The Free Press
Pride Month is almost over. Perhaps you didn’t notice it began, because corporate America has kept its mouth shut this year for fear of provoking right-wing boycotts or reprisals from the Trump administration. A vibe shift? Maybe for Target. But not for my fellow gays, as I learned at 10 a.m. last Saturday when they blocked off my street and started blasting Kylie Minogue directly underneath my apartment. This is what Pride actually is: an excuse for us to get publicly day drunk, ostensibly under the guise of commemorating the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn. This tradition has thankfully survived, and will continue to, regardless of whether or not Raytheon throws a rainbow filter over their Instagram logo.
Less fortunately, another Pride tradition has also survived the right-wing moment: historical revisionism. Late last month, a transgender activist, author, and filmmaker called Tourmaline—f.k.a. Reina Gossett—released a best-selling book called Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson. The hagiography, which has received glowing reviews in publications like Allure, and ended up on The New York Times’ spring reading list, argues that the catalyst for the Stonewall riots—which essentially birthed the entirety of the gay-rights movement and paved the way for the last 70 years of gay culture—was actually a black trans woman called Marsha P. Johnson. In this narrative, average gay men and women are effectively sidelined in their own history.
Here’s Tourmaline: “No one knows exactly what happened on the nights of these raucous, wild clashes, but every historian of this period of LGBTQIA+ history agrees: Marsha P. Johnson was integral to the fiery resistance that took hold, and the movement wouldn’t have galvanized without her.”
The great thing about the gay-rights movement is that it had no central leader. It was achieved by millions of gay people living their lives openly and demonstrating that they weren’t so different from the rest of America.
She isn’t the first to make this argument; claiming Johnson made the Stonewall riots happen has become an article of faith for anyone who believes in intersectionality, which holds that whoever checks the most boxes in the list of supposedly oppressed groups has the most revolutionary potential. As a black, homeless, mentally ill transvestite prostitute, Marsha P. Johnson was oppressed from multiple directions—and therefore, the perfect hero for the Stonewall riots, at least from the perspective of twenty-first-century progressives. In recent years, Johnson’s supposed centrality to the gay-rights movement has been promoted by politicians like former president Biden and New York congressman Jerry Nadler. In 2020, New York’s East River State Park was named after her in a ceremony officiated by then-governor Andrew Cuomo.
Meanwhile, the suggestion that “cis” white gay men might have had anything to do with the Stonewall riots has become borderline blasphemous. Roland Emmerich’s 2015 film Stonewall came under intense fire—and was boycotted by some—for featuring a photogenic white guy as the protagonist, even though Johnson was a character in the film. Emmerich defended himself by saying that “there were only a couple of transgender women in the Stonewall ever. They were like a minority”—a fact that’s evidenced by the historical record and every existing photo of the riot.
That’s not the only hole in the radical narrative. Here’s another: Johnson was a drag queen; she never called herself transgender. And though the publisher of Tourmaline’s book claims on its website that Johnson was the one to “throw the first brick at Stonewall,” Marsha herself said, in a 1989 interview, that by the time she got to the mobbed-up gay bar on Christopher Street, the place was already on fire. Tourmaline explains inconsistencies between her account and Johnson’s by arguing that the drag queen’s memories were tainted by her profound mental illness, which the author cheekily describes as “another way of remembering.” (Other interviews given by Johnson are taken more or less at face value.) At the same time, Tourmaline accuses anyone who points to evidence that Johnson wasn’t a central player during the Stonewall uprising of “attempting to undermine Marsha’s key role in the riots.”
Tourmaline seems to see herself as the sole self-appointed guardian of Johnson’s legacy. In 2017 she attacked fellow filmmaker David France—a personal friend of Johnson—for making a Netflix documentary about the drag queen. “People facing the kinds of violence Marsha faced can be the ones to tell these stories—and the ones to benefit from their telling,” Tourmaline wrote in Teen Vogue in 2017. “And that includes me, a black trans woman who has had to fight for a sustainable life while a white cisgender man gets to tell Marsha’s story. As the Netflix movie launched, I was borrowing money to pay my rent.”
Having established personal ownership of Johnson’s story in her own head based on their (perceived) shared identity as black trans women, Tourmaline then seems to have felt entitled to write Johnson’s history however she sees fit, to make Johnson seem more radical. For example, Tourmaline heavily implies that Marsha was inspired to take the last name Johnson after witnessing a 1947 demonstration against a Howard Johnson’s restaurant in her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, as a child. In reality, Johnson did take her last name from the restaurant, but claimed she did so because she thought “It was a nice name for a boy.”
Johnson did give occasional speeches at gay-rights events, marched in Pride parades, and helped establish a short-lived homeless shelter for transvestites—which was effectively just a shared apartment, and which fell apart after a year because nobody paid the rent. But the sad fact is that she spent most of her life in and out of homelessness and mental institutions. Had she actually led the gay-rights movement, we certainly wouldn’t have gay marriage and hell, we might still be in jail for breaking sodomy laws. I don’t expect people to admit that in public, but the least we can do is stop pretending she’s the gay Gandhi she never was.
All of the fan fiction written about Johnson in the past several years, including Tourmaline’s, serves to obscure an inconvenient truth, which is that the rights gay people currently enjoy were largely gained through respectability politics, as I’ve pointed out before: Even if Johnson was the central figure of the Stonewall riots, we didn’t get our rights by rioting; we got them by convincing straight people that we wanted to buy houses in the suburbs, shop at Williams Sonoma, and adopt Chinese babies. The great hero of the gay-rights movement is probably some unnamed, upper-middle-class gay guy who befriended former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy at a D.C. cocktail party and convinced him that two men should be allowed to get married—and perhaps doesn’t even know himself that he was the spark that changed history. The great thing about the gay-rights movement is that it had no central leader. It was achieved by millions of gay people living their lives openly and demonstrating that they weren’t so different from the rest of America. Nobody will reclaim the legacy of these people because it doesn’t look radical from a distance. But it was. It took guts. And it shouldn’t be forgotten.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story stated that the East River State Park is in New Jersey. The park is located in New York. This has been updated. The Free Press regrets the error.
For more from River Page, read his piece on how far he’s drifted from the Democratic party:
