The first brick lobbed during protests over a police raid on the Stonewall Inn may have come from Marsha P. Johnson’s hand.
The LGBTQ rights pioneer was one of the central figures in the gay liberation movement of the 1960s. Born Malcolm Michaels Jr. on Aug. 24, 1945, in Elizabeth, N.J., she was shunned by her community until she moved to New York City.
The city of Elizabeth built a monument to memorialize Johnson in August, 28 years after she died under suspicious circumstances following New York City’s 1992 Pride parade. She was 46 years old.
Johnson worked as a sex worker and drag performer in New York.
“I was no one, nobody, from Nowheresville, until I became a drag queen,” she said in a 1992 interview, according to a 2018 obituary in The New York Times.
Alongside her fellow transgender pioneer Sylvia Rivera, Johnson co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a political coalition that provided housing for queer youth and sex workers in Manhattan.
Johnson said in a 1972 interview that her goal was “to see gay people liberated and free and to have equal rights that other people have in America.”
— J. Edward Moreno
photo: Netflix