“How many years has it taken people to realize that we are all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race?”
Those are the words of the African American drag queen and LGBTQ+ rights activist Marsha P. Johnson,
Johnson was one of the main voices in the Stonewall riots; together with Sylvia Rivera, they created the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) to help homeless transgender people in New York.
Johnson, male at birth, began dressing and seeing herself more as a girl at a young age, but she struggled to show her real self as her parents didn’t support her and other kids bullied her.
After high school in 1963, Johnson moved to New York, and her personality began to show. She began calling herself Marsha P. Johnson. The middle P stood for “pay it no mind,” a phrase she often used when questioned about her gender and lifestyle.
For a while, Johnson performed with the drag group Hot Peaches, and also earned money through intimate work, but she was often abused by clients and arrested.
Johnson was one of the many protesters in the 1969 Stonewall riots, against police and social discrimination.
In the ‘80s, Johnson, who was HIV positive herself, became an AIDS activist and joined ACT UP to help bring attention to the AIDS epidemic.
On July 6, 1992, Johnson’s body was found in the Hudson River off the West Village Piers in New York City. She was 46 years old.
Authorities reported Johnson ended her own life after struggling with mental health, but friends and other members of the local community said she didn’t have thoughts of ending her life and that what the authorities reported wasn’t true.
In 2002, the cause of death was changed to undetermined; then, a decade later, the New York Police Department reopened the case, but it remains unsolved.
Several documentaries were made about Johnson’s life and activism, such as the 2012 documentary Pay It No Mind: Marsha P. Johnson and the short film Happy Birthday, Marsha!,
In 2020, New York renamed its East River State Park to Marsha P. Johnson State Park, and a year later, writer and activist Eli Erlick, in collaboration with other organizers, created a bronze bust of Johnson at New York City’s Christopher Park, near the Stonewall Inn.
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