Marsha P Johnson has been the subject of seemingly endless invocation. From posters to murals, protest banners, T-shirts, and that infamous TikTok, the last decade has seen her ubiquity skyrocket. Yet, in spite of the growing prevalence of her image, there has never been a full biography of the local New York legend turned international trans icon until now.
Few people are better placed to translate Marsha’s life onto the page than Tourmaline, an artist, writer and perhaps the pre-eminent scholar on the life of Marsha P Johnson. She began writing Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson in 2020, but the real work started in the mid-2000s when she first started talking to people on New York’s Christopher Street and beyond about Marsha. Learning from friends, fellow artists, incarcerated people, Marsha’s family, and the many people Marsha mothered, Tourmaline has built a trove of overlapping and multifaceted narratives.
For Tourmaline, this book is about Marsha’s legacy being “a gift to know and a gift to share with the world”, hoping that people can “attune to her frequency” to find inspiration and power. Below, we speak to her about intergenerational connection, capturing the “fullness” of Marsha’s life, and embracing madness.
You’ve worked in film, in photography, exhibitions, and more. What made you want to tell Marsha’s story in this written format?
Tourmaline: I think this book format for me really is the culmination of two decades of work. It is a format that really lets me get deep into [her]. Each chapter provides a focus; Marsha as the downtown performer, Marsha as an HIV/AIDS care worker, Marsha as a Times Square hustler. And also it allowed me to share the arc of this powerful life, whose legacy is still unfolding. It felt really fulfilling to get that deep in. I wanted a format that allowed me to bring all of me and share all of Marsha.
Were there any challenges in working in this specific way?
Tourmaline: Marsha had so much beauty and glamour; she had such a rich palette. For me, with writing a script, because it’s a visual medium, I get to use the script as a jumping-off point. We have a beautiful cover designed by Jason Booher and there are some incredible photos, but I really wanted to do justice to the kind of beautiful, whimsical, glamorous aspects that were living in technicolour. I had to explore many different ways of how I am really describing the texture and feeling of Marsha.
In the podcast episode you did with the NYC Trans Oral History Project in 2019, you talked about growing up on a street and in a community where you met and had friendships with sex workers and older trans women from a young age.
Tourmaline: That really made up a huge part of my life! It’s so interesting to think about it, it’s huge for who I am.
How does that intergenerational connection and interaction affect how you approach your work?
Tourmaline: Sylvia Rivera hit Times Square when she was 11 years old and she met Marsha at 13. Marsha mothered her and was a surrogate mother for so many people. For me, I think about that in a bunch of different ways. I was a mentor for Queer Art Mentors for a number of years, when I was coming up there weren’t Black trans women directors that I knew. It continues to be important to help grow and facilitate infrastructure that helps mentor intergenerationally. Then there’s also my chosen mother, Miss Major.
[Marsha’s] name is often invoked, and her image, there are so many beautiful murals of her. But people don’t necessarily know the fullness of Marsha’s life
In the book there are several distinct points where you present parallel perspectives and narratives about Marsha – did it feel freeing to avoid creating a singular definitive narrative?
Tourmaline: To me, it was important to embrace the unfolding abundance of Marsha. She was known in many different spheres: the Marsha who walked on stage with Angels of Light is the same Marsha who was a Jersey girl, yet the people around her had different perspectives on life and community. Like Al Micheals, Marsha’s nephew, who she babysat – his voice is important. The Harris sisters, who were part of the Angels of Light, were also babysat by Marsha and have very different orientations around life. All of these people were so deeply touched by Marsha.
An interesting aspect of your book – and your broader work – is how you talk about disability and madness. For you as a writer and an artist, how does that connect to refusing objectivity?
Tourmaline: My friend Leah Lakshmi wrote an essay about Marsha, and Stonewall not being a neurotypical event or a sane event. It was a neuroqueer event. We need to love the madness in our communities, the mad queens who are so often marginalised within our own communities. Marsha was a queen among those queens. It was so important to centre the work of Marsha in these events through the lens of disability justice.
Marsha talked about the music that played at Stonewall with so much clarity – Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”. At the same time, she talked about Stonewall – which happened in late June, early July – happening on her birthday in August. To me, it was really important to embrace that messiness, and depict how trauma shapes and affects memory.
In our current historical and political context where disability and neurodiversity are used to restrict trans people’s access to care, how do we use madness to a liberatory end in the legacy of Marsha’s work?
Tourmaline: I was an organiser for a decade before I became a filmmaker and writer. When I was at the Sylvia Rivera Project, we talked a lot about how different diagnoses – especially for people who were incarcerated – actually helped facilitate access to care. So instead of a mantra of ‘trans people aren’t crazy,’ it’s thinking strategically about how, under this current apparatus, different diagnoses can provide access to hormone replacement therapy. How do we make sure we’re in a movement that’s not pushing a sanity agenda without thinking about the effects for people who are both currently using different diagnoses to get access to care, and also for those of us who have psychiatric disabilities?
Incarcerated trans people feature heavily in the book – I’m curious about what you have to say about that connection between abolition and queer liberatory work.
Tourmaline: In 1970, Marsha and some friends took over NYU in the heart of the West Village, the heart of the queer, trans and gender non-conforming community in New York City. Previously they were in Times Square hustling together, and they would rent these hourly hotels that people in the sex industry would often hire, nicknamed ‘hot spring hotels’ because, whatever season, the heat was boiling and you couldn’t open a window. And they would hire these hotels for hours at a time, and in these spaces they would ask questions over and over again. Questions like: ‘when might the world feel easier?’, ‘what do we mean when we talk about freedom – what does that feel like to us?’, ‘when would that happen?’, ‘what would that look like?’ Then Stonewall happened and they occupied NYU a year later. They were able to do that because they were dreaming long enough to experiment and prefigure the world they wanted.
Part of that was free tuition, part was free childcare, part was access to gender affirming care. A very strong, bold declaration was also that NYU should stop incarcerating and experimenting on queer and trans and gender non-conforming people in Bellevue Hospital. Bellevue was holding many queer and trans people against their will, giving them treatments that they did not want or accept.
There are spaces of incarceration which Marsha, even in the 70s, knew ought to be challenged, ought to be dreamed beyond, and the people who are held within them ought to be cared for by people on the outside.
One thing you write about is how people in her life talked about her as ‘St. Marsha’ because of her generosity. Posthumously, that title takes on a different meaning. We live in a world where a lot more people know about Marsha and her image specifically is a lot more used. What are your thoughts on that and its complexities?
Tourmaline: That’s part of why I wrote the book. Her name is often invoked, and her image – there are so many beautiful murals of her. But people don’t necessarily know the fullness of Marsha’s life. People don’t necessarily know that not only was she a performer with the Hot Peaches doing two performances a day, but she also made sure to perform at AIDS hospices. It was important that her art was part of how she cared for her community.
There’s also the adornment, the flowers and the glitter. She talks about how she wears glitter for her loved ones who died from AIDS. She talks about how she is constantly in connection with her loved ones who, in her words, have ‘crossed the river Jordan’. Her spiritual life is something people would really benefit from understanding. Her care work so profoundly overlapped with her spiritual life; she cared for her loved ones who were sick not only by changing sheets or taking them to the hospital, but by praying for them and lighting candles, channeling God through her, to her loved ones.
You write about Marsha doing the performance work and doing justice work, about how sometimes they cross over and sometimes they don’t. What’s your favourite piece of joyful defiance from Marsha’s life?
Tourmaline: There’s this really wonderful interview in the 70s where she’s on the radio and she’s been on estrogen. She’s like, ‘You know, my boobs are growing! I got a handful! My bust is a handful, it’s a small handful… but it’s still a handful!’ And she’s just so happy and it speaks to how our capacity to channel all of who we are increases when we can access care.
