When she first went to college, she chose Long Island University Brooklyn, but she soon tired of the un-campus-like feel of its few downtown buildings, not to mention the expensive price tag. After taking some time off to work full time, she realized she wanted to return to school and transferred to żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” as a sophomore.

“It just felt like it fit my story to come to Brooklyn,” she says. “I live nearby. The beautiful campus was a big plus. And at the end of the day, this is a place where I can say I’m proud of my diverse peers and the friends I’ve made here.”

As a new student, she became more in tune with social justice issues and got involved in several activities that helped clarify her career goals.

She talks about how the organizations she joined shaped her and how she parlayed her extracurricular connections to snag her current position as the special assistant to President Michelle J. Anderson.

After you left LIU and started working, it must have been tough to give up a full-time paycheck to go back to school.

I was making good money and passed on some opportunities to advance at my job. It was a struggle, but during the height of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement was heating up and I became more aware of social justice issues and the kind of anxiety that many people in the country were living with. I did some thinking and realized that I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. I had some savings, so I quit. I knew I needed to invest in myself. So when I came here, I started looking up extracurricular activities, something I never had time for before. I got involved with NYPIRG [the New York Public Interest Research Group] and got a public policy internship to work with state officials in Albany.

How did that connect with your interests and plans?

I was interested in public health and was thinking med school was the next step. But I came to realize that the healthcare system in America was dictated by unjust laws and Big Pharma. Doctors, although they provide healthcare, don’t have the leeway to make changes outside their office. The NYPIRG experience lobbying, writing memos, and speaking for the public voice made more impact than anything else, and prompted me to run for chairperson of NYPIRG’s student board of directors, where I served a two-year term. Each experience at NYPIRG pushed me closer to the idea that I wanted to pursue a career in public policy. I knew I couldn’t change the world overnight, but I wanted to get more involved. So I did.

How so?

One of the things I did was to reactivate the Global Medical Brigades chapter. It’s a group that gives students the opportunity to volunteer as medical assistants in under-resourced, mostly rural communities in a handful of countries. The college chapter had never been restarted after the pandemic. We had to start from scratch. All of our procedures and policies had to be written. We had to get the word out to student volunteers and show them what a good opportunity this was. We went to Panama, where we shadowed doctors, packed meds, and worked with pharmacies.

It was eye-opening. Healthcare is so routine for us and so accessible. Unless you go out in the world, you don’t know what it feels like to go without that. I was grateful for the opportunity, but at the same time it was heartbreaking.

You were also involved with the Undergraduate Student Government.

I was the USG president’s press director during my senior year. It’s what led me to this position because as press director, I interacted with the żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” administration more than a typical student does, so I got to know the office a little bit. A week before Commencement, I got a call from President Anderson, who said she had this position open, and asked if I’d like to interview. I had a final exam and interview right after. A couple of days later, she called me and told me I had the job.

What do you do in your position?

I am an advisor to the president and a member of the cabinet. I schedule meetings for her and often attend them with her to take notes. I organize a lot of events, something I’m just realizing I enjoy doing. I deal with students a lot, and I’m very grateful. When students are working with the president’s cabinet or trying to organize a community event, I get to help them put it together. It’s a great benefit that I’m a former student because I can give my input. It’s rewarding because I remember how much it meant when someone helped me out as a student.

And what are your long-term plans?

I feel like I’m just getting started here. It hasn’t even been a year yet.

But eventually, I want to be a neuroscientist who also lobbies. I would love a job where my research could help change laws. I want to go to graduate school and study how the brain impacts our behavior and where that intersects with the law and public policy. The intersection of all of that is not a common field, so finding the right grad program isn’t easy.

For now, I’m going to stay receptive to the doors that open for me. I never thought about being in this position, and I’m really enjoying it.

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“I said, ‘Let me see what’s going on,’” says Cruz, who suspected him of philandering. When she arrived, Frankie saw her and told her to go home. She refused. She remained on a stoop near the inn and saw Sylvia Rivera—co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), who would become a key figure in what was about to go down—across the street in Sheridan Square Park. Cruz remembers feeling there was something ominous in the air that night, and the arrival a few hours later of police vans confirmed her intuition.

“All hell broke loose.”

The Stonewall Riot: “We got boisterous,” says Victoria Cruz ’82. “Shoes started flying. Bottles started flying. People started throwing bricks and rocks. Some folks began setting cars and garbage cans on fire.”

The New York City bars and clubs that serviced LGBTQ clientele had been suffering regular state-sanctioned harassment, raids, and violence, in addition to the violence individual members of the community faced in their private lives from an anti-queer citizenry-at-large that sometimes even included family members. Cruz notes that lesbians and transgender women of color, particularly those who could not readily pass as cisgender (non-transgender) women, were often the main targets.

The cops would punch you right in the breast! They’d slap you up and down! They’d threaten you! One of the lines they used to use on us was ‘Hey, do you want to see my nightstick?’ and if we were sassy and responded, ‘Hey, do you want to see mine?’ you would get your gay knots,” Cruz recalls, explaining how the abuse came in myriad forms. “When lesbians were caught by the police, the cops used to pull on their bra straps and snap them against their backs. They called this ‘Robin Hooks’ because of the metal hooks on the bras that would leave marks on their backs after what the cops did. This is one of the reasons, I think, during the feminist movement, women started burning their bras. And if the clubs were raided and you were transgender, you had to carry with you at least three articles of clothing that pertained to the gender you were assigned at birth.”

Otherwise, Cruz says, the cops would arrest them, strip them down, and force them into prison cells with other inmates who objected to queer identities.

On this night, the victims of such tactics had had enough, and instead of allowing those forces to trample over them, they decided to fight back. Cruz says that she believes several factors fueled the resistance at that particular moment.

“Judy Garland [an icon to members of the LGBTQ community] had just been laid to rest. The hot and sticky weather had made us even more irritable. The atmosphere in the Village was uncharacteristically gloomy. Then, when the police showed up and started attacking us—attacking, particularly, lesbian and transgender women of color—we said: ‘No, honey. Not today!’”

What ensued, Cruz says, was an almost surreal scene out of the Keystone Cops. “We got boisterous. Shoes started flying. Bottles started flying. People started throwing bricks and rocks. Some folks began setting cars and garbage cans on fire. The cops started chasing a group around the corner, chasing them in a circle, so that at one point, it looked like the group was actually chasing the cops!”

On June 24, 2016, President Barack Obama designated the Stonewall Inn a National Monument, the first one in honor of members of the LGBTQ community in the United States.

As more police officers showed up, things escalated; Frankie insisted that Cruz leave, and she finally relented. The next evening, she accompanied Frankie back to the Stonewall Inn. It was in a shambles. Cruz and her beau helped clean up the place. From the debris, she salvaged a plaque that announced the prices of alcoholic beverages, and she became a foster mother to the watchdog—Rusty, a shorthaired pointer—that guarded the inn’s property. Cruz knew at that moment that she was a participant in and witness to something that was greater than her or any one person.

“You had the civil rights movement for black people, the feminist movement, and I knew that this was our time,” says Cruz, who, the following year, participated in the very first LGBTQ pride march in U.S. history, which took place in New York City.

Growing Up Transgender in Red Hook

Cruz’s identity was never really up for debate; from a young age, she was very clear about who she was. But the world’s view was a different matter entirely. It was the world, after all, that assigned her male at birth, without her control or input, based purely on biological understandings that failed, according to Cruz, to speak to the nuances of human existence and experience.

Born in Guánica, Puerto Rico, Cruz came to the mainland United States—Red Hook, Brooklyn—when she was six years old, just after her father, a World War II veteran, served in the Korean War. The third of 11 children (six, including Cruz, survive today), she spent much of her youth caring for her younger siblings. She attended Metropolitan Vocational High School and received a license in cosmetology and hairdressing.

“I always wanted to be a hairdresser, from when I was young,” Cruz says. “I used to do my sisters’ hair. My mother was an asthmatic. She was often sick, so I would wind up taking care of my younger siblings.” She worked professionally as a hairdresser for a period of time.

When Cruz was growing up, the word transgender had not yet come into existence, and transgender people in the United States were simply thought to be very feminine gay men or very masculine lesbian women, cross-dressers and drag kings/queens, and eventually, transvestites. There were few, if any, serious conversations about gender identity.

“At a very early age, while I was living in Red Hook, I saw the World Trade Center going up,” Cruz reflects. She says that seeing those majestic towers being built triggered something in her and made her, every night before she went to bed, engage in a bit of magical thinking.

Cruz was never “in the closet.” She says that her family had always known that she was “different” and that, surprisingly, most of her family accepted her, including her father. Courtesy of Victoria Cruz

“I used to do those ‘Star light, star bright, wish I may, wish I might, make this wish come true tonight’ sort of things, and I would always wish to wake up as a girl.”

But Cruz was never “in the closet.” She says that her family had always known that she was “different”— perhaps in ways they could not articulate or understand, but they knew. She says that, surprisingly, most of her family accepted her, including her father.

“I think I was blessed, because my family didn’t disown me. And I had six brothers, so no one in the neighborhood really messed with me. I always stood my ground, even when I had to fight my brothers. Sometimes they would call me a ‘faggot.’ They stopped calling me that once I began to win my fights with them,” she laughs, adding that her family, who had affectionately nicknamed her Negro (Spanish for “black”) because she had the darkest skin among them, began to call her Negra, the feminine form of the word, as a sign of acknowledgment and respect for who she really was.

Still, Cruz’s mother had some difficulty accepting her and her identity, which caused an estrangement.

“Once, I ran away from home, at age 17, and I didn’t come back for about two years. My mother got sick with asthma and she asked to see me, and I went back. She hugged and kissed me, and we cried together, and I moved back to Red Hook,” Cruz says. She recalls renting an apartment at 109 Union Street for $40 a month that had a beautiful view of Governor’s Island from one side and of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline from the other. “My mother was a seamstress and she made all of my dresses and taught me how to sew.”

As she started to discover who she was, pushing back against what society told her she had to be, Cruz sought the means to express what she was feeling inside and began her physical transformation.

“I went to Dr. Leo Wollman, rest in peace, on West 28th Street and Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island. He was a pioneer in hormonal therapy and transitional medical issues, and I began to take the pills he prescribed me. But then I found out that you could get hormone shots on the black market for much cheaper.”

Once she had stepped fully into her identity, she became part of a vibrant and celebratory queer community in New York City, partying hard and fast. In the back of her mind, though, she knew that she had to provide a more stable life for herself.

“I thought, ‘This body is not going to last forever,’ so I said, ‘Let me continue my education.’”

Cruz enrolled at żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” in 1978 and majored in theater. She made friends with the small queer community on campus at the time. It was not officially organized, but members found one another through a combination of luck and intuition.

A Hard Road to Activism

Upon graduating in 1982, Cruz could not find any work directly related to her field, so she began a career on the nightclub stage, performing drag shows in some of the local gay venues. She also became a sex worker, which could be particularly dangerous for transgender women of color. Cruz carried a hammer or spike heels as a defense.

“Queen Victoria” Cruz in costume at a NYC Pride parade, date unknown. Says Cruz, “The transgender experience isn’t new. It’s as old as the human experience, and anyone who does their research would know this. I think society needs to be educated, and maybe after being educated, empathy will follow.” Courtesy of Victoria Cruz

“The other workers would throw rocks and bottles at me when they saw me coming because they saw me as competition. So I had to change my venue and change the time I would work. I would go to this bar called the Grapevine on West 47th Street, the diamond district, during the day. And my clients would pay me in jewelry. And I think that was a blessing, because jewelry was hard to get rid of, and that prevented me from spending my earnings on frivolous things.”

Cruz dated a Navy veteran who abused crack cocaine and eventually persuaded her to partake—a habit that depleted her savings. But she would not stay in that state for long. Concerned about her health and appearance, Cruz sought professional help for herself and her partner. She brought him to the VA hospital, then a local rehabilitation center where he remained for three months. Cruz discovered that he told his therapists that Cruz was the cause of his drug addiction, stating that her transgender identity caused him a great deal of pain and shame.

“That was a betrayal,” Cruz says. “I was the one who found him a place where he could get clean. And he was doing drugs before he met me.” Cruz never saw the man again.

In an attempt to gather herself and regroup, Cruz took four months to get clean and applied for public assistance. The simple act of applying for something like help from the government can often prove difficult for transgender people.

“When I went for the physical examination, you were required to undergo when applying for assistance, the nurse told me to go into the exam room and put my legs up into the stirrups. Oh, the comedy! When the doctor came in, he said, ‘You’re in the wrong room!’”

In 1996, she was enrolled in Welfare Education Program (WEP), which, at the time, required that adults receiving assistance work a specific number of hours per week wherever the agency sent them. Initially, the program assigned Cruz to work in a public park, but she expressed concerns about her safety as a transgender woman. She was then given a job at Cobble Hill Health Center, a nursing home where she enjoyed working with elderly and disabled clients and believed she would be safer.

That was not to be so. Cruz was peppered with gender slurs, and physically and sexually assaulted twice by cisgender female co-workers, one of whom she knew from her old neighborhood, and who Cruz believes was the instigator of the abuse.

“The first time, I didn’t say anything,” Cruz remembers. “But the second time was much more of a violent assault, and I said, ‘No, no, no, no, no. This isn’t going to happen.’”

Cruz began to experience signs of trauma after the experience. “I was in shock for about a month. I couldn’t feel the ground beneath me as solid. It felt more like foam rubber. I would get up in the morning and walk around aimlessly, mindlessly, but somehow find myself back in front of the nursing home. When I came to, I’d say, ‘What am I doing here?’”

Cruz’s friend Rosalyn Blumenstein from the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of New York referred her to the New York City Anti-Violence Project. She explained what had happened to her to Christine Quinn, the first openly gay speaker of the New York City Council, who was the director of the project at that time. Quinn suggested the grassroots approach of picketing the nursing home. Eventually, charges were brought against Cruz’s attackers, and two of the four assailants were found guilty of harassment.

In 1997, based on Cruz’s friendly and professional interactions with the staff, Cruz was hired by Quinn to work at the Anti-Violence Project, starting as an administrative assistant. After a few years, noting her tremendous empathy with clients, the organization promoted her to a social worker counselor position, working specifically with victims of domestic violence. She became coordinator of the program, and then senior counselor advocate, the highest position she could attain without a master’s degree in social work. Cruz led training modules for counselors who aid people entering public shelters (the Anti-Violence Project was one of the first organizations to develop shelters specifically for the LGBTQ community).

Keeping the Spotlight on Educating the Public

She did not at first grasp how much of an impact her advocacy for victims was having on the larger society, not even after helping hundreds of people leave and survive dangerous situations. It was not until 2012 that she began to see her influence. She was notified during the Obama administration that she would be the first transgender woman of color to receive the Justice Department’s National Crime Victim Service Award, which was presented to her at the White House by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Cruz, who now walks with a cane due to rheumatoid arthritis, recently retired from her career as an advocate after 18 years of service. Still, work is far from over. She was featured prominently in the critically acclaimed 2017 Netflix documentary The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, which examines the lives of the transgender women at the forefront of the gay rights movement who were often erased from mainstream narratives. She will also star in an upcoming documentary celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall protests in 2019. She returned to the żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” campus for the discussion “Trans Activism Before, During and After Stonewall,” part of a joint collaboration by the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, LGBTQ+ Resource Center, The Women’s Center, and Women’s and Gender Studies to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.

Cruz is overwhelmed by her newfound stardom and the adoration she is receiving from the younger generations who are just discovering her accomplishments. In social media spaces, they have dubbed her “Queen.” When asked what she thinks of this, she jokes, “But I am, darling!” In all seriousness, though, she wishes to use the attention wisely, redirecting the focus to the plight of the queer community and educating the public with the hopes that it will become a more compassionate space.

“There is so much hatred directed toward queer people, particularly transgender women of color. For what? Why? I think it may be about people’s own insecurities about their own identities and sexualities. And further, people don’t know their history,” she emphasizes, noting that transgender women and men even face discrimination and violence from cisgender members of the queer community. “The transgender experience isn’t new. It’s as old as the human experience, and anyone who does their research would know this. I think society needs to be educated, and maybe after being educated, empathy will follow.”

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“My goal is to help people, especially children. I intend to double major in art and psychology and pursue a career in art therapy,” she says.

It was not always clear how she might be able to achieve her goal. When she first arrived in the United States in October 2012, she was a graduate from a high school in Jamaica. But when she attempted to enroll in college, she was informed that she required remedial coursework that would put her more than three years behind schedule. Rather than register in an American high school at the ninth-grade level, Bernard instead decided to sign up for a General Educational Development (GED) course. Shortly afterward, she took the required exam and passed.

There was still the matter of getting into college. With recent changes to admission standards at the City University of New York (CUNY), students who receive GEDs often are not able to get into the senior institutions. Bernard applied to żÉÀÖÊÓƔ—because, she says, she wanted not just an education, but a good education—and was accepted thanks to a new gateway program called żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” Bound.

The brainchild of Sharona Levy, Percy Ellis Sutton SEEK professor, the żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” Bound program provides a path to college education for GED students who may have initially not been considered for admission.

“It seemed clear that with the right type of supported first-year program that uses national and local best practices, students should be able to succeed,” Levy says of the program, the first of its kind at CUNY senior colleges and one of the few around the country. “And if they aren’t able to have a successful semester for whatever reason, the program helps them find a better place to continue their higher education career in the hopes that they can still succeed and perhaps come back to żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” at a later stage.”

In 2013 the program accepted 30 students, including Bernard.

“We designed it to give them a rigorous try out,” Levy said. “If they’re motivated, we can get them to where they need to go. They just have to put in the work.”

Currently, students applying to the program must have a cumulative GED score of at least 2,700—and have achieved a minimum score of 500 in the English and 500 in the math portions of the exam. They must also be interviewed in person. Once admitted, they attend a four-day orientation. They also agree to attend classes on a full-time basis—making them eligible for financial aid—meet regularly with academic advisers, and show up for tutoring sessions. And they are held to the same academic standards as any other żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” student.

Penelope Terry, director of undergraduate admissions and recruitment, is responsible for reviewing each application and identifying candidates who meet the program’s criteria. “We admit a cross-section of students from every demographic,” she says. “These students broaden notions of who we might imagine GED students to be. What unites them is their determination and self-motivation.”

Sophomore Juma McCurren is a prime example. Faced with a devastating personal loss, McCurren dropped out of high school so that he could work full-time and help support his family. He had intended to return to school once his family was economically stable, but other personal obstacles prevented that from happening. It would be years before he could finally obtain his GED. But even then, he found himself coming up against roadblocks.

“I wanted to, finally, pursue college,” McCurren says. “At an open house for prospective students at a community college, I was asked what year I received my high school diploma, and, when I disclosed that I had a GED, there was a pregnant pause by the interviewer, followed by, ‘Oh, you didn’t graduate.’ I doubt that she intended to insult me, but I was filled with the same kind of shame that hindered me for so many years because I didn’t finish school when I was still a teenager.”

Initially, McCurren was not accepted to żÉÀÖÊÓÆ”. He then reapplied through the żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” Bound program.

“The work is challenging and completely fulfilling. I’m excited to see where I’ll go from here, says McCurren, who has not decided on a major, but describes himself as a closet writer and is looking into the college’s creative writing program.

Funded by the CUNY Black Male Initiative (BMI), żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” Bound takes a holistic approach to helping students achieve. Students in the program are part of “learning communities” designed to foster camaraderie among the participants and facilitate acclimation to college life by ensuring that the students take some of their courses together, and participate as a group in other co-curricular and extracurricular events. These communities also allow faculty and program interns to work closely with the students and provide individualized attention.

With programs like żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” Bound, żÉÀÖÊÓÆ”, which has its own GED course housed under the Adult Literacy Program, is keeping pace with national trends indicating that students who receive access to these types of resources are far more likely to complete their undergraduate work and obtain baccalaureate degrees.

“From my experience, the reason many students are not able to complete high school has little to do with their academic prowess,” says Richard Vento, director of the żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” Learning Center who provides academic guidance and support to students in the program. “żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” Bound provides a select group of persistent students with an opportunity to reach their full academic potential and change the course their lives forever.”

Professor Levy says that the program has helped build the college’s connection to the surrounding community and hopes that the program gains traction beyond żÉÀÖÊÓÆ”.

“I have received calls from other schools as well as local politicians who share my excitement,” she says.

One of those politicians is Reverend and Assemblyman Karim Camara, who represents the 43rd assembly district in Brooklyn.

“Historically, CUNY has always played a role in educating the children of New York,” says Camara. “BMI is quite significant and helps ensure and protect access and equity for black and Hispanic young men entering the CUNY system. Transformative academic programs like BMI and żÉÀÖÊÓÆ” Bound endeavor to reaffirm CUNY’s historic commitment to all of our communities for a quality college education—an indispensable asset in the 21st century. I commend CUNY Senior Vice Chancellor Jay Hershenson and Elliott Dawes for devoting resources to maintain these programs.”

Levy believes this is just the beginning of out-of-the-box approaches to the admissions process, student mentorship, and successful outcomes. Bernard and McCurren are but two of those outcomes: Bernard’s lowest grade was a B in her first semester and McCurren is averaging an A-.

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