Marsha P Johnson

Early life

Johnson was born Malcolm Michaels on August 24, 1945 at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She was raised by a single mother, alongside an older sister, Norma. Johnson was brought up in a Roman Catholic church and remained religious her entire life, stating that she "got married to Jesus... he takes me seriously" and that she talked to him all the time. Johnson stated in a 1992 interview that she first began wearing dresses at the age of five but stopped because "boys next door would try and get fresh with me" and describes being raped as a child. Johnson in her late teens told her mother she was gay and her mother responded that she was "lower than a dog". After graduating from high school in 1963, Johnson moved to Greenwich Village in New York City where she at first worked at a restaurant until she began to pursue a new life as "the biggest drag queen in the world" where she began performing onstage in NYC drag balls where she initially went with the name "Black Marsha", before shortening it. Johnson stated she never "did drag seriously" because she "didn't have money to do serious drag", stating she'd always get her clothes from the thrift shop, and was known to add flowers all over her head; Johnson often designed most of her outfits. Johnson began hustling in the streets to make ends meet. Johnson lived on the streets of Greenwich Village by 1966.

Johnson chose Marsha P. Johnson as her "drag queen name" because everybody used to call her "Michelle", and she claimed, "I was a little boy and I didn't think that was a nice name for a boy. That (42nd Street)'s where I got the name 'Johnson' from Howard Johnson's restaurant." The "P" in her name stood simply for "pay it no mind", as recalled by Bob Kohler, one of her fellow friends and fellow activists in the gay movement, who was bailing her out of jail, when the judge in Johnson's case asked her what the "p" stood for, Johnson snapped her finger and said "pay it no mind". Humored by the response, the judge agreed and let her go. Johnson would also use the saying sarcastically when questioned about her actual gender.

Johnson began frequenting the Stonewall bar after they began allowing "(lesbian) women and drag queens" in. Johnson claimed she was one of the "Stonewall Girls".

Stonewall uprising and social actions

On the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the Stonewall uprising occurred. Many identify Johnson as being one of the first to fight back in the clashes with the police during the uprising. Though Johnson is cited by some as having "started" the rebellion, Johnson herself disputed the account in 1987, stating she had arrived at around "2 [o'clock] in the morning", stating "the riots had already started" when she arrived and that the Stonewall building "was on fire" after cops set it on fire. The riots reportedly started at around 1:20 that morning. According to David Carter, in the book, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Revolution, it was stated Johnson on the first night, "threw a shot glass at a mirror in the torched bar screaming, 'I got my civil rights'", while on the second night, Johnson "climbed on top of a lamppost" and dropped a heavy object into the windshield of a police car. Carter listed Johnson alongside Jackie Hormona and Zazu Nova as being the "three individuals known to have been in the vanguard" of the escalation of the Stonewall uprising.

Following the Stonewall uprising, Johnson joined the Gay Liberation Front and participated in the first Christopher Street Liberation Pride rally on the first anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion in June 1970. One of Johnson's most notable direct actions occurred when she and fellow GLF members staged a sit-in protest at Weinstein Hall at New York University in August 1970 where administrators had canceled a dance where they found that it was sponsored by gay organizations. Shortly after that, she and close friend Sylvia Rivera co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) organization (initially titled Street Transvestites Actual Revolutionaries), and the two of them were a visible presence at gay liberation marches and other radical political actions. In 1973, Johnson and Rivera were banned from participating in the gay pride parade by the gay and lesbian committee who were administering the event stating they "weren't gonna allow drag queens" at their marches claiming they were "given them a bad name". Their response was to march defiantly ahead of the parade. During one LGBT rally in the early '70s, a reporter asked her why she was there, Johnson shouted to the microphone, "Darling, I want my gay rights now!"

During another incident around this time, which landed Johnson in court, she was confronted by police officers for hustling in New York, and when they went to apprehend her, she hit them with her handbag, which contained two bricks. When Johnson was asked by the judge why she was hustling, Johnson explained she was trying to secure enough money for her husband's tombstone. During a time when same-sex marriage was illegal in the United States, the judge asked her what "happened to this alleged husband", Johnson responded, "Pigs killed him". Initially sentenced to 90 days in prison for the assault, Johnson's lawyer eventually convinced the judge to sent her to Bellevue instead.

With Rivera, Johnson established the S.T.A.R. house, the first shelter for gay and trans street kids in 1972, and paid the rent for it with money they made themselves as sex workers. Marsha was a "drag mother" of STAR House, getting together food and clothing to help support the young drag queens, trans women, gender nonconformists and other gay street kids living on the Christopher Street docks or in their house on the Lower East Side of New York. The S.T.A.R. House was short-lived but became a legendary model for future generations.

In 1975, Marsha P. Johnson was photographed by famed artist Andy Warhol, as part of a "Ladies and Gentlemen" series of Polaroids. Johnson was also a member of J. Camicias' international, NYC-based, GLBT performance troupe, Hot Peaches (which has been compared to the similar, San Francisco troupe, The Cockettes).

In the 1980s Johnson continued her street activism as a respected organizer and marshal with ACT UP. In 1992, when George Segal's Stonewall memorial was moved to Christopher Street from Ohio to recognize the gay liberation movement, Johnson commented, "How many people have died for these two little statues to be placed in the park to recognize gay people? How many years does it take for people to see that we're all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race? I mean how many years does it take for people to see that? We're all in this rat race together."

Gender identity and health

Johnson used an array of language to express gender identity. In 1971, journalist and Gay Activists Alliance member Arthur Bell asked Johnson if she thought of herself as male or female, Johnson told him, "I think of myself as me". In 1972, Johnson self-identified as a "gay transvestite" and "girlie". In Johnson's final interview in 1992, Johnson consistently used the terms "drag queen", "transvestite" and "boy", and stated "when I became a drag queen, I started to live my life as a woman." She is documented using the words "homosexual" and "gay" to describe her sexual orientation. In the documentary, Pay It No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson, some people interviewed described Johnson as a "drag queen", while columnist Michael Musto, in talking of Johnson's portrayal in Warhol's series, called Johnson a "transgender version of the Campbell's Soup, but much prettier".

Johnson often was threatened by clients who would discover that Johnson wasn't a woman, despite Johnson consistently reminding them that she was "a boy in drag", saying later, "some people couldn't believe I wasn't a real woman. Honey, I was just a transvestite, and then I'd look in the mirror and go 'maybe [the client] could've thought I was [a woman]', I don't know, I wouldn't be for sure." In describing a similar incident with another client, Johnson would say, "there was just once in a while, I would run into this lunatic who would actually have it in his mind that I was a woman. And I mean, I'd tell him I was a boy and he just wouldn't, you know, just wouldn't believe it until he'd seen down my pants and everything, another day, another illusion. (laughs)" Johnson had a bullet lodged in her spine from an assault by one client, and claimed she had lived "nine lives" because she had survived so many knife and gun assaults. In 1972, Johnson is documented discussing transition and hormonal treatments. Randy Wicker, Johnson's best friend and roommate for over a decade, refers to Johnson as "transgender" in a 2009 interview. Johnson is not documented using the word "transgender" to describe herself.

Johnson's sister, Norma Michaels, is filmed in an interview by Randy Wicker repeatedly referring to Johnson as "Mikey", and recalling that while one neighbor spouted a homophobic slur at Johnson, others in the neighborhood were amused by Johnson. Ms. Michaels reminisced that Johnson would return to the New Jersey neighborhood to visit "in a shirt and pants". Wicker said that when Johnson was living with him in his Hoboken apartment, he advised Johnson to not go out in public in female drag, "because it would be too much"; Johnson obliged by dressing in male clothes while traveling from Hoboken to Greenwich Village. By the time Johnson arrived at Christopher Street, Johnson had already changed into a dress and put on a wig, while "still wearing clunky male shoes".

Johnson spoke of first having a nervous breakdown in 1970. Though generally regarded as "generous and warmhearted" under her Marsha persona, Johnson's dark side sometimes emerged under Johnson's "male persona as Malcolm", often resulting in Johnson being hospitalized and sedated. During those moments when Johnson's violent side emerged, according to an acquaintance Robert Heide, Johnson could be aggressive and short-tempered and speak in a deeper voice and, as Malcolm, would "become a very nasty, vicious man, looking for fights". This dual personality of Johnson's has been described as "a schizophrenic personality at work". A 1979 Village Voice article titled "The Drag of Politics" by Steven Watson reported that Johnson's saintly personality was "volatile" and listed a roster of gay bars from which she had been banned. On April 17, 1987, Johnson was sent to the mental ward of St. Mary's Hospital after falsely pulling the fire alarm and vandalizing Wicker's apartment building in Hoboken, claiming that "God told [her] to do it." Johnson was said to be in a "very fragile" state at the time of her death in 1992, according to Wicker.

Death

On June 30, 1992, shortly after the 1992 Pride March, Johnson was reported missing. Six days later, on July 6, Johnson's body was found floating in the Hudson River off the West Village Piers; Johnson was 46. Police initially ruled the death a suicide, but Johnson's friends and other members of the local community insisted Johnson was not suicidal and noted that the back of Johnson's head had a massive wound. According to Sylvia Rivera, their close friend Bob Kohler believed Johnson had committed suicide due to her ever-increasing fragile state, which Rivera herself disputed, claiming she and Johnson had "made a pact" to "cross the 'river Jordan' (aka Hudson River) together". Randy Wicker would claim later that Johnson "may have possibly hallucinated", or that her death was accidental, or that she jumped to the river to escape her harassers.

Several people came forward to say they had seen Johnson harassed by a group of "thugs" who had also robbed people. According to Wicker, a witness saw someone engaging in a fight with Johnson days prior to her death calling her a homophobic slur in the process and later bragged to someone that he "had killed a drag queen named Marsha" at a bar. Despite a campaign from Johnson's friends and vigils at the site where Johnson's body had been found, initial attempts to get the police to investigate the cause of death were unsuccessful. In November 2012, activist Mariah Lopez finally succeeded in getting the New York police department to reopen the case as a possible homicide. Lopez's fight in getting the case reopened and getting to the bottom of Johnson's death is the main focus of the 2017 documentary, The Death & Life of Marsha P. Johnson.

Johnson was later cremated and her ashes spread over the same river where her body was found as a special memorial by her friends.

Tributes

Only ten days before her death, Johnson gave an extensive, filmed interview which forms the core of the 2012 documentary, Pay it No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson, directed by Michael Kasino and Richard Morrison. Also interviewed are many of Johnson's closest friends. Johnson is honored by them as saintly, as a deeply spiritual person who attended every church and temple, who gave away what little she had to help others on the streets, and who made Santeria-influenced offerings to the spirits of the waters that surround and run through New York City. Agosto Machado, performer and friend of Johnson's, refers to her as a "bodhisattva". She is honored as an LGBT rights pioneer, a veteran activist, and a survivor.

New York City baroque pop band Antony and the Johnsons (led by Anohni) was named in Johnson's honor, and their eponymous 1998 album features a song called "River of Sorrow," which is inspired by Johnson's life and passing. The song is featured in the Pay it No Mind documentary. In 1993 Anohni appeared in a play about Johnson and International Chrysis by the Hot Peaches, the same theater group with whom Johnson had performed. Anohni also wrote and directed a play about Johnson, "The Ascension of Marsha P. Johnson" at the Pyramid Club in 1994 and at PS122 in NYC in 1995.

American drag queen and TV personality RuPaul names Johnson as an inspiration and describes Johnson as the true Drag Mother. During an episode of his show RuPaul's Drag Race in 2012, RuPaul told her contestants that Johnson "paved the way for all of [them]".

A character based on Johnson appears in the film, Stonewall, a drama inspired by the Stonewall riots. She is played by Otoja Abit.

Happy Birthday, Marsha!, directed by Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel, is a short, experimental film about Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, set in the hours before the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, in which Johnson is portrayed by Independent Spirit Award-winning transgender actress Mya Taylor.

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, directed by David France, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2017 and later found a buyer in Netflix. The documentary re-examines Johnson's untimely death and celebrates the contributions of Johnson and Sylvia Rivera to the modern LGBTQ rights movement.