Leo sat at the corner table, his fingers tracing the edges of a worn binder. He was twenty-two, three months on T, and still getting used to the way his voice vibrated in his chest—a low, resonant hum that felt like finally finding the right radio frequency after years of static. "You’re overthinking the speech," a voice chirped.

Popular culture often credits the 1969 Stonewall Riots as the birth of the modern gay rights movement. What is less discussed is who was on the front lines. The heroes of Stonewall were not neatly groomed cisgender gay men; they were transgender women, gender-nonconforming drag queens, and butch lesbians. Figures like (a self-identified transvestite and gay liberation activist) and Sylvia Rivera (a co-founder of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or STAR) were the ones throwing bricks at police.