LGBTQ+ Spotlight: Marsha P Johnson

Born Malcolm Michaels Jr. to a working-class family in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Johnson already wore dresses for a short period at age five, stopping because of bullying. However, it took till a 1966 move to New York City for Johnson to go from considering being gay as "some sort of dream" to coming out to fellow sex workers. Johnson took a new name, in which her middle initial "P." was to describe her gender - "it stands for 'pay it no mind.'" Though Johnson left her gender identity ambiguous, she was a drag queen using both the feminine 'Marsha' and masculine 'Malcolm' personas. Nevertheless, she typically identified as a 'transvestite' to the public, which she contrasted with being 'transsexual' - in her own words, "a transvestite is still like a boy, very manly looking, a feminine boy", contextualized by her disinterest in hormone or surgical therapy. In 1972, her drag career went international, but she earned her place in history in 1969, as one of the first drag queens to attend what had originally been a bar for cis-presenting gay men - the Stonewall Inn.

Liquor laws barred bars like the Inn from serving alcohol to gay patrons legally; instead, the Inn used its criminal links to pay the bribes demanded by police in exchange for being allowed to operate. On June 28, 1969, New York police nevertheless raided the bar. However, attendees refused to cooperate with police, who sought to separate and arrest men wearing women's clothing. Though police attempted to arrest many, the crowd outside the inn grew to more than ten times the original arrests. Eventually, a "dyke-stone butch", sometimes identified as Stormé DeLarverie, was arrested after a fight with police. Her call to the crowd to stop standing by and to take action, as she was hit on the head and dragged to a police wagon at about 1 a.m, was the impetus for the crowd to fight back against the police.

Less than an hour later, Johnson is said to have thrown a shot glass at a mirror at the bar, by then set on fire by police. It was this shotglass that activist Robin Souza described as "the shot-glass heard around the world". When they heard of the uprising, Johnson and some friends set out for Stonewall, and arrived at about 2 a.m. The uprising lasted for a second night, then fuelled not just by spontaneous retribution but active demonstration - per a witness, "From going to places where you had to knock on a door and speak to someone through a peephole in order to get in. We were just out. We were in the streets." Johnson was one of three influential individuals in the vanguard of the pushback, and was spotted climbing a lamppost to throw a bag through the windshield of a police car.

After Stonewall, Johnson went onto become a radical activist. Johnson started the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) as a radical political organization with Sylvia Riveria in 1970, and two years later, a shelter for LGBTQ+ kids; the STAR House. Adopting the notion of 'chosen family' common in black and Latino LGBTQ+ communities, Johnson was the 'drag mother' of STAR House. Johnson was also a member of the Gay Liberation Front and ACT-UP, until her likely murder in 1992. Earlier that year, in response to a memorialization of Stonewall by George Segal, Johnson asked - "How many years does it take for people to see that we're all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race?"
Read more:
On Stonewall and its impact, including the Gay Liberation Front: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48643756
On direct action & police brutality: https://crimethinc.com/2020/06/28/stonewall-means-riot-right-now-what-the-queer-uprisings-of-1969-share-with-the-george-floyd-protests-of-2020
On STAR and STAR House: https://womenatthecenter.nyhistory.org/gay-power-is-trans-history-street-transvestite-action-revolutionaries/
On the events of Stonewall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7jnzOMxb14
Pay It No Mind, a documentary on the life and times of Marsha P. Johnson, with several interviews of her and her contemporaries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjN9W2KstqE