Our Heroes!

Some times our heroes are lost in the new generations of trans people, most know about Sylvia Rivera but do not know about her friend Marsha.

Profiles in perseverance
You may not know their names. But these courageous Black Americans changed history.
CNN
By Harmeet Kaur
February 1, 2021


The late Marsha P. Johnson is celebrated today as a veteran of the Stonewall Inn protests, a pioneering transgender activist and a pivotal figure in the gay liberation movement. Monuments to her life are planned in New York City and her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey.

During her lifetime, though, she wasn’t always treated with the same dignity.

When police raided the New York gay bar known as the Stonewall Inn in 1969, Johnson was said to be among the first to resist them. The next year, she marched in the city’s first Gay Pride demonstration.

But Johnson still struggled for full acceptance in the wider gay community, which often excluded transgender people.

She fought against the whitewashing and gaywashing of the Stonewall Uprising, she along with Sylvia Rivera were one of the leaders of the rebellion. They formed Gay Liberation Front (GLF), Worker’s World had this to say…

Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries
By Leslie Feinberg
Published Sep 24, 2006


Stonewall combatants Sylvia Rivera and Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson—a Latin@ and an African American activist, respectively—took part in the early development of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in the weeks after the 1969 Stonewall street battles. Both were self-identified drag queens.

While consciousness and attitudes toward transgender and transsexual activists was not uniform in GLF, the lesbian and gay front did not turn away trans people.

The Philadelphia GLF news letter COME OUT took the following written position in its August 1970 newsletter: “Gay Liberation Front welcomes any gay person, regardless of their sex, race, age or social behavior. Though some other gay organizations may be embarrassed by drags or transvestites, GLF believes that we should accept all of our brothers and sisters unconditionally.”

Rivera and Johnson were inspired by their experiences in the early militant gay liberation organizing and protests.

“STAR came about after a sit-in at Weinstein Hall at New York University in 1970,” Rivera explained to me, in an interview in 1998, four years before her death. The protest at NYU erupted after the administration cancelled planned dances there, reportedly because a gay organization was sponsoring the events. GLF, Radicalesbians and other activists held a sit-in at Weinstein Hall. They won the right to use the venue.

Rivera and Johnson saw the need to organize homeless trans street youth. Both Rivera and Johnson were themselves homeless and had to hustle on the streets for sustenance and shelter. “Marsha and I just decided it was time to help each other and help our other kids,” Rivera stated.

In 1970, the two formed Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR).

The CNN article ends with…

In 1992, Johnson’s body was found floating in the Hudson River. Police initially ruled her death a suicide but later agreed to reopen the case. It remains open to this day.