Marsha P. Johnson (1945-1992) was a fixture in New York City who fought fiercely for the queer community, while battling mental illness, substance abuse and homelessness.
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
You could not miss today’s activist when she hit the New York streets. For decades, she was a fixture of the city, draped in flower crowns and Christmas lights and material others discarded. She fought fiercely for the queer community, while battling mental illness, substance abuse and homelessness. Her middle initial, P., famously stood for “Pay It No Mind.”
Let’s talk about Marsha P. Johnson.
Marsha was born Malcolm Michaels, Jr. on August 24, 1945, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the fifth of seven children. Her father, Malcolm Sr., worked the assembly line at General Motors. Her mother, Alberta, was a housekeeper.
By the age of five, Marsha was drawn to wearing dresses. But she soon stopped, intimidated by bullying from other children, and a sexual assault from a teenaged neighbor.
In 1963, high school diploma in hand, Marsha left home for New York City with a bag of clothes and $15.
But New York, despite its reputation as a progressive capital, was still not an easy place for the queer community in 1963. Just a decade earlier, sodomy had been downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor. It was illegal for two men, or two women, to dance together, romantically, in public. Bars were banned from serving gay people alcohol. Cross-dressing often earned a sexual deviancy charge. And all of this was enforced arbitrarily by police.
To survive in the city, Marsha turned to sex work. She often alternated between her birth name, Malcolm, and Black Marsha, which she later changed to Marsha P. Johnson. “P” for “Pay it no mind.” Being arrested became commonplace. Marsha later said she lost count after 100.
Transphobia was rampant within New York’s gay community. Marsha became, according to her, one of the first people to go into Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn, in drag. In 1969, police raided the well-known gay bar, attempting to arrest patrons for simply being inside. The raid kicked off a three-day riot. There are many differing accounts of what became known as the Stonewall Riots. Some say Marsha screamed, “I got my civil rights!” and threw a shot glass at the bar, which had been set on fire by police. Some say she threw a brick. Others say she climbed a telephone pole and dropped her purse, heavy with bricks, onto the windshield of a police car.
But regardless, the consensus is that Marsha was there, part of the vanguard pushing back against the police. And that Marsha -- a 23-year-old, Black, homeless, gender-non-comforming sex worker -- deserves recognition for kicking off a global movement for LGBTQ rights.
The first Gay Pride Parade hit the streets of New York in 1970. That same year, Marsha and fellow activist Sylvia Rivera founded STAR: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. They advocated for other young trans people, often clothing and housing them in a tenement on the Lower East Side.
Their goal, she said, was “to see gay people liberated and free and to have equal rights that other people have in America. We believe in picking up the gun, starting a revolution if necessary.”
Marsha became a well-known figure across New York. She was, essentially, un-missable. Tall and slender, she was known for her dramatic ensembles of discarded materials: plastics, bright wigs, costume jewelry, fake fruit, and floral crowns whose blooms she scavenged from the city’s flower district. In 1972, Marsha began working with a drag performance group, Hot Peaches. In 1975, she was photographed by Andy Warhol, as part of his “Gentlemen and Ladies” portfolio. In 1980, she rode in the lead car of the now-annual Gay Pride Parade. When AIDS began devastating the city’s gay community, Marsha worked with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or Act Up, attending meetings and protests.
But amidst her growing fame as both an activist and an artist, Marsha struggled under the weight of mental illness and substance abuse. Her first breakdown came in 1970. For the rest of her life, she would be in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Marsha also struggled with housing, living on the streets and on friends’ couches for the majority of her adult life.
In the summer of 1992, Marsha went missing. A few days later, on July 6, her body was pulled from the Hudson River. Police quickly called it a suicide. But her friends and chosen family pushed back against that decision, and continue to to this day.
Marsha P. Johnson’s magic came from her ability to mix joy with anger, performance with activism. She once said, “As long as gay people don’t have their rights all across America, there’s no reason for celebration.”
All month we’re talking about activists.
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