05 Sep Power to the People: Exploring Marsha P. Johnson’s Queer Liberation (part one)
Perhaps my favorite image of Marsha P. Johnson—and there are a lot to choose from—comes from a 1970 Gay Liberation Front protest at Bellevue Hospital, where doctors were using shock treatments to “cure” homosexuals. In an oversize fur coat, Johnson leans against the corner of a building, a desultory cigarette hanging from one hand. In the other, she holds a poster with simple block letters reading, “POWER TO THE PEOPLE.”
Which people? All people. But particularly her people: queer people, street people, activists, artists, trans women, drag queens, sex workers, the poor, the homeless, and those who struggle with mental illness. At a time when being any one of those things might land you in jail or in the morgue, Johnson was all of those things tied up in a messy package, with a gorgeous, trash-couture bow on top.
It’s not the poster that makes the picture so endearing, though. In fact, it’s something missing from the photo that draws me to it. Run a Google image search on Johnson and you’ll get page after page of results showing her with a smile as wide as 14th Street. Smiling in a club; smiling on the corner; smiling in a photo by Andy Warhol; smiling on stage with the Hot Peaches; smiling while her best friend Sylvia Rivera throws her fist up in the air; smiling even when the rest of her face looks exhausted and done; smiling on a promotional sales tag from the Hot Topic for hipsters, Urban
fucking Outfitters; smiling, smiling, always smiling.
But not at Bellevue. Diana Davies, the photographer, captured Johnson at a moment when her mask was down. There’s a flicker of joy in the upturned corners of her mouth, but in 1970, after some 25 years of smiling, that was just the shape of Johnson’s face. Her smile was her sword and shield, and to be who she was meant always coming armed and armored. That smile kept her alive—until it didn’t.
It might seem odd to suggest that Davies—a white, cisgender queer woman known for documenting the early gay liberation movement on the East Coast—could capture Johnson in a vulnerable moment of repose. After all, if there’s one thing we’re supposed to know about white lesbians in the ’70s, it’s that many of them were viciously transphobic separatists who had no room for trans women. Certainly, that virulent strain of gender-fascist “feminism” did exist, and it still exists today. But it’s hardly the full story. Johnson got along well with lesbians, and even attended a few meetings of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national lesbian organization in America. In the activist gay world of the 1970s, both lesbians and trans women (many of whom used the word “transvestite” to describe themselves) were often marginalized for their gender.
“Gay sisters don’t think too bad of transvestites,” Johnson said in a 1971 interview collected in Karla Jay’s book Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation. “Gay brothers do.” When I look at Davies’s photo, I like to think that maybe this is the face that Johnson saw in the mirror in the morning, before girding it with that smile that enabled her to survive a world that could barely even acknowledge her existence, let alone celebrate her brilliance.
I’ve been looking at that photo a lot recently. Every time I hear about another murdered trans woman of color (at least a dozen times this year already), I pull it up. Every time I see a new homage to Marsha P.—a documentary, a short film, a paean to her presence at the Stonewall riots—I look at it again. I’m trying to see how we got here, to a place where we can memorialize Johnson as the “Saint of Christopher Street” yet ignore the consistent violence that her trans daughters and granddaughters still face. How we can fetishize Johnson’s presence at Stonewall, yet ignore the demands she made of the queer community and the world at large.
I think her smile is a big part of that story.
Marsha P. Johnson was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on August 24, 1945, near the end of World War II. The “P” in her name stood for “Pay It No Mind.” She lived most of her life in the nimbus of New York City, but she always maintained a close, if fraught, relationship with her family back in Jersey, according to Al Michaels, her nephew.
Now 36, Michaels remembers that it was “like a holiday” whenever Johnson came over, and that kids flocked to her because she brought them treats: beads and candies and flowers. Her mother would make Johnson put on men’s clothes when she entered the house, but invariably, Johnson would have parted with them by the next time she visited. “She’d give you the shirt right off her back,” Michaels says with a laugh. “‘You like it? Here, you have it.’” Johnson’s grandmother may have disapproved, but it was always with an undercurrent of love, Michaels says. And when Johnson had one of her spells — like the time she was reported lost in Hoboken wearing only her underwear — her family always picked her up and brought her home or to the hospital.
If every day was like a holiday with Johnson, however, then real holidays were extra. “They’d walk up from the train, Marsha and like 15 or 20 of her friends,” Michaels says. “Our house would be full of people dancing.” Everyone who ever met Johnson remembers this aspect of her personality: her gregarious, generous nature, which made you feel like you were at the coolest party in town.
And often, Johnson was at the coolest party in town. She was a member of the avant-drag performance troupe the Hot Peaches, with whom she toured America and Europe performing comical songs and spoken-word poetry. She was photographed by Andy Warhol, who also painted her as part of his “Ladies and Gentlemen” series of trans portraiture. One time, recalls Michaels, when he was DJing in New York City, he pulled out an Earth, Wind, and Fire album only to discover an image of Johnson in the album artwork.
Johnson, as seen in Netflix’s The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson
But Johnson was an icon whose influence was felt far beyond New York. Filmmaker Stephen Winter, who recently worked as a consulting producer on David France’s new documentary The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (premiering October 6 on Netflix), remembers hearing about Johnson in 1990, when he was a newly radicalized 20-year-old involved in ACT UP Chicago. “People gotta understand,” he says over the phone one afternoon, “before there was Snapchat and Facebook, queer TV or gay characters or gay books, there was Marsha, walking around.”
Johnson is emblematic of what black queer feminist thinker Alexis Pauline Gumbs describes as the “never straight”: those queer pioneers who were unable or unwilling to hide their differences, and thus forced queerness to be publicly acknowledged wherever they went. Almost always, those differences manifested themselves through gender, which is why time and again gender-variant people have been at the forefront of queer rebellions, like Stonewall.