Rivers of Sorrow and Rivers of Joy: Marsha P. Johnson and Queer Intersectionality
This article revisits two monumental figures in the American fight for LGBTQ+ rights. In doing so, we seek to honor Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, and to underscore, during this month of so-called “gay pride,” that mainstream gay culture has long turned its back on the community at large, shifting instead toward a white, wealthy, able-bodied, and highly conventional image. The LGBTQ+ community must stand in solidarity with trans people, people of color, migrants, the impoverished, the marginalized, and all gender-divergent individuals. Let us reclaim the history that came before us, learn it, and carry it forward into something better [not just for some].
A Life on the Margins
At the very heart of the struggle for civil rights in the United States stands a Black transgender drag queen and self-identified transvestite. Marsha spent her life battling deep poverty and mental illness, ultimately living out her final years with HIV. Yet, she was a fierce political force. Alongside Sylvia Rivera, a key figure on her own right, she co-founded S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), a groundbreaking organization that provided food, clothing, and shelter to homeless queer youth and drag queens.
Marsha & Sylvia via aldianews
Marsha also played an important role in the Stonewall uprising, a pivotal event that galvanized the LGBTIQ+ rights movement. She was always political: she shouted in the streets, marched in protests, and was interviewed and photographed by Andy Warhol, yet she often slept on the street. The exact cause of her death, which was allegedly murder, an accident, or suicide, has never been conclusively established.
Marsha P. Johnson was born on August 24, 1945, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, as Malcolm Michaels. The fifth of seven children, she was the daughter of Malcolm Michaels Sr., a General Motors worker, and Alberta Claiborne, a homemaker. As a child, she attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She carried this faith into adulthood, continuing to attend Catholic churches and other places of worship, and some of her most devoted followers even came to call her “Saint Marsha.” She began wearing dresses, which were then considered women’s clothing only, when she was five years old, a delightful revelation she wouldn’t fully understand until years later.
Marsha began living on the streets when she was eleven years old, a pattern that would repeat throughout her life. In 1970 she was shot, and it was around this time that she began showing signs of mental illness. She would walk down Christopher Street completely naked until the police picked her up, gave her antipsychotics, and held her for three months. Within weeks of being released, she was back to being Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson. Some people remember that she sometimes appeared as “Malcolm,” a persona in which her voice deepened, her behavior became more aggressive and confrontational, and she would pick fights. She was also described as having a condition that affected her concentration. While she could develop rich and elaborate lines of thought, she often lost track of where a thought had begun, as shown in the documentary The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, directed by David France.
Identity and performance
Marsha used feminine pronouns and self-descriptors. She considered herself gay, a transvestite, and a drag queen. In those days, the term “transgender” was not widely used, and the category of “gender nonconforming” would take many more years to fully take shape. The “P.” in her name, which stood for “Pay It No Mind,” began as a playful response to authority. When a judge once asked about it, she replied, “Pay it no mind,” so humorously that he let her go. That was one of the many times she was arrested, an experience that became routine. Marsha herself stopped counting her arrests after the hundredth.
Johnson began wearing dresses, which were then considered women’s clothing only, when she was five years old, a revelation she wouldn’t fully understand until years later. As a drag queen, Marsha performed with Hot Peaches, a New York theater company that staged weekly shows from 1970 to 1990. The group was often compared to the Cockettes, a famous hippie and psychedelic troupe based in California. In 1990, she performed with Hot Peaches in London. With them, she also sang the classic tune “Love” in The Heat, performing not with formal vocal training, but with pure energy and commitment.
Her style had nothing to do with high-end drag, the glittery, expensive world that required costly dresses and fine accessories. Instead, she was known for wearing flowers and fruit on her head and plastic heels. Her wigs were extravagant, and her smile was wide, stretching across almost her entire face. Her face was long and sharp, but with few harsh angles. She drew her eyebrows thin and tight, which softened her expression. You can see this in the Polaroids Andy Warhol took of her in 1975, when he invited her to participate in his Ladies and Gentlemen series. It is a provocative, ambiguous series whose central idea is to present drag queens as royalty, not mere imitation.
Marsha. Polaroid by Warhol via shotgunseamstress
Stonewall
The Stonewall uprising took place on June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York, around 1:20 a.m. Police raids on gay bars were common in the United States at the time. Trans people and transvestites were arrested, and women wearing fewer than three “feminine” pieces of clothing could also be detained.
Although the Stonewall Inn began as a predominantly gay male bar, it later expanded its clientele to include drag queens and lesbians. Like every gay bar in the city, however, it was never safe from police raids. Entry required either knowing the doorman or appearing visibly gay. The bar was owned by a Genovese crime family syndicate that paid off police in exchange for advance warning of raids. When an alert came in, the main, darkly lit hallway would suddenly light up, and the dance floor, where same-sex couples were banned by law from dancing together, would scramble to line up. Officers would ask for IDs. Female police officers took drag queens, or anyone they suspected might be one, into the bathroom to determine whether they were “men dressed as women.” Arrests followed, in a routine that systematically violated their rights.
But on June 28, 1969, no warning came. The raid arrived without notice, and the patrons were furious. There was something in the air then, an unnamed, unorganized energy that only needed one shattering moment to break loose.
The 1960s in the United States were turbulent, full of social movements and struggle. The African American civil rights movement, the hippie counterculture, anti-Vietnam War protests, and the liberal atmosphere of Greenwich Village all helped fuel the insurrection that erupted at Stonewall. Craig Rodwell, who ran a bookstore a bit farther down Christopher Street from the bar, later recalled seeing police chasing civilians and a drag queen hitting a police officer with her purse. After those arrested were released, a crowd gathered in front of Stonewall. More arrests followed. Police vans came late, left, and returned. Thirteen people were arrested and five officers were injured. By around 4 a.m., silence slowly began to settle over the street. Later that morning, unable to process what had just happened, some demonstrators gathered in Christopher Park. The week that followed was filled with more protests, clashes, and arrests.
Not everyone in the community celebrated this violent outburst. In particular, the more conservative wings of the gay rights movement looked down on drag queens, distrusted femininity, and opposed physical confrontation. Nonetheless, the impact of Stonewall still echoes around the world today. Two organizations were formed in its wake, the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance, and the following year the first Pride march was held, quickly spreading to cities worldwide.
One year after the Stonewall uprising, Marsha P. Johnson and her friend and fellow activist Sylvia Rivera founded S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries). This political group provided food, shelter, clothing, and other basic needs to the most vulnerable people in New York. Immigrants, people of color, drag queens, sex workers, and homeless youth found refuge at 213 East 2nd Street. The two cofounders paid for much of S.T.A.R. out of their own pockets, using money that came from sex work.
Sylvia Rivera
Sylvia Rivera was a political activist born on July 2, 1951, in New York. Her father abandoned the family early, and her mother died by suicide when Sylvia was three. Her grandmother strongly disapproved of her femininity, which first became visible through her early use of makeup. Of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent, she began living on the streets with eleven and quickly became involved in the community of drag queens, which also included homeless transgender people.
Sylvia Rivera via Forwardtogether
Her political activism intersected with the anti-Vietnam War movement, the civil rights struggle, feminism, and the rights of Black and Latine communities, including through groups like the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. As an adult, she lived in an abandoned lot, from which the police eventually evicted her. After that displacement, a friend took her in. She began working at a church and revived her political life, which would continue for another five years until her death on February 19, 2002, from liver cancer. Two years before she died, while in Italy for the Millennium March, she was hailed as the "mother" of LGBT people.
During one of her speeches in those last five years, in a public square, she recalled the crucial role drag queens had played in the LGBT movement and denounced how the mainstream gay movement had turned its back on them. “You all better quiet down,” she told the crowd, and then closed by saying that S.T.A.R., the organization she founded with Marsha P. Johnson, was genuinely trying to help and protect the most vulnerable members of the community, not the middle-class white men and women.
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