LGBT Profiles: Marsha P. Johnson
The 24th August marks what would have been Marsha P Johnson’s 73rd birthday. If she was still alive today, you wonder just how much she would have achieved for LGBT rights. She may have been born Malcolm Michaels Jr but she died Marsha P Johnson, a black transgender activist, who did so much for her community despite not having much herself. The first LGBT profile was about Oscar Wilde, Marsha’s life was completely different. She lived in a different time, she was a different race and she was a different gender than was assigned to her at birth.
Malcolm Michaels grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, she crossed dressed from an early age, apparently from the age of 5 but stopped because of other children’s aggression towards her. After graduating from Thomas A. Edison High School, in 1963 she moved to New York with only $15 and a bag of clothes. It was in New York where Malcolm became more widely known as Marsha P Johnson, the P she would tell people was “pay it no mind”, and Johnson was from one of her favourite hangouts the Howard Johnson restaurant in New York.
Marsha had to make her living on the streets, being arrested more than 100 times (she stopped counting) for prostitution. What she was better known for, however, was her work for the LGBT community. It is said that she was one of the people at the forefront of the Stonewall riot in 1969. For those who don’t know, the Stonewall Riots started after yet another raid on the Stonewall Inn, in Christopher Street, New York. LGBT people where fed up of the treatment of the police and this raid was the final straw for people in the community, including Marsha.
She went on to form Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries or STAR as it became known with Sylvia Rivera, a fellow transgender women and LGBT activist. The idea of STAR was to help young transgender people, they had a property where they would house, clothe and the feed these young people who had come to them for help.
Unfortunately STAR didn’t survive, but Marsha and Sylvia continued their work for LGBT rights. In an interview Marsha stated that her main goal was for gay men and women to have equality in America and to get them out of jail and back on the streets. She worked on her goal for the rest of her life, always trying to help anyone in the community in anyway she could. This including helping her flatmate Randy Wicker’s lover when he was dying of AIDS in 1990. As an AIDS activist she would attend meetings and protest for ACT UP a aids advocacy organisation.
In the documentary The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson on Netflix her family said that they didn’t believe her when she said that she knew Andy Warhol. She did and Warhol took Polaroids of Marsha and included her in his work ‘Ladies and Gentleman’; a portfolio with screen prints of transgender people and drag queens. Marsha stated that she was ‘no one from Nowheresville’ until she became a drag queen. She travelled around America and even Europe with the drag queen group Hot Peaches.
Marsha suffered from mental illness and was in and out of psychiatric institutions during the 70’s. I have read that she was also known to take a lot of drugs, something that is refuted by her flat mate Randy Wicker. Even though in the Making Gay History Podcast, Marsha does actually recall taking drugs but that doesn’t mean she was a heavy user. What also might be a surprise to some people is her faith, she was a Catholic Christian and, when her flatmates boyfriend died, would be seen at a Catholic church before the Virgin Mary
Through seeing and hearing interviews of people who knew her it’s obvious she had a personality which matched her flamboyant way of dressing. This is why it was a surprise to everyone that after she was found dead on July 6th 1992 in the Hudson River that the police said it was suicide. People who knew her disagreed with this from the start and campaigned for the verdict to be overturned and her death looked into. The authorities reclassified her death as drowning from undetermined causes and in 2012 they agreed to take a look at the case which today remains open.
Watching the Netflix documentary, listening to the podcast and reading about Marsha made me realise just how much Marsha and Sylvia Rivera did for the LGBT community. Neither of them had much themselves but they did there best to help people and fight for LGBT rights. The people in the community owe a great debt to people like Marsha. They showed us that you have to fight for change. Just think how happy they would be knowing that gay men and women could get married and have many of the same rights as straight people. To think that Marsha was a multiple minority; she was a black, transgender women during a period where either one of those could find someone hating you, yet she never gave up.
We’ve come a long since Marsha died, in Laverne Cox we have a black, transgender women who is a famous actress. We still have a long way to go, the Netflix documentary follows a court case about the murder of black, transgender lady who was killed just for being who she was. Marsha helped the whole LGBT community, maybe it’s time for all of us to be a bit more like Marsha. We need to fight together for our rights and we should support each other more, we all need to find our inner Marsha.
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