For each of the four weeks of Black History Month, I will discuss a different figure in Black American LGBT history. This week is about Marsha P. Johnson.
Marsha P. Johnson was a Black trans woman living in New York City. She was an important activist, leading Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or STAR, with Sylvia Rivera. She is most known as the person who threw the first brick or stone during the Stonewall riots, although by her account she arrived after it began.
Marsha P. Johnson spent a lot of her time trying to help others, in part because she knew what it was like not to get help. She had been assaulted, robbed, and engaged in survival sex. She was arrested dozens of times, sometimes just for wearing a makeup in the wrong area, and the legal situation for transgender people in New York City was fairly dire. There were no lawyers willing to help, a very small community able to help pay bail, and once you were in jail things frequently got violent. So, she created STAR with two main goals. As she explained in an interview with Allen Young, the first was revolutionary in nature: “We believe in picking up the gun, starting a revolution if necessary. Our main goal is to see gay people liberated and free to have equal rights that other people have in America.” Most transgender people in the area weren’t on board with that level of militancy, and to Marsha that was okay, because STAR’s other goal was “to do is reach people before they get on drugs, ‘cause once they get on drugs it’s very, very hard to get them off and out of the street.”
Marsha P. Johnson’s gender has been a topic of some discussion. It’s a little peculiar, given she said that she considered herself a pre-operative transsexual and said the following:
Lots of times they tell me, “You’re not a woman!” I say, “I don’t know what I am if I’m not a woman.”
Nevertheless, she did have a little bit of fun with it: The P in Marsha P. Johnson stands for “pay it no mind,” referring to her gender.
Last week, I discussed Ernestine Eckstein. Three years before Stonewall, Eckstein expressed her opinion that it was not the right time for the LGBT community to engage in civil disobedience. She was not alone in this; another major gay rights activist, Randy Wicker, felt similarly. He tried to present the image of a respectable homosexual, one who respects law and order and dresses up all nice. So, when Stonewall happened and his roommate Marsha P. Johnson was involved, he was a bit distraught! But he ultimately admitted that Johnson’s more radical approach was a very positive contribution:
See, I, I, Stonewall, I don’t want… I shouldn’t start on this note, but it puts me in the worst light, because by the time Stonewall happened I was running my button shop in the East Village and for all the years of Mattachine and you see pictures of me on TV, I’m wearing a suit and tie and I had spent ten years of my life going around telling people homosexuals looked just like everybody else. We didn’t wear makeup and wear dresses and have falsetto voices and molest kids and were communists and all this.
And all of the sudden Stonewall broke out and there were reports in the press of chorus lines of queens kicking up their heels at the cops like Rockettes, you know, “We are the stonewall girls, and you know, fuck you police.” And this, I thought, you know, it was like Jesse Jackson used to say, rocks through windows don’t open doors. I felt this… I was horrified. I mean, the last thing to me that I thought at the time they were setting back the gay liberation movement twenty years…
…the thing was that you were dealing with a new thing. And it shows that what my generation did, we built the ideology, you know. Are we sick? Aren’t we sick? What are the scientific facts? How we’ve been brainwashed by society? We put it together, like, you know, Lenin… I mean, Karl Marx wrote the book. That’s what we did. But it literally took Stonewall, and here I was considered the first militant and visionary leader of the gay movement, to not even realize when the revolution, if you want to call it this, this thing that I thought would never happen, that a small nuclei of people would become a mass social movement was occurring—I was against it. Now I’m very happy Stonewall happened. I’m very happy the way things worked out.
Marsha P. Johnson was willing to break a few laws to make a better world, and we’re better off for it.