Victoria Cruz, a transgender rights advocate and Stonewall veteran, has died at the age of 79 after a battle with liver cancer. Cruz was present at the 1969 Stonewall uprising and spent 17 years at the New York City Anti-Violence Project supporting LGBTQ+ survivors of violence and abuse, becoming one of the most trusted and beloved figures in New York's transgender community.

I have been thinking about the news of Victoria Cruz's death since I read it, and the feeling it brings up is something I want to try to put into words. Not grief exactly, though it is that too. Something more like gratitude, and something like a question: what do we do now with what she gave us?

She was there at the beginning

Victoria Cruz was at the Stonewall Inn on the night in 1969 when the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement found its feet. She was not the loudest voice in the room. The New York Times noted that her role was quieter than those of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, whose names have become rightly iconic. But I think we all know, from years of watching how communities actually function, that quiet presence is not small presence. The people who stay, who show up year after year without seeking the spotlight, who simply make themselves available to whoever needs them: those people often do the most.

Cruz did that for a very long time.

Seventeen years of showing up

For 17 years she worked with the New York City Anti-Violence Project, supporting LGBTQ+ people who had experienced violence, discrimination, and abuse. She was a survivor of anti-trans workplace harassment and assault herself, which means she brought something to that work that no amount of training can give you: she knew what it felt like from the inside. She helped people navigate the legal system, access support services, and find a way back to themselves after terrible things had happened to them.

Her colleagues said that community members would simply ask for "Miss Vicky." Not a job title, not a department, not a referral pathway. Just her name, and the understanding that she would be there, and that she would not judge them. In 2012, the US Department of Justice recognised her work with the National Crime Victims' Service Award.

In a 2022 interview for the Anti-Violence Project, she put it simply: "If you have the empathy to help out people, that's half the ordeal. Just having the empathy and letting them know that you're there to help them, not to judge them."

That is it, really. That is the whole philosophy in two sentences. I have spent years trying to articulate something very like it, and she said it better than I ever have.

The documentary, and the justice she sought

Many people will have come to know Victoria Cruz through the 2017 documentary The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, in which she investigated the circumstances of Johnson's death in 1992. She was not content to let history settle into comfortable silence. She asked questions. She pushed. She wanted the truth to be on record, and she wanted her friend and forebear to be treated with the seriousness she deserved. That kind of loyalty, sustained over decades, across grief and frustration and the grind of fighting systems that would rather forget, is its own form of courage.

What we owe the people who came before us

People like Victoria Cruz built something from almost nothing. They were present at a moment of extraordinary risk, in an era when simply existing as a trans woman of colour in New York City carried daily danger, and they chose not just to survive but to serve. They stayed in the community. They absorbed other people's pain alongside their own. They created the networks and the mutual aid and the quiet wisdom that made it possible for the next generation to have a little more ground under their feet.

We are living, right now, through a period when trans people are under enormous pressure: legislative attacks, hostile media, restricted healthcare, and a political climate that sometimes makes it feel as though the ground is shifting beneath us. I understand why that is exhausting. I feel it too. And in those moments, I keep coming back to the people who were there in 1969, who faced violence and criminalisation and total social invisibility, and who still found ways to help each other. If they could do that, we can do this.

That is not a platitude. It is an inheritance. Victoria Cruz and her generation left us something real: proof that it is possible to build community and extend compassion even when the world is hostile, proof that one person who shows up consistently and refuses to judge can change lives, and proof that love, patient and practical and unglamorous, is the thing that actually holds communities together.

The best way to honour her is to keep doing the work, exactly as she did. To show up. To listen. To not judge. To make sure the people around us know they are not alone in any clinical, scripted way, but in the specific, human, reliable way that made people ask for Miss Vicky by name.

Rest well, Victoria Cruz. You gave us so much.