This book is a perfect meeting of author and subject. The artist and writer Tourmaline has, for many years, been the keeper of Marsha P. Johnson’s memory, for those who came after her time. Marsha herself is one of those people born to become a legend, who led an unclassifiable life, whose struggles and joys made space for others to come.
In today’s language, you could say Marsha was a transgender woman, or maybe nonbinary, and probably neurodivergent. It can be good to have language for nonstandard ways of being, but it only gets us so far. Better to think of her, as Tourmaline does, as an artist of the self, opening space for all sorts of people to also become some more efflorescent being.
She was her own invention, starting with her name: “I just made myself Marsha.” In the early sixties, still in her teens, she gravitated to the Times Square entertainment district, as did many queer and trans people at the time. Marsha: “I took the Lord in my heart, and I took him with me, and I moved to the city for better or worse. And he said ‘You might wind up with nothing’ because me and Jesus are always talking. And I said ‘Honey, I don’t care if I never have nothing until the day I die, all I want is my freedom.’”
Times Square offered a broad range of entertainment in those days. Sex work was one of them, although for Black people that was west of Seventh Avenue. Like many others, she sold the occasional hand-job. Marsha: “The ones that made the most money were the boys that looked like girls and could wear their own hair with just a little bit of makeup and have a little hormone tit. That’s when the hormones just started coming out in the sixties.”
She met Sylvia Rivera around Times Square in 1963. Seeing Marsha in full drag just walking down the street gave Sylvia a sense of the possible. Marsha had been going to drag socials since she was seventeen and could carry a look. She would importune passersby with the line: “Spare change for a starving actress?”
Sometimes Marsha and her street friends would pool their money to get a room for the night. For Tourmaline, these small, rented rooms were spaces for collective dreaming. A room for the night, safe from the street, is one thing, but what more expansive vision might it imply? For Tourmaline, as for Marsha, even life under difficult circumstances can be shot through with the possibility of another city for another life.
Increasing police presence made Times Square more dangerous leading up to the World’s Fair in 1964, so Marsha went downtown. She was not welcome in many of the gay clubs there, where the sign might well say “NO DOGS NO DRAG.” Cross-dressing was policed by cops and bars alike.
She would occasionally get into the Stonewall Inn. If not, she might hang out across the street in Sheridan Square Park with others who could not afford it or who were refused entry. Marsha met International Chrysis, Jackie Hormona, and Zazu Nova—who may actually have been the person to throw the first brick at the Stonewall rebellion. There are many, many others whose lives, even their names, are lost.
They might have called themselves street queens, painted queens or scare queens at the time. Transsexuality, in the sense of medically supervised transition, was mostly out of reach. The term transgender was not yet current. All the same, I think we can claim Marsha as a transsexual ancestor. She took hormones on and off. No easy thing at the time, as trans people were at the mercy of often predatory doctors. Or perhaps we could imagine "transsexual" as an even more expansive and inclusive term than what transgender became once the nonprofits started defining it as a client category, and see Marsha as a precursor to it.
The Stonewall Inn had two dance floors. The back room, also known as the Black room, would be the space in which Marsha and her scare queen friends might occasionally be allowed. And then on June 28, 1969, when the police came, as they often did, the patrons fought back. Marsha recalls the jukebox was playing Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (1968) when it started.
There are many legends around the Stonewall rebellion. Marsha is often excluded from the story. It’s a combination of hostility to sex workers, transsexuals, and the neurodivergent with racism. Marsha herself sometimes did not remember clearly. Tourmaline suggests we read the legends of Stonewall as acts of what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation.” Not just filling in gaps in the police record, but trying to write in that gap what the police gaze can never even perceive.
In the sixties there was a whole sequence of queer rebellions against the cops, of which Stonewall was only the most famous and sustained. The relation between gay liberation, which gained momentum after Stonewall, and transsexuality—in the expansive sense—is complicated. The temptation is always there to define gayness narrowly, as just an “identity,” as if that would be enough to slip it into everyday normality without much question. Marsha troubles that limited approach to gay politics and culture, then and now—as Tourmaline gently reminds us.
Marsha co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries organization (STAR) in 1970. She refused to be president, so Sylvia took it on. Maybe Marsha knew she was not stable enough for that kind of organizing. Or maybe she thought her talents lay elsewhere. The October 1970 “STAR Manifesto” says: “If you want gay power you’re going to have to fight for it.” Maybe there's more than one way of fighting.
It’s remarkable what Marsha achieved given the lack of resources. Tourmaline: “She had reserves of resilience in the face of waves of violence, grief and loss.” When asked if she’d used the mace she carried, Marsha answered, “Not yet, but I’m patient.” She was shot in the back in 1980 and never really recovered.
Tourmaline does her best to reconstruct Marsha's career as a performing artist. She was in ten productions with the Angels of Light, a New York break-away group from the famous Cockettes of San Francisco. She performed for twenty years with the revue show Hot Peaches. Marsha also appeared in a Theatre of the Ridiculous production called Caprice and in a 1982 production at the Mineshaft BDSM club. Tourmaline: “This starving actress would take the stage and command the audiences blessed to behold her.”
One strange piece of documentation of Marsha's life is the portrait of her in Andy Warhol's series Ladies and Gentlemen (1975). Warhol sidekick Bob Colacello recruited a group of Black and Hispanic queens from the Gilded Grape nightclub for a portrait series commissioned by an Italian art dealer. One has to admire the purity and banality of this extraction of Black trans beauty, turned into art world property. Part of the project of Tourmaline's Marsha is to reverse the procedure, to retrieve Marsha's creativity and agency from the frozen image made of her.
The last part of the book, and of Marsha's life, coincides the start of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. A lot of the infrastructure of queer life shut down. In place of gay liberation, the politics of ACT-UP. Just as transsexual women are often written out of the Stonewall story, so too with the politics of AIDS. Trans women often took the role of caregivers rather than frontline activists. Certainly that was the case with Marsha.
Always fond of flowers, these took on additional meaning for her after the HIV/AIDS pandemic had begun. They were her symbol of eternal life. “There are several people I made into a flower inside me,” she said. Like all of us who lived through that era, she lost many friends. “I’m not promised a tomorrow,” she often said. Hers was an art of living in the present.
It’s unclear how she ended up dead in the Hudson River in 1992. Tourmaline presents the evidence without forcing a conclusion. Many of her friends thought it was the result of a hate crime. It’s also possible she knew it was time to leave the party. To cross the River Jordan. To be free of this cursed world. There is now a state park named after her, on the East River, on the other side of Manhattan to where her body was found. Since it is state and not federal, her name remains on it, for now at least.
For Tourmaline, “Marsha was an innovator of a form of freedom.” The benefit of this framing is that it rescues Marsha from being reduced to a sacrificial icon, or an object of injustice. It restores the agency and beauty to her life and labors. Tourmaline gives us a version of Marsha to help create even more possibilities for trans life. Particularly for Black trans life. In Raquel Willis, Mya Taylor, Laverne Cox, or Tourmaline herself, there are examples of Black trans womanhood that show what can bloom with a little more nurturing and tending than was ever made available to Marsha.
Tourmaline's book is first of all an act of love. It’s also an act of filiation, of family-making, ancestor-claiming. Marsha becomes an icon in a double sense: firstly for Black trans people to come, but secondly for the rest of us. Tourmaline centers Blackness and transness as the heart of whatever “LGBTQ+” is supposed to mean. In that sense, it’s also a political intervention in gay history-making.
These days, some of the most useful and interesting art in all mediums is coming from trans people. Not to mention some of the most useful and interesting interventions into politics and everyday life. At the center of all of which is Black trans people. As Tourmaline shows, through Marsha's example, this did not just spring up overnight. It's a long history of dreaming against the odds. No matter how hard they try to stop us, we'll keep Marsha's dreams alive.
Tourmaline’s Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson was published by Tiny Reparations Books on May 20, 2025.
