06 Sep Power to the People: Exploring Marsha P. Johnson’s Queer Liberation (part two)
Perhaps the least important, but most discussed, aspect of Johnson’s life is what she did or did not do during the Stonewall riot. Almost every modern depiction of the riot includes Johnson, or a character obviously modeled after her. She is the only real person to be portrayed in Roland Emmerich’s underwhelming 2015 white fantasy Stonewall. According to Johnson, in an interview she gave to writer Eric Marcus about that night:
I was uptown and I didn’t get downtown until about two o’clock. When I got downtown, the place was already on fire, and there was a raid already. The riots had already started.
That’s riots, plural, because “the Stonewall riot” was an anti-police insurrection that lasted six days. In our rush to pinpoint the first punch thrown, we have lost the vast scope and meaning of that rebellion. And the fact that it followed other LGBT anti-cop riots that happened in the late ’50s and throughout the ’60s, including the Compton’s Cafeteria riot (in 1966 San Francisco) and the Cooper’s Donuts riot (in 1959 Los Angeles). In all three incidents, a community of trans women and poor hustlers was at the forefront of the uprising. Johnson may not have hurled the first shot glass at Stonewall, but she was a major force in creating the visible queer community that rose up that evening. Her fearless presence announced itself in her Goodwill dresses and the headpieces she crafted from flower district castoffs. If silence=death, then Johnson — in a very literal way — gave us life.
But being a legend doesn’t pay the bills. Johnson lived on and off the streets for most of her life, and relied on charity and sex work to survive. For more than a decade, she stayed in the New Jersey apartment of gay activist Randy Wicker, who would become one of her closest friends. But her best friend, for nearly her entire life, was Sylvia Rivera. According to Rivera, the two met on the streets when Rivera was 12 and Johnson was 18. Together, they conceptualized the idea that trans people were a marginalized community, separate from but related to the larger queer world, and that they had their own needs, which were often neglected or sacrificed even as they put their bodies on the line as foot soldiers in the “gay revolution.”
Shortly after Stonewall, Johnson and Rivera founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (or STAR) and created STAR House, a short-lived, unfunded communal space for trans women who’d been living on the streets.
STAR had a radical platform that would not seem out of place coming from today’s Movement for Black Lives. It included “free gender expression, an end to prison injustice and homelessness, and the creation of an inclusive community that rejected binding definitions of gender and sexual identity,” according to Stephan L. Cohen’s book The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York.
What doesn’t that platform sound like? About 90% of the organized LGBT rights movements today. Despite the fact that nearly all queer political groups lay claim to Stonewall as a mythic origin point, the moment at which “our” movement began, very few seem willing to embrace the radical politics of the women who were there.
“Marsha was naming these things precisely and powerfully for a long time,” Reina Gossett explains. For years, since she was a young community organizer at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Gossett has been working to unearth and restore Johnson’s legacy. Together with filmmaker Sasha Wortzel, she is the creator of Happy Birthday, Marsha!, a forthcoming, somewhat ahistorical narrative short film that imagines Johnson in the hours leading up to the Stonewall riot.
Rivera and Johnson are almost always mentioned together, but Rivera is often credited with their political thinking, while Johnson is presented as her sassy black sidekick. As usual, the reality is more complicated. “Marsha definitely had her own political imagination,” Gossett says. In that same interview in which Johnson called out the transphobia of gay men and mentioned her alliances with lesbians, she also advocated for a queer movement that centered on anti-prison and anti-homelessness activism. This was two years before Sylvia Rivera’s infamous speech at Pride in 1973, when she was booed for railing at the white, middle-class complacency of the movement.
However, Gossett isn’t interested in arguing about who had which idea first. “Political imagination and freedom dreams don’t happen in a silo,” she says. It takes a community, because we have to be able to see that our issues are shared with others, and that they are created by systemic forces, not personal failures. Why, then, does Rivera get all the credit? The truth is, it’s not about who said what, but about who we are able to hear.
“Marsha survived by using the classic trickster mode,” says Winter, an expert on the archetype of the queer black trickster. His latest film, Jason and Shirley, is a reimagining of the first such character in cinema, Jason Holliday, from Shirley Clarke’s experimental 1967 documentary, Portrait of Jason.
“Marsha allowed people to think she was dizzy — and she was a little dizzy — to ensure her survival,” he says. Showing anger, for a black person in America, is the quickest way to get censured, ignored, punished, or killed. The one exception to that rule? The sassy black friend, who can get a little angry, so long as it’s in a funny, you-go-girl kind of way. In that case, anger can even be rewarded (at least in a limited sense).
There’s a scene in The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson in which this dynamic plays out, as a drunken gay white man gleefully accosts Johnson on Christopher Street. Even as he tells her how brave she is, he also mansplains to the camera — and Johnson herself — all about her gender. Johnson’s laughing protests — “How do you know all this?” she asks pointedly — go ignored. It’s a perfect encapsulation of how a loving embrace can also be a straitjacket.
“White gay culture has always found a place for black feminine joy,” Winter says, “as a way to express their own pain and suffering.” Thus, Johnson gets turned into a symbol for “all” queer people — but “all” almost always means the universalized experiences of white gay men. Johnson’s specific pain, her specific suffering, takes a back seat. It’s why we know Johnson’s smile, but not the thoughts that were running through her head. It’s why we can memorialize Johnson as a martyr, but ignore the causes she fought for.
Thankfully, a number of black trans female activists have refused to let Johnson be reduced to a single image. Johnson lives on in Gossett and Wortzel’s short film, which they hope to release next year. They are also already working on a follow-up feature-length film about Johnson. In addition, her memory is preserved in the new Marsha P. Johnson Institute, the brainchild of 29-year-old community organizer Elle Hearns. Hearns says she created the institute specifically “because Marsha is being idolized in a way that removes her” from her real political goals. The institute creates a space for black trans women — particularly those who, like Johnson, live in poverty or on the fringes of mainstream society — to come together and work toward their shared empowerment.
Like Johnson, black trans women who want to be active in the modern queer movement are forced to focus on the organizing goals of others, Hearns says, because they lack organizations that prioritize their needs. “In philanthropy, one penny of every one hundred dollars goes to trans [issues]. So you can just imagine how little money black trans women actually receive.”Yet these same women are among the most in-need members of the community, experiencing significantly elevated levels of poverty, discrimination, ill health, violence, and death.
Johnson’s own death has never been adequately explained. Her body was fished from the Hudson River on the afternoon of July 6, 1992. Although the NYPD officially ruled it a suicide, many of those closest to her believe that it was either an accident or murder. According to the New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP), at the time 1992 was the worst year on record for anti-LGBT violence. Two months after Johnson’s death, Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock were burned to death by white supremacists in their apartment in Salem, Ore. Two months later, Petty Officer Third Class Allen Schindler was beaten to death by a shipmate in a public toilet in Japan. His body was so brutalized, the pathologist who performed the autopsy compared his injuries to those often seen after a high-speed car crash.
Today, reported murders of gays and lesbians are comparatively infrequent. In 2015, AVP noted eight gay men or lesbians killed in bias-related incidents. That same year, despite making up just an estimated 0.6% of the population, 16 transgender people were murdered — 13 of whom were trans women of color. The majority of perpetrators were straight white men.
Marsha P. Johnson fought, and perhaps even died, for gay liberation. Although we still witness and experience violence and discrimination today, we live in an America that is vastly safer for gays and lesbians because of the life she lived. Yet the very movement that idolizes her does too little for black transgender women like her.
Perhaps finally — thanks to the work of queer black artists and activists like Gossett, Winter, and Hearns — we are ready to recognize the woman behind the icon, the pain behind the joy, the mind behind the smile. But that means more than just slapping Johnson’s face on placards in the Pride parade — it means listening to black trans women, and putting our financial and legislative weight behind the issues that affect them. Until then, invocations of Johnson’s legacy by mainstream white LGB groups will remain nothing more than hollow promises dressed in blackface.