Sylvia Rivera would always be quick to redress those who thought she threw the first Molotov cocktail at the historic Stonewall riot on June 28, 1969. “I have been given the credit for throwing the first Molotov cocktail by many historians, but I always like to correct it,” she said in 2001. “I threw the second one. I did not throw the first one!”

Today, Rivera is revered as a legendary transgender activist. She vehemently fought for early legislation banning gender discrimination; sought to create safe spaces for queer homeless youth; and spoke loudly and powerfully that her community of transgender individuals, homeless and incarcerated among them, be fought for in the move toward equality. At the time, though, many gay rights activists regarded her as a mere troublemaker.

By the time Rivera became a full-fledged activist, spurred on by the Stonewall riots, she had been fighting for much of her life. She was born in the Bronx to a Venezuelan mother and Puerto Rican father, but her father had abandoned her and her mother had committed suicide. She was being taken care of by her grandmother, who would often beat her for her effeminacy. She shaved her eyebrows and wore makeup to school beginning in fourth grade, and by the time she was 10 years old left home and began life as a sex worker, hustling near Times Square. In a community she had found of street queens — as poor trans youth, some of whom performed sex work and/or were homeless, then identified themselves — she gave herself the name “Sylvia Rivera” in a ceremony attended by some fifty of her friends and peers. She also referred to herself as a drag queen, and later in life as transgender.

It was, by all accounts, an arduous life: Rivera and her peers were regularly beaten up by cops, johns, or even each other. Rivera would eventually serve 90 days on Riker’s Island, sent to a cellblock kept for perpetrators of “gay crimes,” as scholar, activist, and author Jessi Gan noted in 2007.

When Rivera threw that second Molotov cocktail at Stonewall, she was only 17. She was no stranger to demonstrations at that time, having also protested against Vietnam, for women’s rights and civil rights. But Stonewall incited a fervor in Rivera to keep going, to keep fighting for voices marginalized within the gay rights space. She became involved with the Gay Liberation Front, or GLF, and the Gay Activists’ Alliance, GAA, and challenged the way the predominantly white gay and lesbian community approached activism from a middle class perspective. Rivera wanted their activism to be more progressive, to include in their fight the rights of transgender individuals, including people of color, the homeless, and the incarcerated. But she challenged multiple communities through her activism, also working with Puerto Rican activist organization the Young Lords, hoping the Puerto Rican and Latinx communities would acknowledge the reality of gay and transgender people, says Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the departments of American Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women’s Studies.

But some other activists didn’t like the way she pushed. She was banned from New York’s Gay and Lesbian Community Center, for example, after she destroyed a desk in the lobby, enraged because she felt the center did not address the needs of transgender homeless youths who slept in front of it. At a gay pride rally in 1973, she got onstage amidst boos from the crowd. “I had to fight my way up on that stage...people that I called my comrades in the movement literally beat the shit out of me,” Rivera would say later. She stopped working with the GLF and GAA and the gay rights movement in general after three or four years because the organizations began to both publicly denounce and ignore her. She would return some 20 years later for the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, asked to participate by the pride parade’s organizing body. “The movement had put me on the shelf, but they took me down and dusted me off," she said in 1995. “Still, it was beautiful. I walked down 58th Street and the young ones were calling from the sidewalk, 'Sylvia, Sylvia, thank you, we know what you did.' After that I went back on the shelf. It would be wonderful if the movement took care of its own.”