Marsha P. Johnson

Marsha P. Johnson was a Black gay and trans liberation activist, drag queen performer, actress, and sex worker who struggled with mental illness and lived with HIV/AIDS. The "P" in her name stood for "pay it no mind," her answer to questions about many aspects of her life, including her gender. Though often mistreated by mainstream society and even by parts of her queer community, she was known in New York City’s West Village for charisma, joyfulness, and generosity, and many called her Saint Marsha. After graduating high school in 1963 and briefly enrolling in the U.S. Navy, she moved to New York City with fifteen dollars and a bag of clothes, found a new home in the West Village, and made ends meet through sex work, one of the few options available to many in the gay community at the time. In a period when New York City’s sexual deviancy laws effectively made being gay or trans illegal and police frequently targeted TLGBQ+ people, she was present when the street around the Stonewall Inn erupted in rebellion in 1969. In the days that followed, she moved to the forefront of the Gay Liberation Movement, including co-founding STAR, now known as STARR: Strategic Trans Alliance for Radical Reform, with Sylvia Rivera. She called for Power To The People outside Bellevue Hospital in demonstrations led by the Gay Liberation Front in 1970, marched in the 1971 Christopher Street Liberation Day march as she had the year before and every year after, and joined Sylvia Rivera in three days of protests at City Hall in 1973 after the City Council voted down a bill protecting homosexual people while overlooking protections for trans people. In 1980, she took shelter in the New Jersey home of Randy Wicker and stayed there until July 6, 1992, when her body was found in the Hudson River. Police ruled her death a suicide, but it is widely believed that she was murdered; although the case was reopened in 2012 at activists’ insistence, it remains unsolved, and her death stands as a reminder of the increased risk of violence faced by Black trans women and the TLGBQ+ community even as her legacy is celebrated.

New York, New York · United States