Frank Kameny & Sylvia Rivera are heroes, but their deaths reveal a sad truth about queer elders

Frank Kameny and Sylvia Rivera
Photo: Library of Congress

Among the 50 LGBTQ+ pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes’ names inscribed on the silver hexagons hanging from the rainbow-colored U.S. flag backdrop of the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor — a monument unveiled during New York City’s 2019 World Pride last June — are two in particular: Sylvia Rivera and Frank Kameny, early queer rights activists who, unlike many of their peers, survived anti-queer violence and the HIV epidemic to die in the relative peace of the 21st century.

Rivera died on February 19, 2002 at age 50 of liver cancer in St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York, and Kameny died nearly a decade later, on October 11, 2011 (National Coming Out Day), at age 86, of a heart attack in the northwest Washington, D.C. home where he’d lived for 49 years. They both laid the foundations for the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, but few people outside of activists or academics recognize their names. Even fewer realize they both…

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