Before there was a building, there was a trailer. Sometime around 1970, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera -- both Stonewall veterans, both formerly homeless, both sex workers who had met while hustling as teenagers on 42nd Street -- managed a semi-truck trailer that sheltered roughly twenty unhoused transgender youths. They paid for meals by begging and doing sex work. When a group of truck drivers tried to haul the trailer away, Johnson and Rivera fought to stop them, terrified that someone was still inside. Their pleas were ignored. One youth was accidentally taken all the way to California. It was this crisis that prompted the first meeting of what would become the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.
The spark came in September 1970. When New York University's administration canceled upcoming dances at Weinstein Hall after learning they would be "homosexual" events, members of several activist organizations -- including the Gay Activists Alliance and the Gay Liberation Front -- occupied the building. During the five-day occupation, Johnson proposed creating an organization specifically for transgender people. The name, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, may have been partially inspired by an album called STAR by the musician Julianne, according to Johnson's biographer Tourmaline. When police broke up the occupation on September 25, the occupiers marched through Greenwich Village. Shortly after, Rivera published a fiery flyer under the alias "Street Transvestites for Gay Power," condemning police abuse and urging immediate action. The first formal STAR meeting followed in late 1970, with Johnson declining the presidency in favor of the vice president role while Rivera took the lead.
STAR House opened in November 1970 at 213 East 2nd Street in the East Village. The four-bedroom apartment was in dire condition -- no electricity, no heat, broken plumbing, rubble piled in the corners. Johnson and Rivera cleaned and furnished it, supported the residents through sex work, and took on parental roles for the transgender youth who lived there. The arrangement was precarious from the start. Rent was difficult to maintain, and the building's condition never fully improved. But for the young people who passed through STAR House during its eight months of operation, it provided something that scarcely existed elsewhere: a place where transgender youth could sleep indoors, eat a meal, and be among people who understood their lives. STAR House closed in July 1971 when the organization could no longer cover rent.
STAR's activism extended well beyond shelter. The organization advocated for bodily autonomy, free clothing, education, food, healthcare, housing, and transportation. It drew influence from the Black Panther Party's revolutionary nationalism and from the gay liberation groups that had formed after Stonewall. Rivera and Johnson pushed for prison reform and worked alongside the GAA, the GLF, and the Mattachine Society. When the Gay Activists Alliance proposed a New York City gay rights bill in 1970, STAR attended hearings to argue that transgender rights must be included. This was not a popular position. Within the broader LGBTQ movement of the early 1970s, transgender people -- particularly those who were poor, of color, or involved in sex work -- were often treated as an embarrassment, their visibility seen as a liability in the fight for mainstream acceptance.
STAR's activity declined sharply in 1972. According to Rivera, the organization "died" in 1973, after attempts to exclude transgender people from the Christopher Street Liberation Day rally -- the very event commemorating the uprising that Johnson and Rivera had helped ignite. The exclusion was a bitter irony. For nearly three decades, STAR existed only as a historical footnote. Then, in 2000, the murder of Amanda Milan, a transgender woman killed in New York City, brought Rivera back into activism. She temporarily revived STAR, reconnecting the organization's founding principles to a new generation of transgender advocacy. Rivera died in 2002, Johnson in 1992 -- her body found in the Hudson River under circumstances that remain disputed. But the framework they built has endured. Academic Benjamin Shepard credits STAR as America's first trans political organization, and scholars like Stephan Cohen and Abram J. Lewis argue that its work prefigured the developments in queer theory and transgender activism that would reshape American culture decades later.
STAR's story resists the clean narrative arc of institutional progress. There were no galas, no endowments, no office with a receptionist. There were two women, both marginalized many times over -- by poverty, by race, by gender identity, by the sex work they relied on to survive -- who decided that the young people sleeping on the streets of the East Village deserved a roof. They scrounged rent money. They fought truck drivers. They showed up at government hearings and demanded to be heard by a movement that often wished they would disappear. The buildings where they worked are unremarkable: a crumbling apartment, a university dormitory, a stretch of 42nd Street. But what happened inside and around those buildings -- the sheltering, the organizing, the refusal to be excluded -- helped establish the principle that transgender rights are human rights, years before that phrase entered common use.
STAR House was located at 213 East 2nd Street in the East Village, Manhattan (40.7217N, 73.9831W). The East Village is a dense, low-rise neighborhood east of the Bowery and south of 14th Street. From the air, look for the rectangular grid of Tompkins Square Park as a reference point -- STAR House was several blocks southwest. Nearby airports: KJFK (John F. Kennedy, 24km SE), KLGA (LaGuardia, 14km NE), KEWR (Newark Liberty, 15km W). Best viewed at 2,000-3,000 feet AGL approaching from the East River.