An Oral History of Trans Activism, From the Vietnam War to the AIDS Crisis

Editor’s note: This story is part of ‘Trans Bay: A History of San Francisco’s Gender-Diverse Community.’ From June 9–19, we’re publishing stories about transgender artists and activists who shaped culture from the 1890s to today.

In this excerpt from their book ‘So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer and Two-Spirit People of Color’ (Algonquin), author Caro De Robertis interviews community activists Ms. Billie Cooper, Tupili Lea Arellano, Nicky Calma, Fresh “Lev” White and Yoseñio Lewis about their decades of fighting for trans rights.

Tupili Lea Arellano: I’ve been a social justice activist from a very early age. The first time I went to the streets was in 1968 to fight against the Vietnam War, and that was in Silver City, New Mexico, a very small, conservative town. But there were people who said, “You’re coming with us.” I’ve been very active since then.

Ms. Billie Cooper: I am a forty-year-plus activist, a forty-year-plus advocate, not only for Black rights in the early days, but for trans rights.

We have been called many names by many people. But we have been called transgendered, I would say, for maybe the last ten to fifteen years.

We have been fighting for trans rights, transgender rights, since long before we were transgender.

The person who started me in my lifelong work as an activist, advocate, and community liaison was Miss Major Griffin-Gracie. When I met her, in San Francisco in ’79, I was AWOL from the Navy. I told her I wasn’t going back. She told me, “Queen, go back, do what you got to do, get your discharge, and then come back to San Francisco.”

For the few weeks I was with her, I saw how she reached out to the community. She never threw anyone under the bus. She always gave her last to someone who didn’t have anything. I wanted to be like that. I hung around her each and every day.

Tupili Lea Arellano: In the Bay Area, in the 1980s, I was one of the visionaries and founders of Mujerío.

I just want to shout out appreciation so deep, deep, deep for the founders of Mujerío and the ones who organized it and ran it. The commitment there, to give ourselves space, a space as Latinas, as queer women of color with origins in the Americas. We had meetings, we’d have food, we danced, we’d meet new people, we’d hear people’s stories. Isolation kills, it kills, so that was the big medicine. That was some social justice.

We had a newsletter, and I was “Ask Doña Marimacha.” I was the secret Ann Landers of Latinx queer women. I had my column in that newsletter. They’d write to me—we didn’t have email then, folks, believe it or not—and send me questions I would answer. That was so much fun. That newsletter was really a connector.

In those years, like the early eighties, the mid eighties, people were not talking about trans stuff. Trans people already existed, we’ve existed for millenniums, but we weren’t talking about it.

Yoseñio Lewis: In the mid nineties, I was part of a group that would go to Washington, DC, to lobby for trans inclusion. In anything, but especially around medical care. Unfortunately, one of the things that we had to do was convince the people who were supposedly there to represent us that we were worthy of being represented.
The amount of times I had to go to the Human Rights Campaign office! To try to convince the people in charge that trans people were a part of the queer community.

That we did need to be represented. That we were not asking for “special rights.”

How dare you tell us that we’re asking for special rights, when that is exactly what you grew up hearing all of your life? When you said, “I just want to be able to rent an apartment, I want to be able to have a job, marry the person I care about, have children and not worry about custody issues.”

And dealing with the backlash from cis gay people. “Oh, you guys are freaks, we’re just at the point where straight people are beginning to understand that we’re normal, that we’re just like them, we can’t have you come in, you’re going to mess everything up.”

There was a bill, ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, that was supposedly to support the “normalization” of LG. It wasn’t B and T, it was LG. “We’re getting accepted. People like us now.” ENDA was on tap, but it never passed.

And some of us were saying, “Look, if you’re going to be coming to DC every year and lobbying for this, and you’re raising all this money for it, why can’t you include the B and T? We’re here. We’ve been here. We’ve been here forever. We’ve been in the back rooms, doing the grunt work. Why are you ignoring us? You’re a part of us, we’re a part of you. You don’t recall Stonewall, and what really happened there. We’re getting killed by the dozens, and you don’t want us here because we will make you unpalatable. You were unpalatable just a few years ago. But because you decided to start dressing preppy, and move to places where there was a lot of money, you think that’s going to make people accept you, and that it also makes it okay for you to treat other people poorly.”

So then all my years of hearing “You’re not Latin enough, you’re not Black enough, you’re not woman enough, you’re not man enough”—all of those things came up for me to say, “No, not again. This is not going to be yet another place where I get told I don’t count.”
So I made it my mission. For years, a bunch of us would go to Human Rights Campaign meetings and talk to them, to get them to be more inclusive of trans people. Well, now they are, and now they fight for us.

Ms. Billie Cooper: I will always fight for the underdog, and underserved people. I have always challenged authority, and I have always questioned authority, because for many, many, many decades, we as Black people have been forgotten about in so many facets of life. When it comes to giving Black people their roses — not only Black people but Brown people, too — give us our roses while we’re here. While we’re still here.

Tupili Lea Arellano: Oh, the PTSD of racism. Anyone who hears that says, “Oh God, do they have to harp on racism?”

I say, “I have to harp on it because it harped on me. I wake up into it every day.”

Nicky Calma: In this field, you know, I think there’s so much hate going on when you’re not white. I mean, I feel that way. They don’t want to see an Asian transgender woman up there commanding, or talking. I still get it, even from folks in the transgender community, sometimes. We have internalized transphobia. When you’re doing good, some people don’t want to see that, they want to see you fail.
Suddenly, you have all these organizations popping up, wanting to serve transgender people, and yet they just take the money. They’ll hire a transgender person, but they won’t invest in that person. They want someone with a degree in public health. Well, I have twenty-five years of experience working with my community, and I think that’s good enough. Because you probably haven’t experienced things that I’ve experienced. I say that, and I come from a place of love, but give us a break.

Yoseñio Lewis: You know how you have, like, a gumball machine, but it’s segmented? So there’s this kind of gum here, and there’s this kind of gum in the middle, and that kind of gum in the other silo, but down at the bottom, if you turn the buttons the right way, you can get something from all three silos, and it’s all together at the bottom?
That’s the analogy that I can utilize to best explain how I could recognize that kink liberation, sexual liberation, trans liberation—all of it was the same. Even though they were in different silos, once you turned a certain knob a certain way, all of the gumballs all mixed together at the bottom.

In order to get liberation for one, you ended up getting liberation for all three.

If I want to get Black liberation, I’m also going to get the kink liberation gumball, which is going to be close to the sexuality gumball, which is also going to be close to the Latinx gumball. And all of it comes out in one handful. That new taste that comes from all of them being together is a taste that I will go to the ends of the earth to achieve. It fulfills me. Because that allows me to be my whole self.

I spent so much time compartmentalizing myself. Because I knew if Group A knew about Part B of me, I would be cast aside. I would never be allowed to come back to anything that Group A did. So Group A never knew about Part B of me. And Group C never knew about Part A, and on and on and on. It’s tiring. It’s zaps you of life, of strength. I finally had to say no, this is not authentic living. I had to recognize: do I want to keep living my life so compartmentalized? Or do I want to try and be whole? Walk into a room, and be myself.

The God that I know gave me that responsibility. And told me, “You know there is harm and hurt in the world. You have experienced it. Try and alleviate the pain that others are experienc- ing.” So that’s what I’ve been doing.

We recognize our gifts, we give the gifts, and somebody else can take from that, get the energy, and then move that energy on to someone else. I’ve known that forever. I’ve always known that I was supposed to do something to make the world better.

Ms. Billie Cooper: My DNA is my advocacy and my activism. It’s embedded in who I am. Not one day do I wake up and live my life that I’m not helping someone, or being there for someone. Because we have to.

Caro De Robertis (they/them) is the author of ‘So Many Stars: an Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color,’ as well as six novels, most recently ‘The Palace of Eros.’ Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous prizes, including the Golden Poppy Octavia Butler Award, two Stonewall Book Awards, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.