Marsha P. Johnson Lives On in Tourmaline’s Artistry and Activism

Over the last two decades, the lore of Stonewall veteran Marsha “Pay it No Mind” Johnson has increasingly entered the mainstream consciousness, in no small part due to the work, art, and archival research of Tourmaline. The community organizer-turned-renowned filmmaker and award-winning artist is known for her pleasure-filled work, which has been exhibited at some of the world’s most prestigious art institutions. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, she has had solo exhibitions at MASP in São Paulo and Chapter NY, and was featured in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 and the 2024 Whitney Biennial, two of the art world’s largest international exhibitions. Her work is also held in the permanent collections of the Met, Tate Modern, and Whitney Museum, among many others.

But perhaps what Tourmaline is best known for is her knowledge and love of Marsha P. Johnson, as expressed in her new book MARSHA: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, a definitive biography of the Black trans woman who was a central figure in the Stonewall Uprising. In a founding moment of the LGBTQ+ rights movement on June 28, 1969, Marsha and others rebelled against the police raids of the landmark bar and criminalization of gender-nonconforming presentation. For three nights, alongside other drag queens (as many trans women referred to themselves during that time) and gender-transgressive queer people, Marsha fought back against oppression and authority with shot glasses and bricks.

Decades later, as a young community organizer, Tourmaline learned Marsha’s name and began a lifelong fascination with her story, eventually dedicating much of her work to ensuring others knew and remembered Marsha’s legacy. Through interviews with Marsha’s blood and chosen family, scouring and saving archival footage of interviews, Tourmaline became the preeminent historian on the vibrant and spirited life of Marsha P. Johnson. “Part of the blessing, the gift of writing this book, and just my project about learning more about Marsha has been getting close to people who knew Marsha best,” Tourmaline tells me one afternoon.

At nineteen years old, Tourmaline moved to New York City from Massachusetts in 2002 to pursue an ethnic studies degree with an African American studies concentration at Columbia University. It wasn’t long before she became a community organizer, finding her first political home at Critical Resistance, a prison and police abolitionist organization, which met in the West Village, Marsha’s old stomping ground. She also joined FIERCE, an organization working with young LGBTQ+ people of color, with which she helped prevent a community board-proposed curfew on young people in the West Village.

Tourmaline grew up in a politically active home and she later became a welfare organizer at Queers for Economic Justice, where she first entered the filmmaking world with a short documentary called “Taking Freedom Home,” which followed the lives of low-income LGBTQ+ people navigating the systems of welfare and healthcare while building each other up and continuing to thrive despite adversity.

Tourmaline herself grew up in poverty and on welfare and came to understand poverty as a queer issue, similar to the advocacy work of Marsha P. Johnson. For her college thesis, she wrote about the history of the West Village and its gentrification, the FIERCE campaigns she worked on, and the organizers who came before, including Marsha P. Johnson. “In so many interviews, Marsha talked about being on welfare until she bled welfare dry,” Tourmaline says. “It was a really important aspect. They were thinking through economic justice issues and organizing around them through STAR.”

Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, or STAR, was co-founded by Marsha and Sylvia Rivera in 1970, a year after the Stonewall Rebellion, as a groundbreaking organization focusing on mutual aid work, providing basic needs like housing and food. The organization was intersectional in its politics and engaged with other well-known organizing groups like the Black Panther Party, Young Lords, the Gay Liberation Front, and ACT UP. It was through STAR that Marsha and Sylvia housed around twenty-five people, and together they dreamed of a future without violence and with everything they needed. “It’s so beautiful to really see Marsha’s expansive dream, which centered on low-income, poor, queer, transgender, nonconforming people,” Tourmaline says. “After STAR disbanded, Marsha started an organization just called Gay Poor People and marched at Pride with a banner that said, ‘Gay Poor People.’ That was a real central tenet around economic justice, around supporting people who are navigating poverty, and making central to their movements those voices and those lives.”

Throughout our several conversations for this interview, Tourmaline’s knowledge of Marsha P. Johnson is a clear throughline. She has a reverence for the earlier activist’s life and work, at times half closing her eyes as she discusses important dates, locations, and names of people close to Marsha. “I needed it to move through me in a narrative way. I think it’s maybe from writing a script or writing a story, it just felt so right to feel and follow Marsha in her flow, because she was also an artist,” Tourmaline shared at the Brooklyn Museum during a conversation celebrating her book’s launch. Tourmaline co-wrote and released a short documentary on Marsha’s life called Happy Birthday Marsha in 2018 with her friend Sasha Wortzel. During the process of producing the film, she learned of another documentarian, David France, who, as Tourmaline alleged, stole language, research, and archival footage from her grant application for his film The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, which debuted on Netflix in 2017.

“That experience just gave me a lot of clarity and it sparked a desire to write this book and write about Marsha in a very particular kind of way,” Tourmaline says. In the summer of 2020, she began the book proposal for the long-overdue biography. While France’s film focused solely on Marsha’s death, Tourmaline’s biography uplifts her life in a way that shows an intimacy with Marsha not seen in France’s film.

It’s easy to see the ways that Marsha also influences Tourmaline’s artistry, her dreaming, and approach to life with abundance. “Freedom dreams are born when we face harsh conditions not with despair, but with the deep knowledge that these conditions will change— that a world filled with softness and beauty and care is not only possible, but inevitable,” Tourmaline wrote in 2020 in a piece for Vogue. Tourmaline shares a dream for trans life that goes beyond survival but includes beauty, comfort, and luxury. (For Tourmaline’s birthday in 2020, her friend started a GoFundMe and raised $58,000 for a pink Bentley.)

In her photography and filmmaking, Tourmaline draws from the experiences of Black trans lives, her own and of others like Marsha who’ve laid the groundwork for her. Marsha’s dreaming, as Tourmaline’s new book shows, was essential to her survival and resiliency amid various systems working against her. She faced discrimination from the gay bars and gay men who hated trans women or found Marsha’s politics too radical. Shockingly, Tourmaline shares in the book that some bars had “No Dogs. No Drags” signs, and some even banned Marsha specifically.

Despite these hardships, Marsha was overly generous with her time, labor, and coins. She gave away what money she made, either through sex work or panhandling, to anyone who’d ask or was in need. Her community came first, even at times before her own well-being. “She looked for relief from the violence that she was facing on the street. She found it on the dance floor right next to the jukebox. I think it’s really important to name that those spaces are sacred for our community for a reason,” Tourmaline shares about Marsha’s love of nightlife and her role as a regular at the bars and gay discos. “All of these places she created and built life through nightlife—that’s how many, many people that she mentored and cared for got to know her, through the dance floor.”

It’s also one of the reasons Marsha was at the Stonewall Inn for the rebellion. For years, as the riots at Stonewall rose to prominence as a defining moment for the LGBTQ+ rights movement, tensions about who was at Stonewall Inn and who started the uprisings have come to a head. Conflicting quotes from Marsha herself on when the rebellion took place and where she was when it started gave credence to those who attempted to erase her involvement.

In the biography, Tourmaline doesn’t shy away from these discrepancies: “It was really important to talk about Stonewall from many different vantage points and also really foreground the contradictions that come up in this discussion,” she says, quoting disability justice writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha that a riot is not a sane but a maddening event. “And also how trauma impacts how we recall events in the first place. Marsha was someone who talked about being in the back room at Stonewall when it was raided, listening to Marvin Gaye’s ‘Heard It Through the Grapevine’ on the jukebox. And at the same time, she talks about Stonewall being on her birthday on August 24.”

In MARSHA, Tourmaline dives into these inconsistencies, holding all the available information within context. “I wanted to not shy away from either one but talk about them both as a reflection of what we’re addressing: disability, memory, trauma, also the marginalization and erasure of people,” Tourmaline also notes that in David Carter’s book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, he writes in the footnotes that Marsha might’ve very well been the first person to revolt, but her inability to speak with any coherence is the reason why her actions aren’t attributed. “That goes right back to that conversation about mental health,” Tourmaline adds. “I also wanted to bring in the people who saw Marsha; so many people saw Marsha there fighting back and resisting.”

Marsha’s role in Stonewall is undeniable, and so is her carework during the start of the AIDS epidemic. She supported her sick friends at their homes and in hospitals and attended AIDS walks and disco fundraisers for HIV advocacy work: “She was HIV-positive herself and showing up for other people who were positive and or had AIDS, and that was taking them to the hospital, changing their sheets, advocating to administration and medical facilities for them, performing at hospitals and hospices,” Tourmaline shares of Marsha’s advocacy.

Marsha frequently spoke about crossing the “River Jordan,” combining the themes of her religiosity and spirituality, issues with mental health, belief in reincarnation, and proximity to death. Marsha’s own untimely death is situated within the various systems that failed her. “I wanted to make sure that we understood the structures and systems involved: the lack of physical and mental health care, and also HIV-AIDS care and care for low-income people, and the lack of meeting people’s material needs,” Tourmaline says. “The Justice for Marsha campaign so powerfully reminded us that her life mattered.”

It’s through Tourmaline’s writing, her photography, filmmaking, and artwork that Marsha P. Johnson isn’t flattened to a single narrative or lost to us in the annals of history. MARSHA shows us the revolutionary activist who not only fought for Gay Liberation and the rights of everyone at the margins, but also for a life that allows for more than just survival. As Marsha did while she lived among us, Tourmaline lives a life of abundance, her artwork encouraging us to see the way, as activist and author Raquel Willis might say, Marsha’s seeds of liberation have bloomed.

MARSHA: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson is out now.