fuk My Life

Some edits of this well-known photo of Pam & Jim (belonging to the session of June 28, 1971 in Paris)🌺🌺🌺

David France’s documentary ‘The Life and Death of Martha P. Johnson’ immortalises the extraordinary and unresolved story of a prominent figure in LGBT+ history. 

Rumoured to have thrown the first brick at Stonewall and a legend of transgender rights activism, Marsha P. Johnson’s story comes at a time in which greater scrutiny is being paid towards our movement’s commitment to furthering transgender rights, and following the latest wave of Black Lives Matter protests, the timing of the film is significant.

“We want you to understand what it is to be our kind of outcast—but also to understand our kind of love, to hunger for your own sex. Because unless you understand this, you will continue to look at us with uncomprehending eyes, fake liberal smiles; you will be incapable of loving us.”

– Martha Shelley, “Gay Is Good,” Rat (February 24, 1970), reprinted in Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, edited by Karla Jay and Allen Young (1972/1992)

Women Are Human shares with our readers the following excerpt from Martha Shelley’s essay “An Honest History” on the historical negationism around lesbian and gay history since the Stonewall uprising. Her essay appears in the anthology Not Dead Yet: Feminism, Passion, and Women’s Liberation, published this past year by Spinifex Press. Martha Shelley was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1943. She organized the first gay protest march that took place one month after Stonewall, and was a founder of the Gay Liberation Front. She wrote for the GLF’s newspaper, Come Out! and RAT newspaper after the women’s takeover, as well as producing the first lesbian radio show in NYC, Lesbian Nation. In 1974, she moved to California and worked with the Women’s Press Collective until it dissolved. After that she devoted herself to research and writing, and co-parented two sets of children. Currently she lives with her wife Sylvia Allen in Portland, OR, where they run a small urban farm. She is the author of four poetry collections, numerous essays and short stories, and a trilogy of historical fiction about the life of Jezebel, Queen of Israel. Her most recent work can be found at https://ebisupublications.com. For other helpful resources on Shelley’s life and work, see the following:

Sara Toce, “Martha Shelley Reflects on Stonewall, Writing, and Activism,” Windy City Times, May 23, 2012.

Julia Diana Robertson, “Remembering Stormé—The Black Butch Lesbian Who Started the Stonewall Revolution,” The Velvet Chronicle, June 4, 2017.

Julia Diana Robertson, “Honoring a Queen—The Marsha Johnson Story,” The Velvet Chronicle, March 22, 2019.

Martha Shelley, “Lies, Myths, and Stonewall,” Ebisu Publications, July 21, 2019.

Julia Diana Robertson, “Martha Shelley—The Lesbian Who Proposed a Unified Front After Stonewall,” The Velvet Chronicle, August 31, 2020.

An honest history—truth about the past, whether distant or recent—is essential.

[…]

In recent years, I’ve seen the erasure of lesbian and gay activists. And all the work we did for gay liberation is credited to two people: Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson. Even statues are planned to be erected in honor of them in New York. These two are now hailed for having organized the Stonewall Riot and the GLF and even the historic gay occupation of Weinstein Hall at New York University in protest against the administration’s homophobia. All of this is false. I know, because I and the women and men I worked with were there. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson are today widely celebrated as transgender people of color. However, Rivera identified as a transvestite male, not as transgender. Malcolm, a.k.a. Marsha Johnson, was a self-proclaimed gay man, and drag queen, up until his death in 1992. Johnson deserves to be honored with respect and integrity, not rebranded as a ‘trans-woman’ postmortem. Johnson was probably transgender, though there was no such terminology at the time. Toward the end of his life he was considering raising funds to go abroad for what was then called a sex-change surgery. Nobody led the Stonewall Riots. It was a spontaneous uprising. Neither Rivera nor Johnson appeared on the scene until the riots were well underway. Neither Johnson nor Rivera attended any of the early meetings of GLF in July 1969. I was one of the founders, along with five other women and 13 men. Ellen Broidy and I were among those who called for the occupation of Weinstein Hall in September 1970. Johnson and Rivera were not present. They joined in after a group of us had already entered the building, and it was after the occupation that I first noticed them at GLF meetings. They were inspired by our Weinstein Hall action to start a new group, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). This was the important work they did and how they should be remembered. Through STAR, Rivera and Johnson labored on behalf of homeless street queens who, like themselves, often had to support themselves through prostitution, often strove to overcome drug addiction, and often found themselves in trouble with the law. They provided shelter and counseling, and visited those in prison. They were heroes in their own right. But the false legends have been widely promulgated in the international press, and give them credit for the work of hundreds of others, and never even mention what they actually accomplished. The city of New York has not built any statues to any of us lesbians or any of the gay men who were involved in GLF. Just those two are the heroes. Stormé DeLarverie, who is considered responsible for starting the first Stonewall Riot on June 28, 1969, after the crowd reacted when she was arrested by police, was a woman of color and a butch lesbian. She doesn’t get a statue either.

These smaller fabrications are perhaps not as dangerous as the ones that lead us into war. But what is dangerous is that, by depicting one or two chosen individuals as great leaders and expunging the rest of us from public memory, they strip us all of the knowledge that we ordinary human beings have made history and can do so again. Excerpted from “An Honest History” by Martha Shelley, from Not Dead Yet: Feminism, Passion, and Women’s Liberation, edited by Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne, pp. 378-380. Copyright © 2021 by Martha Shelley. Reprinted by permission of Spinifex Press.