Julio Rivera was brutally murdered on July 2, 1990, at the age of 29 inside the P.S. 69 schoolyard by three local young, white men. Julio was a gay, New York-born Puerto Rican, originally from the Bronx, who lived in Jackson Heights and worked as a bartender. Twenty years later on the anniversary of Julio’s death, New York City finally commemorated this history, officially naming 37th Ave and 78th Street, Julio Rivera Corner.
Rivera’s murder resembled the deaths of at least a dozen other gay men killed in the neighborhood between 1970 and 1990. Up until that point, none of these hate crimes had ever been solved or prosecuted. Initially, the New York Police Department (NYPD) refused to classify Rivera’s death as a bias attack and instead classified it as a drug-related crime. In response, a local LGBT group, with help from Manhattan-centered organizations like Queer Nation, took action. Candlelight vigils and protests were organized. These actions and the related media attention pressured the city to re-classify the murder and issue a reward for the arrest of the killers, who were later found and convicted.
Jackson Heights has been a queer space since the 1920s, when the commute made possible from Manhattan’s midtown along the newly established 7 line attracted actors and vaudevillians from Times Square. The area has since been transformed by immigrants, mainly from Latin America, but it remained a gay friendly area. Since the 1990s it has been seen as the epicenter of the city’s gay Latinx life. The visibility of the LGBTQ community changed dramatically after the murder of Julio Rivera. In a matter of a few years, multiple organizations were founded in the neighborhood to provide services to different LGBTQ communities: a chapter of PFLAG; Generation Q, an afterschool youth drop-in center; SAGE Queens (now called the Queens Center for Gay Seniors); and the community center Queens Pride House.
In 1992, Daniel Dromm and other local gay activists founded the Queens Pride Parade. In 2009, Dromm, a former teacher, became one of the first openly gay City Council members elected from outside Manhattan. Meanwhile, the parade continues to be held in early June of each year,e and regularly attracts 10,000-40,000 people. It is the second largest Pride in New York City and the second largest parade in Jackson Heights after the Colombian Day Parade.
The neighborhood is the most prominent “gayborhood” in Queens and believed to be the largest concentration of LGBTQ immigrants in New York City. The political organizing and coalition building that emerged in the years after Julio Rivera’s death created a new norm of LGBTQ political visibility, coalition building, and action in Jackson Heights that remains to this day. Speaking to a multi-ethnic, cross generational crowd festooned with rainbow flags, Dromm explains in Frederick Wiseman’s documentary about the neighborhood, In Jackson Heights, “Jackson Heights is the most diverse community in the world, literally! We have 167 different languages spoken here. We are very very proud of that diversity. Let’s salute that, and let’s all be proud of what we have accomplished.”
Further Information
Frederick Wiseman documentary In Jackson Heights