STAR House

STAR House was the communal home run by the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a group founded in 1970 by Stonewall veterans Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Its first permanent location was a rundown tenement at 213 East 2nd Street in Manhattan's East Village. Johnson and Rivera, both trans women of color, used money they earned through sex work to pay the rent and feed the young, mostly homeless trans and gender-nonconforming people who lived there. STAR House offered food, shelter, clothing, and a chosen family at a time when no city services existed for these youth. Though the house lasted only about a year, it is remembered as one of the first efforts in the United States to provide housing by and for trans people.