Let's talk about #MarshaPJohnson, a 🧵 (TW riot, assault, bigotry, hate crimes, slurs)
Marsha "Pay It No Mind", Johnson was an incredible activist, sex worker, drag queen, and black trans woman who every queer person in the US today owes a debt of gratitude.
Marsha "Pay It No Mind", Johnson was an incredible activist, sex worker, drag queen, and black trans woman who every queer person in the US today owes a debt of gratitude.
Hers is a name you've almost definitely heard before... she has been honored in books, documentaries, a google icon tribute, and much more since her death in 1992. However, many accounts of her life are sanitized, more palatable versions of the truth. This thread will not be.
Many articles on her early life deadname and misgender her, which you will also not find here. She arrived in New York City from her hometown in New Jersey at only age 17 and quickly established herself in Greenwich Village. This was not the Village as it's known today.
The Village had long been a hotbed for artists, from the beat poets of the 50s onwards. The neighborhood was known for its avant garde stylings, revolutionary culture, and police brutality. Both sex work and same-sex relations were illegal in the city at the time, and GV had...
...both in spades. Gay bars, at this time, were the main cultural center for queer people, and in response, the NY State Liquor Authority targeted gay bars in particular, as a gathering of "homosexuals" alone could be punishable by law as "disorderly behavior". Activists pushed..
...and won huge success when, in 1966, it became legal to serve homosexuals alcohol. This functionally legalized gay bars existing but did not stop the near-constant harassment of these institutions by police. Public same-sex PDA was still illegal. How was that defined?
It was up to the officer's discretion. Additionally, many gay bars did not have legal liquor licenses, as many were owned by organized crime groups. The mafia saw an opportunity--that queer people would pay to have a safe space to simply exist--and took it.
However, being catered to by the mob had consequences. The famous Stonewall Inn, for example, lacked running water to wash dishes or have sanitary bathrooms, and often served drinks that were unsanitary at best and dangerous at worst. Mob members also routinely blackmailed...
...patrons. However, it was one of the cheaper gay bars in Greenwich, and one of the few that allowed drag queens. It also allowed dancing, which was explicitly forbidden at most gay bars. Although raids were common, under the mafia's protection, the Inn was usually pre-warned.
It became a nightly shelter for many queer youths who had nowhere else to turn, as the entry fees were much cheaper than many other locations. This was where Marsha, 17, broke, and homeless, found herself. She, like many others in the area, turned to sex work to support herself.
It was here that Marsha began doing drag, originally referring to herself as "Black Marsha". As time went on, she began using "drag" full-time. When questioned about this, she would reply "pay it no mind", and was asked it so often that she took that as her middle initial.
On June 28th, 1969, NYPD officers raided the Stonewall Inn. No one knew it was coming. The tippers that the Genovese family had hired failed them. The police found plenty of criminal activity, including bootleg alcohol and cross-dressers. Cross-dressing was illegal at the time...
...and it was police policy to have female officers take suspected cross-dressers to a bathroom, strip them, and investigate their genitals to determine if they were committing a crime. This not only included drag queens, but butch lesbians and trans people. The exact details...
...of that night have been endlessly debated, however, the general consensus is that the neighborhood, agitated at the lack of warning, hung around outside the bar as 13 arrests were conducted. The arrests were rough, and officers were flagrantly violent towards their captors.
An officer hit a butch lesbian over the head as he forced her into a police car, she shouted to the crowd to do something, and all hell broke loose. The crowd began to throw things at the officers. There is a lot of discussion currently about who, exactly, threw the first brick.
The truth is that who threw the "first" brick matters far less than how many people were throwing bricks. The riot at the Stonewall Inn--and the beginning of the queer rights movement as we know it--was a movement of solidarity, not individualism.
One person throwing a brick leads to an arrest. Hundreds lead to a movement. The mob at the Stonewall Inn breached multiple police barricades before setting fire to the Inn itself. The fire department was called, but the metaphorical fire was much more difficult to put out.
The protests lasted 5 days, garnering media attention and sparking increased awareness and activism for queer rights across the nation and the world. The next year, in 1970, NYC's first Pride Parade began at the doors of the Stonewall Inn. June is Pride Month because of Stonewall
Newspapers at the time tried to downplay the riots, and celebrated the "successes" of the police to the point of obscuring the truth. Any mentions of violence committed by police are omitted, replaced by counts of officers injured and villainization of protestors. (Familiar?)
But for all the impact it had, Stonewall's Legacy remains taboo. It was a riot, outright, with arson and violence against the police by a group of criminal sex workers, drag queens, queers, and mobsters. Even at the time, many orgs such as The Mattachine Society disapproved.
The queer community is not a monolith and never will be. Many organizations "celebrating" Stonewall's legacy today sanitize its roots and obscure their own complicity in the conditions that led to an open riot.
The queer community was marginalized and forced into destitution, violence, and abuse by organizations, politicians, and bystanders alike. Riots happen when people have nothing left to lose.
The NYPD did not admit any wrongdoing or formally apologize for the violence and discrimination that led to and precipitated the Stonewall Riots until 2019. This is after years of advocacy to beg for even that crumb of closure. Nothing is over.
But let's get back to Marsha. She is often cited as if the Stonewall Riots were her single great contribution to queer rights. This is a discredit to her. Her activism extended both earlier than and long after the riot. The Stonewall Riots became her origin story.
Imagine this. Imagine being a young black trans woman drag queen sex worker in 1969. Whatever level of horror you're imagining isn't enough. You've been beaten, assaulted, harassed, arrested, abused, and more. And at only 23 years old, you see your community rise up.
This is in the midst of protests against war and sexism and racism and violence and bigotry of all kinds. In all of this, you and your allies young and vulnerable, with protection from neither the mob nor the police, homeless and destitute and barely allowed to so much as exist..
...someone throws a brick. And it matters.
This photo was taken in Times Square a few days after the initial riot, when protests were widespread. These are some of the original members of the group that would become the Gay Liberation Front. These were protests that the New York City Riot Squad was attempting to shut...
...down, in the 60s. The people in this photo are so young. The three people in front can't be older than 20. They are kids, marching in the street, risking their lives, to prove they exist and demand that they be allowed to. (Does this also sound familiar?)
Marsha, as well as a close friend of hers, a Latina trans woman named Sylvia Rivera, went on from Stonewall to become some of the most significant queer rights activists in history. These two founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970.
The primary goal of STAR was to serve as a mutual aid and support network for homeless transgender youth in NYC. STAR owned a building on the lower East side, and from there, sheltered, fed, organized, and advocated for trans youth.
This year also saw the first Pride Parade, which was a celebration to commemorate the anniversary of the riot.
Marsha's unique style of drag (mostly foraged from the dumpsters of NYC) and tenacity led her to become the most famous drag queen of her era, even touring the world with the drag theatre company, Hot Peaches, in 1972. She also performed with the Angels of Light in 1973.
This was probably the highlight of Marsha P Johnson's life. Because fundamentally, the story of Marsha P Johnson is a story of failure. Not of her failure, but of the failure of her institutions, her peers, and her movement to prioritize their most vulnerable.
STAR was forced to close in 1973 but is still remembered as it was the first queer youth shelter in the United States as well as the first organization founded and run exclusively by trans women of color (that we know of).
The organizers of the 1973 Pride Parade banned both Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, citing that drag queens and “transvestites” would give the cause of gay liberation “a bad name”. Johnson and Rivera then marched ahead of the beginning of the parade in protest.
Throughout the 70s, her drag performances heavily influenced the art form, and her protests heavily influenced the progression of queer rights. In 1975 she was captured by Andy Warhol for his “ladies and gentlemen” series.
She became a marshal with ACT UP throughout the 1980s. She collaborated with and earned the respect of other activists, even the opposing force of hers in the queer rights movement, Randy Wicker.
Wicker had been one of the Mattachines, and one of the greatest proponents of the strategy that queer liberation could only come by convincing straight people that gay people were "just like them". He was college educated, wore a suit, and answered questions on television.
This strategy was extremely popular at the time, especially by white gays and lesbians. This strategy also had no room for "distasteful" people. Here is a video of organizers at the 1973 Pride Rally asking the crowd if they want to hear Sylvia Rivera speak
vimeo.com/234353103
vimeo.com/234353103
You can, quite loudly, hear the crowd booing her before she speaks, giving a speech about the rights of queer prisoners, and calling out the crowd for ignoring them. She also speaks about STAR and calls the crowd out for ignoring its vulnerable transgender members.
"STAR is trying to do something for all of us, not just white middle class men and women in their white club." -Sylvia Rivera, 1973
Marsha P Johnson was not part of the white club. She was about as far from the acceptable class of queer as one could be. She was a loud, black, mentally ill, homeless drag queen who refused to stay silent or to smother herself into "respectability".
Although she struggled with mental health issues, homelessness, and poverty throughout her life, she became known as “Saint Martha,” the patron saint of young homeless queer people. Reportedly she would give up anything and everything to help anyone who needed it.
She did not receive the same kindness; she remained destitute even as she was world-reknowned. In 1992, Marsha told the world that she had been HIV+ since 1990.
On July 6th, 1992, at 46 years old, Marsha P Johnson's body was found in the Hudson River in New York City. Without an investigation, police ruled the death a suicide.
Those who knew her, especially Sylvia Rivera, contested this, urging an investigation, especially after news surfaced that Marsha had been seen being harassed on the pier where her body was later found and that there was a massive wound to the back of her head.
An investigation was not conducted until activist Mariah Lopez succeeded in mounting enough pressure for the NYPD to reopen the case in 2012. So far there have been no new leads and no convictions.
Marsha "Pay It No Mind" Johnson struggled for most of her life with mental illness; being hospitalized multiple times. She struggled with violent outbursts, despite her overall personality being incredibly kind, generous and patient.
Her activism was villified, often from within the queer community itself, for its revolutionary inclusion. She advocated for sex workers, prisoners, drug users, the homeless, the mentally ill, transgender people, and those living with HIV and AIDS.
She was vocally in favor of mutual aid, vocally anti-police, and revolutionarily honest about her chronic mental illness, homelessness, drug use, and sex work.
She, both in being and in speaking, utterly rejected the idea that the queer community ought to become more palatable, and that individuals seek to make themselves more digestible to society at large in order to gain respect.
So now we sit, in 2021, and attempt to weigh the life and legacy of a beautiful, vulnerable, complex and flawed person. When seeing all the tributes, all the murals, the statues planned in NYC and Marsha's hometown, I am so struck with one overwhelming thought...
...where was all this money, this love, when she was here?
The answer is devastating in its simplicity; it's not.
The answer is devastating in its simplicity; it's not.
The love and the money go towards a caricature of the person Marsha P Johnson was. We made her digestible. We made her simple. We, as a community, let her wallow in poverty, let her be murdered, and now let her memory be sanitized and scrubbed clean of its significance.
We have failed her, and we continue to fail her. She may be gone, but so many others are here. Do you look away when you see them? Are you too afraid to include them in your activism for fear that they will make your cause harder to swallow?
If we are to honor Marsha P Johnson and her legacy, in any way that matters, we will do it through radical honesty and revolutionary kindness.
If you found this thread helpful or informative, please consider donating to the Marsha P Johnson Institute, a charity that promotes the safety and wellbeing of black transgender people, especially those facing homelessness.
marshap.org/donate/
marshap.org/donate/
I would also like to invite any transgender people of color to link their mutual aid funds or donation posts to this post; support them while they are still here.
womenshistory.org/sites/default/…
^Reader compatible versions of newspaper articles published at the time can be found at this link.
^Reader compatible versions of newspaper articles published at the time can be found at this link.
history.com/news/stonewall…
Article on the NYPD's admittance of wrongdoing and apology.
Article on the NYPD's admittance of wrongdoing and apology.
history.com/this-day-in-hi…
Brief overview article of the Stonewall Inn riots.
Brief overview article of the Stonewall Inn riots.
history.com/topics/gay-rig…
Brief article of overview on Stonewall Inn Riots
Brief article of overview on Stonewall Inn Riots
Brief article on Marsha P Johnson's pop cultural impacts: vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifes…
As Elle Hearns, the founder of the Marsha P Johnson Institute has said, "I don't think Marsha has left anything behind besides the permission of us all to be free."
makinggayhistory.com/podcast/episod…
Interview with both Marsha and Randy Wicker on their relationship and Stonewall.
Interview with both Marsha and Randy Wicker on their relationship and Stonewall.
nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-ou…
Article on the monument dedicated to Marsha being put up in her hometown
Article on the monument dedicated to Marsha being put up in her hometown
worldqueerstory.org/tag/hot-peache…
Information on the Hot Peaches, Johnson's relationship with Wicker, and more.
Information on the Hot Peaches, Johnson's relationship with Wicker, and more.
makinggayhistory.com/podcast/episod…
Information and interviews between Wicker, Johnson, and more.
Information and interviews between Wicker, Johnson, and more.
makinggayhistory.com/podcast/episod…
Information on Sylvia Rivera and her famous speech.
Information on Sylvia Rivera and her famous speech.
legacyprojectchicago.org/person/sylvia-…
More information on Sylvia Rivera's incredible activism.
More information on Sylvia Rivera's incredible activism.
A beautifully written opinion piece on why being here for trans women, and black queer people, is the only way to honor Johnson's legacy. jmellison.net/if-we-knew-tra…
For additional research, I have linked helpful sources and summaries throughout my thread, but I also cannot recommend highly enough the Digital Transgender Archive, which holds primary sources of transgender history. digitaltransgenderarchive.net
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