Marsha, instigator? activist

‘My life has been built around sex and liberation’. Marsha P. Johnson is undoubtedly one of the most recognisable figures of LGBTQ+ history. Synonymous with the gay liberation movement of 1960s New York City. Assigned male at birth, Johnson is perhaps best known for being the black transgender woman who threw the first rock at the Stonewall Riots. Although Johnson herself has corrected that, she was not the person who started the fight, that doesn’t stop her from being at the centre of the liberation movement, and perhaps she remains significant simply as a figurehead of a pivotal movement in LGBTQ history. This article will discuss Johnson’s own history, and whether it is problematic to assume she was trans.

Johnson was born on August 24, 1945, in Elizabeth, New Jersey to African-American, Methodist working-class parents, as one of seven children. She attended the Mount Teman African Methodist Episcopal Church throughout her childhood, she would remain a practising Christian throughout the rest of her life, later describing herself as ‘married’ to Jesus at sixteen. She had dressed in dresses throughout her childhood, adopting something of an androgynous identity, as we might call it today. This ended when she, after years of bullying, was sexually assaulted by a 13-year-old boy. Her mother, rather confusingly, told her that being gay was to be ‘lower than a dog’, whilst also telling her to go and find a rich boyfriend.

Her life altered when she moved to Greenwich Village, New York at 17, returning to wearing women’s clothing and choosing the name Marsha P. Johnson (the P meant Pay it no mind and is an interesting call back to Susan B. Anthony and her sister’s decision to include initials in their names). New York was still heavily against gay people, often criminalising otherwise innocent activities in efforts of persecution, yet, within ‘The Village’, and the now infamous Stonewall Inn, this period may have been a point of liberation for Johnson. She immediately began working as a drag queen, saying in 1992 that she was ‘no one, nobody… until I became a drag queen.’ Day to day she favoured colourful outfits, thrift stores and flower crowns, an exaltation of feminine identity. She also, as many young people do, found her people in her move, becoming ‘like a mother’ to a transgender girl named Sylvia Rivera, and making friends kind enough to let the homeless Johnson sleep on their sofas. Poor and gay, she was forced to turn to sex work to supplement her income, where she was often abused by clients. She would later describe her life as ‘built around sex and liberation’.

The most famous moment of her life, shortly before her 24th birthday, on the 28th of June 1969, saw the Stonewall Inn raided by police. It is often perpetuated that Johnson began the riots as police began arresting the gay men in the bar, but she herself has corrected this, clarifying that when she and Rivera arrived it was already 2 am, the place was on fire, ‘The riots had already started.’ Whether Johnson was being completely honest or not, in the weeks and months following, she was one of the leading figures of the following explosive gay rights movement. A year later, the first Gay Pride Parade took place, as a protest led by a group of gay rights groups: the Gay Liberation Front, (radical) and the Gay Activist Alliance (moderate). Johnson and Rivera instigated STAR, Street Action Transvestite Action Revolutionaries frustrated by the general exclusion of transgender and people of colour. Johnson and Rivera’s organisation is clearly keenly inspired by their own histories, exemplified by the opening of STAR House, STAR was “an organization dedicated to sheltering young transgender individuals who were shunned by their families.”

Throughout the 70s, Johnson began to receive more visibility; notably, she performed with the drag group ‘Hot Peaches’, and modelled for Andy Warhol. Her motivation in all was clear, that gay people across America would have their rights, and she would not rest until every gay person did: “as long as gay people don’t have their rights all across America…there is no reason for celebration.” Throughout the 70s and 80s Johnson’s activism was interspersed with mental health breakdowns and subsequent stays in psychiatric facilities, arrests and sex work. In 1990 she was diagnosed with H.I.V., characteristically speaking publicly about this in June 1992. Tragically, less than a fortnight after this interview, she was found in the Hudson River. 1992 was at that point, the worst year on record for anti-LGBTQ+ violence, and rulings of suicide were abhorrent to her friends. Police would reclassify the case as undetermined, but refused to investigate further, nor did the media both covering her death. Despite this, hundreds turned up to her funeral. It took twenty years for the New York Police Department to reopen the case.

Johnson and Rivera’s legacies were not forgotten, in 2019 they became the subject of a monument titled ‘She Built NYC’, and in 2020, New York State named a park in Brooklyn after her, she remains synonymous with the LGBTQ+ movement, regardless of whether she threw the first brick or not.

To turn to the question of her identity, Johnson described herself as gay, and a transvestite, she used she/he pronouns. The word ‘transgender’ was not as widespread as it is now, she is never known to have used the word herself, but it wasn’t unheard of. There is an argument that applying modern terminologies, in this case, a transgender identity, onto someone who would not have understood it, or in this case, perhaps knew that this was not her identity is damaging to that person’s historical memory. Furthermore, we do know that she identified as a drag queen, a transvestite, and gay, and attaching those experiences to one of a transgender person is trivialising all of the above identities. Perhaps given more time, Johnson may have recognised this in herself, or perhaps with her she/he pronouns a gender-fluid identity would have suited her. Unfortunately, we’ll never quite know, but that doesn’t reduce her impact on LGBTQ+ history, and I for one think that regardless of her exact gender identification, she deserves recognition during Women’s History Month.

Binion, Billy, ‘Marsha P. Johnson Probably Didn't Start Stonewall, and Might Not Have Been Trans. Does It Matter?’, reason, (30/06/2020), < https://reason.com/2020/06/30/marsha-p-johnson-didnt-start-stonewall-pride-might-not-have-been-trans/ >, [29/03/2023]

Rothberg, Emma, ‘Marsha P. Johnson’ National Women’s History Museum. (2022), < www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/marsha-p-johnson >, [29/03/2023]

‘Life Story: Marsha P. Johnson’, NY Historical Society, < https://wams.nyhistory.org/growth-and-turmoil/growing-tensions/marsha-p-johnson/>, [29/03/2023]