authorised biography?**

No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.

**Can I read some of it before buying?**

Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,873 words of the book.

**How long is it?**

About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 198 pages in the paperback.

## The writer

Solomon Treadway is a Chicago-born culture critic whose biographies focus on Black American writers, intellectuals, and the post-war public sphere. His research utilizes deep archival investigations to reconstruct the social circles, political struggles, and literary debates that shaped mid-century American thought.

In works like The Chairman, Passing the Torch, and The Papers, Treadway traces how ideas move from private correspondence into the broader cultural consciousness. His writing emphasizes the everyday realities and collaborative networks behind major intellectual shifts, avoiding dry academic jargon in favor of clear, character-driven narrative history.

He lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as an independent researcher and spends his weekends volunteering at local community archives and bookshops.