Sylvia Rivera

Transgender activist Sylvia Rivera is often compared to Rosa Parks. She became famous, in part, for participating in the Stonewall riots, and she spent her life campaigning bravely, stridently and vocally for the rights of gay and transgender people. Read the show notes here.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy the Wilson. So today's subject, which is transgender
activist Sylvia Rivera is often compared to Rosa Parks, like

(00:22):
I would say seventy percent of the articles, but I
read researching this episode compared her to Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks,
as you probably know, became famous in part for refusing
to give up her bus seat on a segregated bus,
and Sylvia Rivera became famous in part for purportedly throwing

(00:43):
the first bottle at a police officer during the Stonewall Riots.
But really, Rosa Parks and Sylvia Rivera almost could not
be more different from each other. Rosa Parks's case was
chosen specifically to try to overturn bus segregation Montgomery, Alabama,
precisely because she seemed really polite. She was married, she

(01:05):
was soft spoken, she went to church, and she had
no criminal records, so basically there was nothing in her
background that might turn white people off to the idea
that she deserved the same basic civil rights that they did.
Sylvia Rivera, on the other hand, has a lot more
in common with Claudett Colvin, who was also arrested for
refusing to give up a seat on a segregated bus

(01:27):
in Montgomery. But Claudett Colvin did not become the household
name that Rosa Parks did. Because she was an unmarried,
pregnant teenager who had a reputation for being a troublemaker.
Civil rights leaders deliberately didn't pursue her case because they
knew it would be a hard one to win. They
held out for a more so called respectable plaintiff instead,

(01:49):
And that brings us to Sylvia Rivera and the years
immediately after the Stonewall riots. She campaigned bravely and stridently
and vocally for the rights of gay and transgender people.
Although the term transgender, which is used to describe people
whose gender and identity doesn't match up with the sex
that they were assigned when they were born, that word
had not been coined yet. But Sylvia was also loud

(02:13):
and aggressive and angry and poor, sometimes even homeless. She
had a history of sex work and drug addictions. Her
mannerisms were really flamboyant, in your face. So when the
gay rights movement started trending towards so called respectability. Sylvia
got really pushed to the sidelines along with a lot
of other transgender people. She refused to be put in

(02:34):
a box, and so she wound up being excluded from
the very movement that she was fighting for, and she
was for decades pretty much forgotten about. So before we
get started, there's a word of caution about this story.
Because Sylvia ran away from home when she was only eleven.
Some of the events that happened to her, especially in
her young life, are disturbing. So parents and teachers, before

(02:55):
you share this with young people, I recommend listening to
it yourself first. And as a second note, some of
the language that was used at the time that Sylvia
lived and that she used about herself isn't the preferred
language that we used today, and will sort of point
out those as they come up. Uh. So, now that
you've been warned, we will jump in as we usually

(03:18):
do at the very beginning. Sylvia was actually born Ray
Rivera on July two of nineteen fifty one. Her mother
was Venezuelan and her father was Puerto Rican. Sylvia's mother
committed suicide by eating rat poison when Sylvia was three.
She also tried to kill Sylvia at that time, but
Sylvia survived and went on to be raised by her grandmother,

(03:40):
via Hita. Via Hita raised both Sylvia and Sylvia's half sister.
Viahita was essentially functioning as a single parent. Her husband
had abandoned her, and Sylvia's father, who had also abandoned
the family, was not paying child support. Sylvia's grandmother was
also very strict. Although she taught Sylvia to cook and

(04:03):
to sew and too niche, she really did not like
it when Sylvia started wearing girls clothes. Viajita would punish Sylvia,
sometimes physically, for wearing makeup and for dressing and girl's clothing, and,
as Sylvia described in the Oral History, Making History the
struggle for gay and lesbian equal rights, her grandmother would say, quote,

(04:25):
we don't do this. You're one of the boys. I
want you to be a mechanic, and Sylvia would answer, no,
I want to be a hairdresser, and I want to
wear these clothes. From Sylvia's point of view, her grandmother
also didn't like her because her skin was too dark.
She had heard her grandmother say that she wanted a
white granddaughter instead, and the struggle between the two of

(04:45):
them went on until at the age of ten, Sylvia
tried to commit suicide by taking her grandmother's pills. She
wound up instead in the hospital for two months. Sylvia
also faced bullying and harassment at school and in the
neighborhood as as well. The other children and their neighbors
didn't like her wearing girls clothing, and they didn't like
her effeminine mannerisms. Feeling lonely, isolated, and desperately at odds

(05:10):
with everyone around her, Sylvia left home at age eleven.
The straw that really broke the camel's back was seeing
how others treatment of her was affecting her grandmother. Even
though their relationship was often contentious and strained and even violent,
Sylvia did not like seeing her grandmother suffer over the
way people talked about her. After she ran away, Sylvia

(05:31):
went to forty two Street in New York City, which
was a haven for cross dressers and street walkers. She
had no other means to support herself, and so she
turned to sex work. And I want to make it
clear that there are people who choose to go into
sex work, but at this time Sylvia was eleven and
she had no other options. The area's drag queens pretty
much adopted her, and they're the ones who gave her

(05:52):
the name Sylvia. Sylvia was arrested frequently and her grandmother
would come and bail her out. A few days shy
of Sylvia's eighteenth birthday, she went to the Stonewall In
for the first time, and this was June twenty, nineteen
sixty nine. The Stonewall End was, like many of New
York's bars that catered to the gay community at the time,

(06:13):
owned by the Mafia. Homosexuality was a crime, and so
was cross dressing, so pretty much the only people who
were willing to operate businesses that catered to this demographic
were also themselves criminals. Gay bars were rated on a
regular basis. Standard operating procedure was that the police would
come in, they would make arrests and confiscations. They would

(06:35):
then collect a payoff, and then they would leave and
padlock the door behind them. Not long after the police
had gone, members of the mafia would come by cut
the padlock off. They would then restock the alcohol supply
and business would start right back up. So for the
people who didn't wind up getting arrested, it was more
of a hassle and an interruption to their evening's revelry

(06:55):
than anything else. For people who did get arrested, it
could be way way harder, and not just for the
fact that they were taken to jail, but often in
jail they were then taunted and sometimes beaten and sometimes
assaulted by other people who were in the jail. On June,
when the police came in, most of the patrons went

(07:17):
to the park across the street to wait, and they
were tired of being hassled. A lot of people say
that this was because it was the same week that
Judy Garland died, and that doesn't seem through the oral
histories to actually add up necessarily, but it's more a
point a coincidence than to cause an effect situation. Right

(07:38):
at some point, somebody started throwing coins at the police officers,
yelling things like here's your payoff, come get some more,
and then things started to escalate. People started throwing bottles
and Molotov cocktails. Sylvia is widely cited as the first
to do this, but near the end of her life
she really worked to try to dispel this idea, saying

(08:00):
that she was in fact the second to throw a bottle.
Soon the police were pinned down inside the bar with
the protesters outside, and the riot went on until reinforcements
arrived and dispersed the crowd. The Stonewall ryot wasn't remotely
the first event in the modern gay rights movement. It
wasn't even the first riot in an establishment that was

(08:21):
frequented by LGBT people. An early earlier example was a
riot at Cooper's Donuts in Los Angeles in X five,
and in that event, drag queens and gay men, many
of them black or Latino, fought back against police, first
by throwing donuts, which sounds sort of funny, and then
with hand to hand fighting much less funny. Uh. In

(08:41):
San Francisco, a picket protest among LGBT protesters turned into
a riot at Compton's Cafeteria in nineteen sixty six. But
Stonewall really did act as a sort of tipping point
and a rallying cry, definitely the most famous today. So
there are several things about the riots and lvia's presence
there that are caused for debate today. One is just

(09:04):
how much of the Stonewell Ins clientele was made up
of cross stressers and transgender people. Now, as we mentioned before,
the term transgender had not really been coined at this
point in history, but when it was coined about ten
years later, a lot of the people who would identified
as cross stressors or as transvestites at the time then

(09:24):
went on to identify as transgender. So we're gonna keep
talking about both cross stressers and transgender people both for
the rest of the episode, because there are two different things.
Cross stressing is about the clothes you have on and
transgender is about your gender expression, so your expression of
the gender that you uh that you are inwardly versus

(09:47):
the clothes that you have on your body. In Sylvia's
own words, cross stressers could only get and if they
knew somebody, because cross stressors were really frequently targeted by
the police, so a lot of businesses felt like it
was too much of a hassle to deal with them.
Other people have characterized the Stonewell in as a haven
for cross jessers and for transgender people, and there are

(10:07):
reputable historians on both sides. Another bone of contention is
actually whether Sylvia herself was even there. She says she was, uh,
And of course she's often credited with being the first
bottle thrower, but historians have not been able to corroborate
her presence there through eyewitness accounts. In the end, it

(10:28):
doesn't necessarily matter how many transgender patrons the Stonewell in
had or whether Sylvia was actually there that night. What
does matter is that Sylvia and the rest of the
cross dressing and transgender community became vocal, aggressive campaigners for
the rights of game and lesbians, bisexuals, and all manner
of people who just didn't conform to gender norms. They were,

(10:51):
in many ways the people who were the most visibly
on the forefront of the fight for equality and for
civil rights. And we're going to talk more about what
happened after Stonewall, right after a word from our sponsor.
If that is cool with Tracy, it is. Sylvia Rivera
had already been active in racial equality and anti war
causes before the Stonewall riot, and after the riot she

(11:14):
immediately passionately turned her attention to the growing movement for
gay rights to gay rights organizations formed in New York
in the wake of the riot. That was the Gay
Activists Alliance and the Gay Liberation Front, and Sylvia was
active in both of those groups as part of the
Gay Activists Alliance. Sylvia petitioned the city of New York

(11:34):
for an anti discrimination bill, and she was arrested while
trying to get signatures. When she appeared before the judge,
he immediately let her go. He recognized that with all
of the social turmoil that was going on in the
United States at that point, it would be a really
unwise pr move for him to jail someone who was
getting signatures for a petition. Sylvia also testified before the

(11:56):
city Council to try to get the bill passed. However,
as the bill was being negotiated, others in the gay
community agreed to drop protections for cross dressers from the
bill in the hope that it would be more likely
to pass. Sylvia and many of the other cross dressing
and transgender citizens of New York felt really deeply betrayed
by this. They had been working, campaigning and getting arrested

(12:19):
and sometimes facing abuse and violence and sexual assault in
jail once they had been arrested fighting for these causes,
and at this point it felt like they had done
this for a cause that had then turned their back
on them. And it didn't help that the bill minus
discrimination protections for gender expression did not actually pass until
fifteen years later, so that would have been ninet So

(12:42):
this concession really in the end was not much of
a help along the way. The Gay Activists Alliance specifically
dropped rights for the cross dressing communities from its mission entirely. Consequently,
after being excluded from other gay rights organizations, Sylvia and
her long time friend Marcia P. Johnson co founded the

(13:02):
Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries or STAR in the fall of
nineteen seventy. Essentially, the cross dressing and transgender community had
begun to feel excluded by other gay and lesbian rights organizations,
and so they formed their own. As a side note
to a lot of people today, the word transvestite has
connotations that are offensive, so people a lot of people

(13:25):
prefer the word cross stressor but at the time it
was a word that they were using to talk about
themselves frequently. Yeah, you also hear drag, which is in there,
and they can get a little fuzzy, and they're still
ongoing debate over you know, terminology and who should use
what to some degree that's still being worked out. Yes, so, uh,

(13:45):
we're not at all using those terms to be disrespectful,
but because that's those are the words that Sylvia and
Marcia were using to describe themselves. So Sylvia and Marcia's
next step was to start what was known as Star House,
and this was an outreach effort for the so called queens.
These were young homeless gay youth, many of whom later
went on to identify as transgender, and many of whom

(14:07):
were also people of color. And they originally operated Starhouse
out of the back of a truck, and then they
started renting a building at two thirteen et Second Street
and they fixed that up and there they provided shelter, food,
and guidance for homeless transgender youth and Sylvia and Marcia
really became mother figures for these kids. They had a

(14:29):
dance to try to raise some money to fund their operation,
but for the most part, Sylvia and Marcia kept the
place running by doing sex work. They tried to protect
all of the young people who were in their care
from being involved in the sex trade at all. However,
many of the youth wound up helping Star Houses efforts
by stealing food and eventually, uh, you know, this is

(14:51):
not really a workable business model. So Starhouse was evicted
from the property for non payment of rent, and before
they left, they took the refrigerator and they destroyed all
of the improvements that they made in the building out
of a sort of turnabout is fair play mindset, And
I feel like we should point out that the reason
that they were having to turn to stealing and sex

(15:12):
work to fund their operations is because their entire lives
at this point were not only illegal, but also specifically
targeted by the police and other people for harassment. So
that was sort of what it had come to by
being excluded from so many other social organizations that were
working to help homeless people and others in New York. Yeah,
it certainly was not like, oh, we don't want to

(15:35):
pursue legitimate means of gaining money. They just did not
have opportunities to do so, right, and that continues to
be a problem in a lot of areas today. Throughout
this time, Sylvia was also active in other radical organizations
as well, including the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords,
which is a Puerto Rican nationalist activism group. In nine three,

(15:57):
Sylvia was supposed to speak at Christopher's Street Liberation Day,
which was a festival to commemorate the anniversary of the
Stonewall Riots. However, radical feminists tried to keep Sylvia from
the stage because they viewed her wearing women's clothing as sexist.
In particular, activist Gino Leary, a former nun and lesbian feminist,
spoke out against Sylvia taking part. Sylvia's response was to

(16:22):
physically grab the microphone and to talk anyway, with a
lot of vigor and profanity behind her words. Um. She
spoke very candidly and angrily about how the gay community
was benefiting from the cross stressors work while simultaneously excluding
them from their successes as your payment. I do want
to note that Gino Leary went on to soften her

(16:44):
views about cross stressors and transgender people later in her life.
I don't want to paint her as a terrible person
who went around oppressing other people. She she did later
on express embarrassment and shame that she had really sickly
kicked people who were already down. Yeah, and the drag
queens that were supposed to perform at this rally were

(17:05):
also barred from performing. After this incident, Sylvia moved to Terrytown,
New York and lived with a boyfriend. Since she was
no longer in the city, she became less prominent in
its civil rights and gay rights efforts, but she did
make her way back every year for the parades and
festivals that commemorated the end of the Stonewall Riot. In
the interim, she led a relatively quiet life. She mostly

(17:29):
worked food service jobs for a while, but eventually, unfortunately,
she began abusing drugs again and wound up homeless, and
journalists who were working to chronicle the gay rights movements
earlier years and transgender people's contribution to the gay rights
movement found her living on the streets in New York
in the early nine nineties. This actually marked her return

(17:52):
to activism and to the public eye, which we'll talk
about after another brief ad break. It's tricky to talk
about some of the issues that are in today's episod
because the terminology that we used to talk about it today,
some of it was coined basically halfway through Sylvia Rivera's life.
It's also tricky to talk about Sylvia Rivera's identity, specifically UH,

(18:14):
because she really really resisted the idea of labels for
a lot of her life. She referred to herself as
a transvestite, and as we said earlier, that's the word
that a lot of people don't prefer to be used anymore.
The term transgender came around about halfway through her life,
but she wasn't totally comfortable calling herself that. Towards the
end of her life, she said quote, I'm tired of

(18:34):
being labeled. I don't even like the label transgender. I
just want to be who I am. I'm living the
way Sylvia wants to live. But despite her lack of
affinity for labels, Sylvia was undoubtedly an advocate for rights
and protections for transgender people throughout the last ten years
or show of her life. We talked earlier about Sylvia

(18:55):
founding the organization Star with Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha's body
was actually found in the Hudson River in Nineteo. Police
originally said that it was a suicide, but they eventually
opened a homicide investigation. And when I say eventually, I
mean two decades later. At the time of her death,
Sylvia and other friends of Marsha's had said that she

(19:15):
was not suicidal and that they had witnessed her being
harassed by someone near where her body was found shortly
before her death. In nine Sylvia was asked to lead
the twenty fifth anniversary Stonewall March. That same year, she
advocated for Martin Duberman's publishers to translate his LGBT history
book Stonewall into Spanish, but according to her, she was

(19:39):
told it would not sell well in quote third world countries.
In Latin countries and her last years, she and her
partner Julia Murray lived and work at a place called
Transy House. This is a collective and shelter for transgender
youth and they joined this collective in nine in Sylvia
was arrested during m O real for Matthew Shepherd in

(20:01):
New York. So if you are not familiar with his story,
Matthew Shepherd was a student at the University of Wyoming
at Laramie who was tortured, tied to a fence post,
and left to die as part of an anti gay
hate crime. He wound up dying of his injuries a
few days after he was found tied to the fence post.
According to Sylvia's own account, a police officer basically spread

(20:22):
the word to arrest her first because she was known
for being very vocal at these kinds of demonstrations. In
Sylvia spoke at the World Pride rally in Rome. In
two thousand, another transwoman named Amanda Milan was stabbed in
the neck and killed on street. Sylvia organized a series

(20:44):
of rallies and protests surrounding her death and the trial
of her killers. Sylvia continued to be really vocal about
the schism between the gay community and the trans community
in the years before her death, and about a year
before she died, at a talk given before the Latino
Amen of New York, she said, yes, we can adopt children.
All well and good, that's fine. I would love to

(21:05):
have children. I would love to marry my lover over there,
she pointed to Julia Murray. But for political reasons, I
will not do it, because I don't feel that I
have to fit in that closet of normal straight society
which the gay mainstream is going towards. In the same speech,
she described the trans community's participation in the gay rights
movement this way quote. We were determined that evening, that evening,

(21:29):
being the night at the Stonewall riots, that we were
going to be a liberated, free community, which we did
acquire that Actually, I'll change the WII you have acquired
your liberation, your freedom. From that night, myself, I've got
expletive deleted, just like I had back then. But I
still struggle, and I still continue the struggle. I will
struggle till the day I die. And my main struggle

(21:51):
right now is that my community will seek the rights
that are justly ours. In the last year of her life,
Sylvia campaigned for New York Sexual or Ination Non Discrimination Act,
which is also referred to as SUNDA, and that act
prohibits discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived sexual
orientation in employment, housing, public accommodations, education, credit, and the

(22:14):
exercise of civil rights. It includes protections for transgender people.
Sylvia was not exaggerating when she said that she was
going to work until she died for this. Her last
meeting about SANDA, when she met with city officials for
the last time, took place in a hospital bed when
she was an in stage liver disease and in great pain.

(22:36):
She died on February nineteenth, two thousand two, of liver
disease at the age of fifty one. SANDA was signed
into law on December seventeenth of that same year. On
November fourteenth of two thousand and five, the City of
New York named the corner of Christopher and Hudson Streets
in the West Village Sylvia Rivera Way. Today, the Sylvia

(22:57):
Rivera Food Pantry, which is under the auspice, is of
the Metropolitan Community Church of New York, which serves the
working poor as well as people with HIV through a
specialized pantry program that's designed for people on anti retroviral
therapies UH. These are higher in protein and easy to prepare.
It also provides nutritional information and kind of meal guidance

(23:19):
for all of the populations that it serves. Sylvia's Place
is a Metropolitan Community Church of New York services organization
for homeless youth. Sylvia Rivera Law projects work focuses on
transgender intersects and gender nonconforming people, particularly those who are
low income people and people of color. They provide legal services,

(23:41):
public education, and advocacy for public policy reform. She had
a big legacy. She did have a big legacy. She
had a big legacy that I think her Her name
is not necessarily well known in the context of the
gay rights movement unless you are pretty familiar with it.
The oral history that we referenced, making history Um, she

(24:05):
is actually the only transgender person who's included, and she's
referred to with male pronouns the whole time, and is
classified as a drag queen, which is she did call
herself a drag queen, but that's kind of limiting and
how she actually viewed herself. I mean, since she was
not a fan of the labels and she identified in

(24:26):
her life as Sylvia, like a lot of drag performers
will still maintain their uh you know, in many cases,
the old school drag performers that were mostly men and
then presented as female for performance, they still maintained that
male persona, whereas she did not at all totally. One

(24:48):
of the reasons that I wanted There are a couple
of reasons that I wanted to do this episode, and
one is that I think the campaign for transgender rights
has been increasingly present in the news over the last
year or so in terms of mainstream news coverage. It's
definitely not something that has been unknown, but when it
comes to like the really mainstream news outlets, um, and

(25:13):
the other is a lot of the things that Sylvia
and the young people that she and Marcia were looking after,
you know, twenty years ago. A lot of those issues
still really exist today, Like, there are still a lot
of homeless transgender youth who's who've basically been thrown out
of their homes by their parents and don't really have

(25:34):
anywhere else to turn. So I think her legacy is
extremely important, not just for having been part of the
gay rights movement, but for specifically when it comes to
working with homeless young people who don't really have anywhere
else to go. Yeah, it's an extremely high risk community
in terms of uh, violence, falling into sex word, you know,

(25:56):
just really being in at risk situations. Yeah. Well, and
Sylvia specifically in addition to being uh originally identifying as
a transvestite and then later kind of identifying as transgender.
Maybe in addition to that, she was Latina, and she
was very poor, she was not particularly educated. She was

(26:18):
in a whole lot of at risk groups all at
the same time. And um she had she said in
a in a speech right before her her death, not
right before, about a year before, that she wanted to
live to be a hundred. She only made it to
fifty one. But given all of those factors, the fact
that she made it to fifty one in the time
that she was living. It's pretty incredible. That's the saddest

(26:41):
possible place to end that. So on a more upbeat tone,
we're going to do a continuation of what we have
already started, which is reading some of the responses we
got when we asked for people who had history degrees
to tell us kind of what they did with those
in terms of their career, which grew out of a
question someone to us of how we got work to

(27:01):
where we are and how people who study history in
college might get such jobs, and we didn't know because
that's not what we studied in college. So we went
to our fabulous listener base because they are smarty pants
is and a lot of them have history degrees. Uh.
So we will read a few more summer short uh.
One is our listener, Christina. She has a degree in

(27:21):
history from the University of Toronto St. Michael's and she
went on to teach high school in the Toronto area
and she teaches Canadian history to Grade ten students as
well as other social studies courses. So we always love
a teacher, So thank you for teaching the historians of tomorrow.
Our listener, Kristen got her bachelor's in history and she's
currently finishing up her master's uh. She currently works to

(27:44):
part time jobs both in history. She's a museum educator
at a hands on children's museum as well as registrar
at a lighthouse museum, which sounds fascinating to me, and
then once her master's degree is complete, her plan is
to work in preservation. So a lot of these kind
of do lead to an archivist path. Our listener Meghan
is a curator, and she says, my recommendation is to

(28:06):
find out what your interests are teaching, research, museum studies, politics, etcetera,
and go from there. If working in a museum is
your career goal, I'd recommend taking any internships that may
be offered and volunteer as much as possible. Our listener
Gina said, I have a double major liberal arts degree
in history and classical Studies, i e. Ancient Mediterranean. It

(28:27):
has served me well through very jobs by endowing me
with an appreciation of perspective, context, communication, and storytelling, which
is what drew me to ancient Greece and Rome in
the first place. And I believe that understanding the roles
played by perspective and context in historical storytelling gives us
a foundation for humanistic empathy that can impact how we
read and interpret news stories today. I could not agree more. Uh.

(28:49):
These days, I am celebrating almost a decade in sales
and customer service and expanding my communication skills into the
animal world with dogcare and training. Uh. She makes such
a great point. I think about kind of the historical
perspective giving you a better lens through which to view
the world around us today. Definitely that's a motivating factor
in my episode selection. Sometimes. Yeah, and then the last

(29:12):
time I will read is from Colleen, and Colleen says
I bartend and my degree gives me lovely conversation fodder
off and all reference. Your podcast then discussed something I
studied that vaguely relates. I've worked with several other folks
with degrees in equally exciting fields creative writing, graphic design, etcetera.
I genuinely love my job, But as one of many
folks who graduated just as the quote great Recession began,

(29:33):
the actual history related career opportunities for history degrees we're
not as plentiful as one might hope. That happens a
lot to liberal arts degree holders in general, and especially
in the last five seven years. It's been a long
time since we've had like a big staff expansion that
how stuff works, but we did several years ago. And

(29:53):
one of the best things about that was Number one.
I was always like, I wanna find people. You don't
have to have a journalism degree, you don't have to
have an English degree, but a liberal arts degree is
preferred because there's so much research and writing involved in
basically every liberal arts degree. Um. And then number two
was getting to basically offer people jobs. Yeah, it was

(30:17):
a good feeling. It's a really good feeling to make
that phone call doing the things that the career center
at college was always telling me, Like, people love liberal
arts degrees because of all these reasons that these history
majors have just been pointing out. But then when I
got into the world of actually trying to find the job,
I was like, you guys, true films were told. Yeah,

(30:37):
so I got to make that true for some people
on a limited scale. Yeah, which is awesome. Anybody who
gets a chance to work for Tracy, I highly recommend it.
So if you would like, I really genuinely do that.
It's not me being nice because she's here, she's my
favorite boss I think of all time. That's you have

(30:58):
some stiff competition there. You're there's a very close seconds.
So if you do something wrong, you're gonna fall the
number two. But right now I'll try not to do that.
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