Who Is Marsha P. Johnson's Participation In The Stonewall Riots?

Marsha P. Johnson was a Black actress, drag queen, sex worker, and trans woman who lived from June 27, 1944 to July 6, 1992 (Born; Parker; Pay It No Mind). She is best remembered for being at the center of the 1969 Stonewall Riots (Tungol). In fact, some claim that she started these riots on June 28, 1969 after racist and homophobic police officers raided The Stonewall Inn, a known gay club in New York City’s Greenwich Village (Born; Gossett). Additionally, with the support of Sylvia Rivera, who she was mentoring at the time, she founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970, which provided a safe space for homeless transgender teens and drag queens and advocated for the inclusion of transgender rights in the gay rights

These riots were the first major event of the LGBT rights movement and led to the founding of the unfortunately short-lived Gay Liberation Front and the advent of gay pride parades across the country the next year (“Stonewall”). Within two years of these riots, nearly every major metropolitan area in the United States had a gay rights group (“Stonewall”). Throughout Johnson’s life, she constantly worked to improve the quality of life for gay and transgender people in New York City and across the country and, being a Black trans woman, she specifically fought against racism and transphobia in mainstream gay culture

However, like any trans woman, she also faced microaggressions, such as misgendering and fetishization, but these were not her primary concern (Pay It No Mind). She needs to be remembered because to this day trans women, especially trans women of color, face intolerance and violence; in the first seven weeks of 2015, at least seven trans women of color were murdered (Kellaway). Many trans youth are told that their identities are not real and most adults over forty or fifty claim that being transgender is some kind of a new trend that did not exist in their generation; if Johnson is more widely celebrated and remembered, this rhetoric will become less damaging