“She would go to the Stonewall just to police her boyfriend,” France says. The louse would often cheat with one of Sylvia Rivera’s friends, creating a rift between Cruz and Rivera that lasted until Johnson’s death brought the two of them together. They became inseparable; when Rivera lay dying at St. Vincent’s Hospital in 2002, Cruz would often visit, promising to “try to keep the community together, because we are our own worst enemy.”

After studying theater at Brooklyn College—and, in the grand tradition of theater majors everywhere, struggling to find a job after graduation—Cruz went back to hairdressing before falling on hard times. She began dating a man who was addicted to crack, and became hooked herself for eight long years. “There was no money for rent, there was no money for the necessities of life,” she says. “It became really hard to maintain myself, so I went on public assistance.”

That’s how a trans rebel with an appetite for nightlife ended up working at the Cobble Hill Nursing Home. At first, the young empath loved her job, which connected her with people in need—in this case, mostly senior citizens with Alzheimer’s. Then tragedy struck.

In 1996, Cruz was sexually assaulted by four female co-workers who grabbed at her breasts and crotch and hurled slurs at her. The attack cracked the delicate world she had been rebuilding.

“I was very angry. Very angry,” she says. “The worst part of it is that I couldn’t feel the ground beneath me.” For a month, she operated in a fugue state, walking to the nursing home each morning with her hand curled around a knife inside her pocket. “I was contemplating suicide,” she says.

A friend referred her to the Anti-Violence Project, a group that helped her report the incident, which was later taken to the Brooklyn Criminal Court. She was forced to listen as police officers gossiped about her, to define her anatomy in court. (“I have . . . two breasts and a penis,” she remembers angrily explaining.) In the end, two out of the four women were found guilty of harassment, a charge punishable by a maximum of 15 days in jail and a $250 fine.

This is where it’s important to note that Cruz is a spiritual woman, one who had overcome assaults before. Since the 1980s, she’s worn a headband every day adorned with feathers and exactly eight cowrie shells as a tribute to her Taíno culture and her own sense of mysticism (seven shells for herself and “one for the Almighty”). A firm believer that all things serve a special purpose, she dug through the ashes of her agony and plucked out a new path, joining the Anti-Violence Project as a volunteer and then, after a little prodding, as an administrative assistant. “Beats welfare,” she jokes. Eventually, she became the group’s senior domestic-violence counselor and advocate, and was honored in 2012 by then U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for her service to the city’s victims.

It was also around the time she started at A.V.P. that she met a man she describes to me only as “Joe.” It was Pride Sunday and she was downtown, drunk on 14th Street after a day of celebration. Around 1 a.m., she was heading to the subway when a man across the way beckoned to her with a “come hither” motion. “I said, ‘No, you come over here,” she recalls. Of course he came. She gave him her number (on a business card that read “Queen Victoria”), and he called the very next day.