Marlene Wagman-Geller

Jun 06, 2025 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

“I was a no one, nobody from Nowheresville, until I became a drag queen.” ~Marsha P. Johnson (sister who fought for transgender rights)  

Kermit the Frog rued, “It ain’t easy being green.” Marsha P. Johnson would have related to the quote: It was not easy being black, transgender, and destitute. However, rather than throw herself a pity party, Marsha, the “Saint of Christopher Street” became a battering ram who dedicated her life to the transgender community.

The activist was born Malcolm, (who his family called Mikey, and sometimes Martian) Michaels Jr. the fifth of six children of father, Malcolm, who worked on a General Motor’s assembly line, and her mother, Alberta, employed as a maid. They lived on Washington Avenue, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a zip code that encompassed segregation. When Malcom was two, civil rights leaders staged a protest against the racial policies of the local Howard Johnson restaurant and hotel. One hundred people circled the venue in a demonstration demanding racial equality. The following year, her parents separated.

Malcolm was not a typical Jersey boy. At age five, Marsha, (his adopted name) first heard the rumbling of a different drummer when she felt a compulsion to wear dresses. Although she felt comfortable in feminine attire, she reverted to boys’ clothing due to unrelenting bullying. The most traumatic moment of her childhood occurred when a thirteen-year-old-neighborhood boy sexually assaulted her. What helped with her spiritual healing for the assault and her sexual identity crisis, was attending the Mount Teman African Methodist Church, the oldest black house of worship in the city. To hedge her heavenly bets, she also frequented Catholic churches. The minister delivered a sermon with a line Marsha always remembered, “Nobody is promised tomorrow.” While the church offered comfort, it did not sanction divergent sexuality. The same situation occurred with the 1950s television programs that depicted heterosexual couples such as Desi and Lucy-never Desi and Desi. In 1963, Marsha graduated from Thomas Edison High School. 

Knowing she could never live anything other than a lie in her hometown, armed with $15.00 and a bag of clothes, Marsha left on the Port Authority bus to New York City. For her new identity to live, Malcom Michaels had to die. When she arrived on 42^nd Street, she told people her name was Mikey, sometimes Martian, and they came up with Marsha. The refugee from Jersey middle initial, “P” represented the phrase, “Pay no mind.” The admonition was for others to overlook her sexual identity, and for her to not care about the condemnation of society. Johnson came from the restaurant where her people had taken a stand against systemic prejudice.  

Neither New York City or Greenwich Village was the land of milk and honey. Although Greenwich Village was one of the era’s most tolerant enclaves for LGPT people, and New York state had downgraded sodomy from a felony in 1950, persecution of the homosexual community ran rampant. The law prohibited same sex dancing, and the State Liquor Authority prevented bars from serving gay patrons alcohol. Cross dressing resulted in arrest under the charge of sexual deviancy. An alternative sexual lifestyle made being gay precarious at best, deadly at worse. Nevertheless, Marsha paraded the streets in her shiny black wig: someone snatched it off and took off with the offending hair piece. On a visit home, her mother rained blows on her head to dislodge the wig. Marsha refused to part with her makeshift crowning glory.

In a bid of survival, Marsha worked as a prostitute and later recalled that after her 100^th arrest she stopped counting. Home was often on the streets or in seedy hotels near Times Square, including the Dixie Hotel, (now the Hotel Carter.) Despite the hard knock life, it did not vanquish Marsha’s innate kindness. The black transgender woman dressed in outfits as flamboyant as her oversized personality. She adorned her hair with flowers, fruits, and seasonally, Christmas lights, and boasted an impressive amount of costume jewelry. The well-known street presence wore a variation of Dorthy’s shoes-hers were red plastic high heels. When not hustling or helping, Marsha prayed in various churches. She said she would never get married-even if it had been legal-because Jesus “is the only man I could really trust. … He listens to all my problems, and he never laughed at me.” And there was another who never laughed at her.

Fighting for a cause can present such an Atlas- like weight that it takes two people to shoulder the burden. Susan B. Anthony teamed up with Elizabeth Cady Stanton to fight for women’s suffrage. As Henry Stanton had remarked to his wife, “You stir up Susan, and she stirs up the world.” The Anthony Stanton counterpart was Johnson and Rivera. Some people are born under a lucky star-and then there was Sandra Rivera. She started life in the Bronx where her Puerto Rican father abandoned her at birth. Her Venezuelan mother had tried to kill her three-year-old daughter by forcing her to drink milk laced with rat poison. When the toddler survived the poison that claimed her mother, her grandmother became her guardian, a relationship that brought neither joy. Upon returning home and finding her grandson dressed in her clothing, as Sandra recalled, “I’d get my ass whipped, of course.” Her Roman Catholic school suspended her for cross dressing. Desperately unhappy, Sandra attempted suicide by swallowing a bottle of pills. At age eleven, Sandra was a runaway who worked as a child prostitute.

She met Johnson on the streets on Halloween night, 1963, when she was still a preteen. Sandra said that Marsha, who provided her with a measure of stability, love, and food, was her surrogate mother.

 

The watershed movement that impacted the lives of the LGBQ community occurred on June 28, 1969, when the police raised the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. In the words of Civil Rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer, the gay and trans community were sick and tired of being sick and tired; they were done with serving as human pinatas that society deemed sick, and scary. On that evening, as the jukebox played Marvin Gaye’s, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” rather than merely walking like lambs to the paddy wagon, the marginalized rebelled. According to some accounts, one of the participants in the protest was twenty-three-year-old Marsha who had moved to the Village. It was time for her to deviate from her motto, “Pay them no mind.” First person accounts reported that Marsha had fired the first volley when she threw a shot glass at the bar’s mirror, while screaming, “I got my civil rights!” Alternate accounts have her throwing the first brick. The action became the catchphrase, “The shot glass heard around the world.” Other claim the initial protest was instigated by Stormé DeLarverie, the emcee of the Jewel Box Revue, a Times Square drag show. Those both inside and outside the bar followed suit and threw bottles and coins at the police. Another witness recalled that on the second night of the uprising, Marsha shimmied up a lamppost and dropped bricks on a cop car. Other protestors used a parking meter as a battering ram used to knock down the doors of the Inn where the police had fled from the attack. As Tourmaline wrote in his biography, Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, Stonewall was a catalyst that transformed Marsha and Sandra from ladies-in-waiting to ladies-in-action.  Marsha stated, “So, honey, when it came to that night, I was ready to tip a few cars for a dream.”

 

Stonewell transformed the Village: where public same sex dancing had only taken place in mafia-controlled bars, more establishments catered to gay clientele. Nevertheless, there were holdouts of prejudice, and many places still displayed signs: No Dogs and No Drag.” The uprising also segued to the gay rights movement, and their first pride parade the following year. Marsha waved from a convertible, at the head of a parade, as it drove down New York City’s Fifth Avenue.

 

In 1979, Sandra and Marsha wanted to establish a haven for the trans community, especially for those who were also in the bull’s eye of racial prejudice. They welcomed homeless sex workers and runaways. Casting about for a name, they found inspiration in an album by musician Julianne entitled “Star.” They spent the night thinking of an acronym for Star and came up with: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. Star House became the first shelter of its kind in America. The founded their shelter in a tenement at 213 East Second Street. Knowing her psychological issues made it hard to concentrate, Marsha turned down the title of president, one that Sandra assumed. The organization was dedicated to helping the transgender people who society looked upon as human flotsam. They packed twenty-five people in the premise; a bathtub served as the makeshift bed. In a 1972 interview, Marsha said that she wanted “to see gay people liberated and free and to have equal rights that other people have in America.” She was also willing to use desperate means to attain her goal, “We believe in picking up the gun, starting a revolution if necessary.” While they never took up arms, Sandra and Marsha organized protests where they demanded social services for the trans community. The Star members also organized a five-day occupation of New York University’s Weinstein Hall. Landlord Mike Umbers was not a fan of his new tenants, and to hasten their eviction, he cut the electricity. The Star members illuminated their home by candlelight that they dedicated to Saint Barbara. They stole ice and put it in the broken refrigerator. Despite the horrific living conditions, Marsha was still thrilled with “a room of her own.” She sewed the scarlet STAR banner and hung it on the wall next to posters proclaiming: FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS. FREE ANGELA DAVIS.

 

At this juncture, Marsha met Thomas Gerald Davis, “Candy,” from Trenton, New jersey, at a dance hall. When Candy asked Marsha to marry him, she responded, “Honey, if you want to marry me you need some money!” He returned with $500.00. The fact their union was not sanctified by state, Marsha felt comforted Jesus had sanctioned their union. For a wedding present, the groom presented her with a rescue dog, one of whose litter Sandra adopted. She also took in strays she named Polo, Toby, Princess, and Prince. The issue that proved a thorn in their relationship is Marsha refused to abandon her activism with the transgender community; one she believed was her calling. Another demon was their shared drug usage, a habit that cost Candy his life. Desperate for money to buy drugs, Candy robbed an off-duty police officer. The confrontation ended with a shot in Candy’s heart. Shortly afterwards, her wedding present dog died, and the police arrested her for prostitution. She ended up in a psychiatric institution on Ward’s Island.

 

Her comrade-in-arms, Sandra, was also committed to the cause. A year after Stonewall, Sandra fought for New York City passing a gay rights bill. To infiltrate a meeting regarding the proposed legislation at City Hall, Sandra scaled a wall-no mean feat as she was wearing a dress and heels. For her efforts, she ended up behind bars. As the gay liberation gained traction, Marsha and Sandra stood on the fringes. The mainstream gay population felt that cross-dressers, and people of color, would detract from their cause’s legitimacy. Their argument was they were no different than their straight peers, except for one difference, However, their words were a hard sell when Marsha showed up with her Christmas lights in her hair. In   the 1973 Pride March, when denied the right to speak, Sandra grabbed a microphone and shouted, “If it wasn’t for the drag queen, there would be no gay liberation movement. We’re the front-liners.” Her detractors booed her off the stage. The same paradigm had been true in the nineteenth century when Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Staton regulated black women to march at the back of their parades. They felt they could only slay one hydra head at a time. Sensing how hard Sandra would take the betrayal, Marsha rushed to her home and discovered her in a pool of blood. Cradling her friend, she told her, “You are not leaving me here without me, girl. You and I are gonna cross that River Jordan together. You hear me?” Sandra moved to Tarrytown, New York, and in 2002 passed away from cancer. The Village Voice eulogized her as “the Rosa Parks of the modern transgender movement.”  With her last words she urged gay leaders that had had come to her bedside to be inclusive.  

 

Tall and flamboyant, wearing full make-up, Marsha was hard to miss, and one who took notice was pop artist Andy Warhol. He snapped Polaroids of Marsha and included her in “Ladies and Gentlemen,” a 1975 portfolio of screenprints of drag queens and transgenders at the nightclub, The Gilded Grape. A natural-born performer who loved to dance, in 1972 Marsha was a member of the troupe Angels of Light where she was a favorite with audiences that included David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, the Rolling Stones, John and Yoko. She was also a member of a drag performance, Hot Peaches. At this point, a devastating event occurred. Marha had flirted with death many times. As she said, “I’m like a cat, Miss Thing. I’ve been almost killed a million times now.” In 1980, she had sex with a taxicab driver. Afterwards he shot her in the back. The bullet remained in her it was too close to her spine to safely remove.

 

Although Sandra and Marsha had carved out a respected niche in their Greenwich Village circle, they also had to arm-wrestle their demons. Sandra was hooked on heroin, and Marsha suffered from nervous breakdowns. Her first occurred in 1970, and for the rest of her life she was in and out of psychiatric institutions. She said that despite her psychological disorders, “I may be crazy, but that don’t make me wrong.”

 

In 1980, due to eviction of the Star headquarters, Marsha moved in with her friend, the gay activist Randy Wicker, in Hoboken, New Jersey. There she devoted herself to the care of Randy’s lover, David Combs, as he was dying from the scourge of AIDS. As more and her friends contracted what was known as “the gay disease,” Marsha often prostrated herself before a statue of the Virgin Mary at the Catholic Community of Saints Peter and Paul. An ardent AIDS activist, Marsha attended protests and meetings of ACT UP, an organization dedicated to fighting the epidemic. Disregarding her personal safety, Marsha cradled those dying of the epidemic. In 1992 interview, Marsha revealed that she had been H.I.V.-positive for two years. “They call me a legend in my own time, because there were so many queens gone that I’m one of the few queens left from the ’70s and the ’80s.”

 

The “nobody is promised tomorrow” came to pass on July 6, 1992, police pulled Marsha’s body from the Hudson River near the Christopher Street piers where she had lived for three decades. The official cause of death was suicide, a ruling her loved ones fiercely rejected. The Saint of Christopher Street would not have ended her life when the disenfranchised needed her helping hand, while her people remained second-class citizens, and insisted she was a victim of homicide.

 

On what would have been the activist’s seventy-sixth birthday, New York’s Christopher Park received a bust of Marsha wearing a tiara that allows visitors to place stands of flowers-plastic or real- through its opening. On the monument’s blue stand is a plaque with the words, “Lover of poetry, flowers, space, and the color purple.”

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