Marsha P. Johnson was born on August 24th, 1945 and was an American LGBTQ+ activist, a sex worker and drag performer. “Transgender” as an adjective was not in use during her lifetime, however Johnson openly referred to herself using female pronouns, and described herself as “gay”, a “transvestite” and as a “queen”. At one time she modeled for Andy Warhol, she was a well known fixture of street life in Greenwich village, and she was a central figure in the Stonewall Riots of 1969 when police raided the Stonewall Inn and, according to several eyewitnesses, was the one who “really started it”, being “in the middle of the whole thing, screaming and yelling and throwing rocks and almost like Molly Pitcher in the Revolution or something”. Susan Stryker, an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at Arizona University said of Marsha that she “could be perceived as the most marginalized of people- black, queer, gender-nonconforming, poor” but that did not stop her from being a joyful person, channeling a “joie de vivre” into political action, and doing so with fierceness and grace.
She was the fifth of seven children, with her father working on the assembly line at a General Motors factory in Linden and her mother being a housekeeper. She was around the age of 5 when she began to wear dresses, but felt pressured by her peers to stop due to their aggression, and in her later life she recounted being sexually assaulted by a boy in her youth, who was around 13. She attended church as a child and practiced her Christian faith throughout her life; being drawn towards Catholicism later in her life. In 1963, she graduated from Thomas A. Edison High School and soon moved to New York City, with only a bag of clothes and $15 to her name.
Despite New York State downgrading what they called sodomy from a felony to a misdemeanor in 1950, it was not easy to be a queer gender non-conforming individual in a cisgender heterosexual world. Same-sex dancing in public was banned, and gay people were banned from being served alcoholic beverages. People could also be charged with “sexual deviancy” if they cross dressed. She would often engage in prostitution while she was in New York and was frequently arrested, well over 100 times, and in the late 1970s was even shot.
At just 23, she was a key figure in the Stonewall Riots, being among the “vanguard” of those who stood against the police who tried to raid the Stonewall Inn. Stonewall was the first step into an, at times, militant gay rights movement, with it prompting the first gay pride in 1970, and in the same year, Johnson and fellow activist Sylvia Rivera founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (or STAR for short) to fight for the rights of young transgender people- and also to clothe, house and feed any who needed it
She often said that nobody noticed her before she became a self-proclaimed drag queen. One of the people who noticed her was Andy Warhol, who took polaroids of her and included them in his 1975 portfolio of screenprints labelled “Ladies and Gentlemen”, depicting drag queens and trans revelers at a nightclub called The Gilded Grape.
In 1980, she was invited to ride in the lead car of New York’s annual Gay Pride Parade, and she began to live in the home of a close friend, activist Randy Wicker, caring for his partner David Combs when Wicker died of AIDS in 1990. She would get heavily involved with AIDS activism, joining protests by and meetings of the AIDS advocacy organization ACT UP.
In a June 1992 interview, she revealed that she had been HIV positive for at least two years, calling herself “one of the few queens left from the ‘70s and ‘80s”, and several days later, she was seen for the last time.
Her body was pulled from the Hudson River on July 6th 1992, with her death quickly being ruled a suicide, a ruling that many of her friends and acquaintances challenged. Later on in 1992 the authorities reclassified the cause, ruling it to be a drowning from undetermined causes, and the case was reopened in 2012 to take a fresh look at the case, although it still remains open.
Her life is documented in the 2017 Netflix documentary “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson” by David France
In loving memory of Marsha P. Johnson, August 24 1945- July 6 1992
By Jake Livingstone
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