June 17, 2025 • 49 mins
A trip to Elizabeth, New Jersey, brings us into the heart of Marsha’s upbringing. We sit down with her sister, Jeannie, and her nephew, Al, to get a picture of Marsha’s childhood home and hear stories about the early ways Marsha dared to be different. We also learn about her hometown’s queer underground and the ways Marsha navigated her identity from an early age. By the time she graduated from high school, she had her sights set on New York City. She headed to Times Square in a time before the billboards and mascots, and the M&M store. Instead, she was strutting the streets where sex was bought and sold, finding community, and forming big dreams.
Check out our Instagram @afterlives.pod for additional content. Plus, you can listen to Marsha P. Johnons’s 1979 interview with Steven Watson courtesy of Artifacts at www.artifacts.movie.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Afterlives. It's a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Outspoken
podcast Network in partnership with School of Humans. Just to
heads up, the following episode mentioned suicide, sexual assault, and
police violence. Take care while listening.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
King stops at Zeccas Elizabeth.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Elizabeth On a cold sunny day at the end of January,
our team headed to Elizabeth, New Jersey mobile tickets to act.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I'm ready.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
It's Marsha's hometown. About thirty minutes outside of Midtown Manhattan.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Sounds a neighbors one Menday.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
From the train station, producers Dylan, Joey and I head
passed Deli's Beauty salons smoke shops. A sign lets us
know that historic midtown Elizabeth welcomes you. We drive past
two and three story buildings, some very old. Others knew
it was bustling and vibrant, nothing fancy. Then we pull
(01:20):
up in front of a fourteen story apartment building towering
over the neighborhood story.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Oh yeah, this is good, Thank.
Speaker 5 (01:33):
You, thank you, Jay Brock.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
We head up to the eighth floor where al Michael's
greets us at the door.
Speaker 6 (01:43):
Hye back out, nice to me too.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Al Is Marsha's nephew. And in the kitchen is Marsha's sister, Jeanie.
Speaker 7 (01:55):
I beck up, Nice to meet you.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
My name is jean Everybody who will reach okay.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
We all settle in at a big brown wooden kitchen table.
Jeanie wears a button up blouse and red readers are
dangling on a chain. She has a black leather hat
with white letters that read I don't care, I compliment.
It turns out it was a birthday gift.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
That's what we did for my birth Datus.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
All sits between his mom and me. Behind them is
the makings of your typical middle class kitchen, white walls
and cabinets, overhead fluorescent bulbs. Al leans back in his chair.
He's bald and bearded and wearing a bald colorful sweatshirt.
Speaker 5 (02:40):
A lot of people to this day don't know that
the Michael's family is still around, that Marsha's family's still here.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
They don't think Marcia has no family.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
It was exciting to enter the orbit of Marsha's closest
living relatives. To be honest, though I didn't know what
to expect, I had a sense from talking to other
guests for the show that Marcia had a support her family,
but it wasn't entirely clear if she was accepted for
who she was.
Speaker 5 (03:07):
There's that rumor, and we all discussed this every time.
I have an interview where they said Marsha wasn't welcome
home and Marsha never came home.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
It's not true. Marsha came home all the time.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
The spirit of Marcia came to life while we set
around that kitchen table. The love they have for her
runs deep. In our last episode, we talked about Marcia's
legendary status and we explored how complex and even contradictory
her legacy can be. To begin to understand how she
(03:39):
changed the world, we're starting where she did and Elizabeth
New Jersey.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Well, we're here and we know the truth.
Speaker 5 (03:47):
That's why we tried every time we talked to put
more of the truth out there.
Speaker 7 (03:54):
They called me an age because there's so many quaints.
Speaker 8 (03:57):
God that I'm one of the few.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Quaints still that if you wait, still.
Speaker 7 (04:02):
That I didn't make the best of every day anywhere.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
I'm Rachael Willis and this is Afterlives Episode two. From
Elizabeth to Times Square talking to Marsha's sister Jeanie and
her nephew Al comes easy. It felt like I was
(04:30):
just hanging with some of my own relatives, sitting around
the kitchen table. The memories just start flowing.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
You know, the kids used to go to people's house
and in Christmas Carol.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Right, my mind is imagining snowy Christmases with Marsha and
her siblings bundled up and hats and scarves. But just
as I start picturing a bunch of tiny angelic voices,
Genie interjects.
Speaker 7 (04:58):
Watch couldn't sing.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Marcia couldn't sing. She was totally off key. Neighbors who
opened their doors weren't getting the typical version of silent
night or whatever. With that voice. Things were not looking
good for a bunch of kids hoping to make a
little money before the holidays. But in a sign of
things to come, Marsha's charm won out.
Speaker 7 (05:22):
Marsha was the one getting all the money.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
I said, you know, you can't see.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
March said, you see, I'm getting all the money.
Speaker 7 (05:28):
I said, I'm staying right with you.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Somehow they raked it in. Genie thinks maybe the people
they were caroling for were just drunk, or maybe they
were applauding Marsha's nerve.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
I'm gonna tell you the story that her little brother,
my uncle Robert told me.
Speaker 5 (05:45):
Robert told me they paid Marcia not to see Marsha.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Shout is so bad. They gave Marsha the money not
to see.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
I love the story. It's like seeing the seeds of
Marsha's legacy before they fully bloomed into a magnificent flower crown.
Marsha was a performer all her life. Years down the line,
she owned the stage with an off off Broadway theater group.
People would chant her name. The thing is, she would
(06:20):
sing off key, then too she'd forget the words, she'd
have to restart her act, and still people loved her.
This has always been part of the legend. So eccentric,
confident and charming that she could command a room even
(06:41):
if she couldn't carry a tune.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Marsha was a performer, wasn't a singer.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
She was a performer, a star even then. I imagine
that for many reasons. As a queer kit of color
coming up in the fifties, Marsha yearned for something different.
Yet here's a glimpse of the personality that stayed with her.
All her life. Singing badly may have been a stick
(07:09):
in a family with seven kids. Maybe it was a
ploy for attention, or maybe she found a way to
be a little different and still be safe. Marshall was
born on August twenty fourth, nineteen forty five, to Alberta
and Malcolm Michaels. She grew up in a small apartment
(07:32):
with plenty of siblings.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
My brother Harold, my brother Alfred, my brother Charlie, me
my sister Norma Marsha, and my brother Bobby.
Speaker 9 (07:44):
Well, we all got along.
Speaker 7 (07:46):
Close family, close knit family back then.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
She was just another one of the Michaels. The siblings
shared bedrooms and even doubled up in beds. The kitchen
was really the heart of the home where they sat
around to catch up after school and watch Alberta cook dinner.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
My mother used to do everything sicks, the TV ain't
used to wallpaper.
Speaker 5 (08:08):
My grandmother cooked every not every day, but Sundays all
the time, and every other day she would cook something
because she was a housekeeper domestic. She did housework to
take care of this family on Edison, New Jersey, to
take care of them and then come home and take
care of us.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Marsha looked up to her mother, partly as a model
of femininity. Being close to her mom may have been
away from Marsha to nourish an unmet need within herself.
It was a matriarchal household. Marcia's mother raised them after
she and her husband separated when Marsha was a toddler.
(08:47):
They still saw their father regularly, though the family stayed
tightly knit even as Marcia's siblings grew up, entered the workforce,
and had kids of their own.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
I was lucky to grow up in the era where
basically your family unit was all in one house.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Al is about fifteen years younger than Marsha, but he
grew up alongside her too, so you.
Speaker 5 (09:12):
Had different floors of the house. You had your aunts,
you had your uncles, you had your grandmother.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
You know. I saw my aunts and uncles every day.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
When Marsha was older, she would come and go, but
never totally left Elizabeth or her family behind. She was
a large and loving presence in our's life. Elizabeth was small,
but not homogeneous. Marsha's neighborhood and schools were integrated before
many others across the country.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
The street I was born on it was all nationalities
on that street, all nationalities. My mother used to go
to work, all the neighbors would watch the children for
all nationality.
Speaker 7 (09:51):
We all got along.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Jeanie has a rosy view of living in a diverse
neighborhood and going to integrated schools all their lives.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Now that's my mother's experience basically.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
So my mother and them were low income because they
weren't destitute, but I'm saying they were low income.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
They lived at row houses and stuff.
Speaker 5 (10:08):
So you had people of all nationalities and stuff like
that because the common denominator, you were poort. So they
got along. They was their own United Nations. I cheated
a little differently because Elizabeth was segregated.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Beyond their corner of the community, the city was more
starkly divided into Black, Italian and Jewish neighborhoods. Civil rights
demonstrations raised consciousness and demanded the end of segregation at
local establishments and institutions. Elizabeth and its sister city, London
were industrial areas, home to factories like Exon Singer Sewing Company,
(10:48):
Gordon's Gin, and General Motors, where Marsha's dad worked. Before
there were regulations against pollution. The air and parts of
Elizabeth could be so thick with smog it was hard
to see. Sometimes it smelled like rotten eggs. On some streets.
Trucks word by and construction projects pounded on. On Marsha's block,
(11:10):
they could hear chickens the chicken Walk.
Speaker 7 (11:13):
It was right on our street.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Marsha's mom would bring the kids to pick up chickens
for dinner. It was a memorable experience, to say the least.
Speaker 5 (11:22):
Listen, my grandmother grabbed me one time, took me by
the hand. Come on, we're going I'm like, what is
a zoop?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
So no and.
Speaker 5 (11:30):
Going in orders that chicken, and that guy grabs that
chicken and starts ringing his neck and I'm like, oh
m G, I am not eating that.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Over time, though, it sounds like they all came around.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
That was nice pressed chicken, and that was the best
chicken from the chickens.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
It was they ate well. Alberta was a good cook.
Marsha was too. The Italian bakery near their home would
let the neighborhood kids come by at night and pick
up homemade roles for free. This is how the days
and weeks passed. Simple weeknight dinners visits with their dad.
(12:10):
Marsha liked going to the local movie theater, where twenty
five cents was enough for a triple feature. On the weekends,
Alberta made Jeanie and Marsha go to Sunday School at
Mount Timon, an African Methodist Episcopal church. It was the
oldest black church in Elizabeth, and in summertime, along with
the hot sidewalks and late sunsets, came one of the
(12:33):
city's biggest events, the Fourth of July Parade. Genie and
al impressed upon me that this was the event of
the season, biog.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Be the whole city.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
In front of all these people, Marcia took the helm.
She led the whole shebang as the drum major, and
she was decked out.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
The full the big hat like the heavy majors where.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
Heavy said at the time, I said, oh yeah, it
get if she comes.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
The whole uniform.
Speaker 4 (13:04):
They splitch it all everything and everybody was waiting.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
They was waiting.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
I wish so much that we had this on film,
But the way Alan Jeanie light up talking about it
says it all. Marcia left her mark on Elizabeth, and
Elizabeth left its mark on her too. The parades were
just one way Marcia spread joy and found the inspiration
(13:30):
growing up through performing, She dared to be different, to
be flamboyant, to be the center of attention for all
Elizabeth and her family had to offer. There was more
out there for Marcia to discover. She got a hint
of it early on on a trip to New York
(13:51):
with her family.
Speaker 7 (13:52):
My mother took us.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
All over I don't know where we didn't go in
New York. It took us around the music Internet. He
took us around New York.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Marcia's mod didn't just take them to the typical touristy sites.
They also went to Tomes Square. It wasn't all lit
up billboards and mascots and the eminem Store like it
is today. Instead think cedy hotels, porn shops, movie theaters
playing explicit films, and Neon signs advertising it all. It
(14:23):
was where sex was bought and sold. Forty second Street
was queer as hell, and Marsha's mom wasn't afraid to
show that world to her kids.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
My mother just said, when you go over to forty
second Street and you look around, what you're going to
see is some of women and some.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Of me Marcia's mom told them not to stare, but
I can imagine Marcia couldn't help but stop and take
a closer look.
Speaker 4 (14:47):
You don't know the difference, and don't stare, and the
people on going, And that's.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
What we did.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
That trip was a gift to Marcia from her mother,
a chance to see people that probably opened her eyes
and her heart in a way that felt new but
also deeply familiar. Her queerness may have been hidden beneath
the surface, but it was always inside of her. These
are parts of Marcia that I want to uncover to
(15:15):
after the break. Were you shocked at all that she
came out as gay?
Speaker 7 (15:28):
No, she said that before she went.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
She just said, I'm gay and I'm going to New York.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Welcome back to After Lives. When I asked Marcia's sister
Jeanie about Marcia's identity, I got a couple of different answers.
One thing Jeanie said was that yes, they all knew.
Speaker 4 (15:51):
It main't no difference does no nobody cared why.
Speaker 7 (15:55):
She was just Marsha.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
I can tell that Janie likes to focus on the
positive when looking back at her childhood, but Jeanie wasn't
attuned to queerness the way Marsha was growing up.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Did you think at any time that Marshall was gay?
Speaker 9 (16:09):
No?
Speaker 1 (16:09):
I didn't.
Speaker 7 (16:11):
We were so close, No I didn't.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
I didn't get a clear answer about how Marsha was
perceived growing up, if she was a misfit or blended
in nobody is ever one thing to their family. But
when Marcia talks about her own childhood, she tells a
story where her identity is central. Like here's an interview
with her from nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 8 (16:35):
See, I was young kid, raised in church, and my
mither didn't tell me anything about gay life. Ever. She
used to say this doork bought us, you know, And
she used to tell me all kinds of little fairy tales.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Marsha was getting a picture of how her family felt
about gay people.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Though.
Speaker 8 (16:54):
That's the judas a hypocrite going to church.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
In case you didn't catch that, Marcia says one of
her sisters called her a hypocrite for going to church.
Queerness can feel like a double life. When Marsha thinks
back to church, she doesn't just think about the choirs
and the Sunday school. She thinks about hypocrisy and the
ways she was left out.
Speaker 8 (17:17):
I used to meet all these different people, and they
used to take me all kinds of different places, but
nothing was no sex to discussed there or anything. It
was just like the Lord all the way.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Marcia didn't grow up in a gay haven, but Elizabeth
wasn't totally straight either. Nobody is a girl.
Speaker 9 (17:38):
You know.
Speaker 7 (17:38):
It was like a mercantile city that also had a
pretty powerful underground queer and trans night I've seen.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
This is Marcia's biographer, Tourmaline. She's been uncovering archival interviews
and records about Marcia's life for nearly twenty years. She's
also like a big sis to me. Oh goodness, see you.
Speaker 7 (18:01):
So good to see you.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
I'm so excited when Benito, I'm me, I'm Tourmaline is
a major reason why so many people know Marcia's name today,
including me. You have to go get yourself a copy
of her new biography, Marcia The Join Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson.
In her research about Marcia, Tourmaline learned a lot about
(18:25):
the underground scenes where Marcia grew up.
Speaker 7 (18:29):
Everyone was going to drag bars that Marcia's mom went
to and Marcia's siblings went to, but not really talking
to each other about it.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Elizabeth had a handful of gay bars. One of them
was even famous for its drag shows. We know this
because they were written up in police reports. The laws
in New Jersey from the thirties through the sixties were simple,
no liquor license if you weren't conforming to gender norms.
So when government agents notice quote unquote female impersonators, the
(19:03):
bars were shut down and their liquor licenses revoked. Marcia's mom, Alberta,
would go to these drag shows, and Marsha would ask
her about them.
Speaker 8 (19:14):
And then she started telling me if you were gay
people out there, you know, But she didn't tell me
they had sex or anything.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Young Marsha was left knowing that queerness was out there,
but maybe not understanding what it was exactly. I think
that's probably familiar to a lot of us who grew
up before Pride Month or before the Internet was ubiquitous. Ultimately,
Marsha was guided by her own spirit to be who
she was always going to be.
Speaker 7 (19:43):
From an early age, she started dressing in drag. She
would wear sometimes her sister's clothing or her mother's clothing.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
But Marcia's mother let her know that this was not
the way a boy behaved.
Speaker 7 (19:57):
One time she beat me up and known what bo back,
and she caught me a dragon.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
This is Marcia in a nineteen ninety two interview. She's
sinking back to when she was nineteen or twenty and
was visiting home after she moved to the city. I
came get house full of dragon and said, mom, that's
what you get for making fun of home and sexuals.
All these years, Marcia and her mom had a complicated relationship.
(20:25):
Her mom could disapprove at times very strongly, but Marcia
kept coming back, often with queer friends in toe who
were fed and cared for. Al says Marcia's mother loved
her through all the ups and downs, and there were
volatile moments, for sure, but Alberta mellowed out over the years.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Was there problems at first?
Speaker 5 (20:48):
Yes, I remember when Marsha first started coming home and
my grandmother had a problem with it. But you have
to writ back in that day, the whole neighborhood win
the bus. So my grandmother was embarrassed and she would
tell Marsha getting this house, well, I take them closure,
you know. But as I got older, she became more
open to it and it wasn't the problem at all.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
When Marshall was young, there were signs everywhere that gender
nonconformity was wrong. And on top of the dynamics with
her mom, Marsha's classmates went after her.
Speaker 7 (21:19):
Too, and it also was met with a kind of
unwanted sexualization from her peers. And she had moments where
she was sexually assaulted by her like a neighbor and
a friend, and she talks about that frequently.
Speaker 8 (21:41):
Did you ever get to use as a sushi or
anything like that? Yes, I didn't pay any attention. I
was almost raped when I was sixteen years old by
the boy next door.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
This interview with Marsha from nineteen eighty eight a lot
of insight into what she was going through as a kid,
the things that maybe her family didn't know about.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
Did you have any romances in school? Oh?
Speaker 8 (22:10):
No, I wouldn't go out with anyone anyone that was
interested me. I always used to chase them away.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Interviewing Marcia is Jim Kepner. He was an early gay
rights activist who dedicated his life to collecting stories about
the movement.
Speaker 9 (22:27):
Did your mother or your relatives?
Speaker 3 (22:30):
I ask you, well, when are you going to get married.
Why aren't you going.
Speaker 9 (22:33):
Out with girls there?
Speaker 8 (22:36):
You still always is that?
Speaker 3 (22:38):
How do you handle it?
Speaker 9 (22:40):
Well?
Speaker 8 (22:40):
What I the way I used to hand the light
is just said I didn't have any time. I was
too busy shining shoes, going to school.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Marcia found ways to deflect these questions, but they didn't stop.
Elizabeth was a city, but not big enough for anyone
to be anonymous. People knew what you were up to,
They knew if you were different were.
Speaker 10 (23:04):
Growing up there. There was many beautiful things about it
and there were awful things about it.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Tommy Lanagin Schmidt grew up between Elizabeth and its sister city, London,
at the same time as Marsha.
Speaker 10 (23:15):
Because when you're kind of effeminis back then people want
to force you into being more masculine.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Tommy is an artist. His work is inspired by his
youth as a gay kid living on the streets, and
is featured in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney, and
the Met just to name a few.
Speaker 10 (23:35):
There was a person in the town that was on
Louis the Queer.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Like Marcia, Tommy lived in a racially mixed, low income
section of town. They didn't know each other growing up,
but they met later hanging out in Greenwich Village.
Speaker 10 (23:50):
Okay, now this is crazy. One day I'm walking down
the street and there's a big, fancy like car with
fifty spins. You've probably seen those cars.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
As a white, sis gay man. Tommy's experiences are different
than Marsha's, but can still give us insight into the
way it's queerness was looked on in their community.
Speaker 10 (24:11):
And someone who looked like a cross between Jane Mansfield,
Marilyn Monroe and Richard Bardeaux. That's a steering wheel and
this person drives while speeding and playing the radio reeled
out and everyone says, who is that beautiful woman? And
someone there alway says that's not a woman, that's Louie
the Queer.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Louis the Queer was the town's token gender non conforming person.
Tommy says, for the most part, Louis wasn't bothered, maybe
because he was rich enough to pay off the police,
but he was a fixture for the town to rumor mill.
People gossiped that he stole women's boyfriends and paid people
for sex. And remember the label queer was a slur then,
(24:52):
so if you were like Louis or Marsha or Tommy.
There were only a few options. You could risk police
rates at the the ground drag bar, or you could
be openly tokenized by your entire town. Living like that,
you could see how shame might build and build and
build beneath the surface. It was ingrained from a young age,
(25:17):
like Marcia. Tommy left Elizabeth behind, choosing to sleep on
the streets of New York rather than hide who he was.
But not everybody made it out. That was a part
of the culture too.
Speaker 10 (25:31):
Okay, there was Freddy.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Like this kid, Freddie, who Tommy went to high school with.
Freddie stayed in Jersey and opened a store in town.
Speaker 10 (25:40):
Every time I come back from New York to is
my parents, I passed my go in talking Hi Hi.
Freddie h and his boyfriend was like this big shot
mafia kid and they were in love and they were
really in love. This is a very sad story.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Freddie's boyfriend was set up by his parents. They wanted
him to marry a woman, and he did.
Speaker 10 (26:03):
Freddie got in his car, took a bunch of pills,
got on the turnipipe, stepped on the gais and bang
it into a concrete Buttminium committed suicide. That's that, and
that's Linden.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Freddie's obituary didn't mention anything like that, but everyone in
the town knew what really happened. I wonder if Marcia
heard those kind of rumors growing up. I wonder what
she would have written in her journal, what she would
have confided to a trustworthy friend. Did she have bad
(26:42):
dreams as a little kid in church? Did she ever
pray to be different than she was? I can't know
these things, but what I am sure of is that
Marcia was brave, because it takes courage to be yourself,
even just to be curious about who he might be.
Speaker 8 (27:03):
I was very, very very late coming out in the
homosexual life because I want an education first. So after
I finished Thomas Satist in high school, I started to
going out thirteen to see if there was really anything
out there.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Marcia started making trips to New York on her own
to see where she fit in, but before she moved
to the city for good.
Speaker 8 (27:23):
So when I was seventeen years old, I was in
Nined States Navy.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
She joined the Naval Reserves. It was just a quick
stop on her way to becoming the Saint of Christopher street.
Speaker 8 (27:36):
But I only made like six months in reserves before
I was kicked duck if some boy touched my ans
and I just punched him in a jool.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
By the time Marcia got an honorable discharge at the
end of nineteen sixty two, she figured out that the
city was where she wanted to be. Her mother would
get upset when she left for trips to New York.
Maybe she knew what it meant. By the end of
high school, she told her yes, she was queer.
Speaker 8 (28:04):
When she used to go to these boys. You see
all these drag queens and everything, and I tell God
gave you one of your own.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Now I'm obsessed with this. Could she have said it
more perfectly? God made her this way and she is
a gift. We should all be so lucky to have
a drag queen in our lives.
Speaker 7 (28:26):
Gender has evolved in this very beautiful way, and how
people self identified back then has continued to evolve.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
This is Marcia's biographer, Tourmaline Again. Marcia's coming out was
a big deal, and it also raised us some big
questions that we haven't come to yet, Like what does
it mean to say you're a drag queen? What was
Marcia coming out as what does it mean for me
(28:57):
to refer to her as a trans woman today? Let's
look at some language, shall we. The word transgender didn't
exist in nineteen sixty three, when Marcia was on her
way out of Elizabeth. There was a totally different set
of words for queerness.
Speaker 7 (29:14):
There was just queens and queens aren't trans people? Well,
it's more complicated than that.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Some sis gay men called themselves queens, but it could
mean a range of things.
Speaker 7 (29:25):
Like some of those people who identified as queens and
had access to makeup, that might have been all you
had access to was full face makeup. You didn't necessarily
access to hormones. You didn't necessarily have access to changing
your name on your ID.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Things that we associate with transness today weren't really available then.
And as those conditions changed, how people identified evolved alongside it.
Marcia had different eras of how she presented and what
language she used.
Speaker 7 (29:59):
It's like at one point Marsha was identifying as a
butcher queen, and so she was like dressing more in
like suits and what people would call him al attire.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Pabody's all three pieces suits.
Speaker 9 (30:12):
Really he wore three piece suits. Yeah, when was that?
Speaker 7 (30:16):
Oh, yes, before it's stone.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah, that's Marcia in a nineteen seventy nine interview with
journalist Steve Watson. By the early seventies, she started identifying
as a transsexual woman and began taking estrogen.
Speaker 7 (30:33):
She very explicitly stated her desire to get gender confirmation surgery,
get a vaginal plasty, and one to really make that
happen for herself. Like she was like, I'm gonna go
overseas to make that happen for me.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
I think I'm the god. Get some more hormones. I
haven't taken him race because I want made us some
German arma, from German horma chuds.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
What different?
Speaker 7 (30:57):
Well German rama.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Just put your up to fight.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Your care. But as the years passed, Marcia didn't talk
about that much anymore. It was a desire never realized.
Speaker 7 (31:12):
And then later because of housing, insecurity and instability, just
like wasn't able to make that happen for herself. Some
things started to shift, and then later she would just
identify as a queen, as a drag queen. Do your hair, Yeah,
(31:33):
where do you do your hair?
Speaker 8 (31:34):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (31:34):
I just do it any place.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
I just walking down the street, Marshall was all of
these things. When I see her, I see one of
the girls. Some people will tell me I'm projecting, that
I'm forcing an identity onto her that didn't even exist.
But I believe that I could hold both truths, that
(31:58):
she was a nineteen sixties free Stonewall queen and that
she was my trancestor a piece of who I am today.
At points during our series, you'll hear friends and family
refer to Marcia as he or him. I've talked to
a whole gaggle of queer elders that knew her. They
(32:20):
used different pronouns, but from what I've gathered, they've always
called Marcia Marcia. Some of them said that she was
entirely her own category. You can't put her in a box.
But no matter what gender binaries Marcia escaped or was
trapped by in her lifetime, she has outlived how any
(32:42):
individual person saw her. The legacy she built for herself
forces people to acknowledge her femininity, and we know that's
something she desired very deeply. No matter what words she
used after the break, Marsha pay it no mind. Johnson
(33:03):
hits the Big City.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Oh my goodness, She's strutting up there, waving to the
policeman in the cars, and then you could get arrested, but.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Pay it no right, We'll be right back.
Speaker 9 (33:21):
Times Square was a party town. I mean, it was
one block of absolute.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
Heaven.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Meet Miss Major, or as I know her, Mama Major.
She's a living legend.
Speaker 6 (33:37):
My name is Miss Major. I am considered to be
this community, and I still believe inviting for our right.
You know, we're still behind the barrel.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Miss Major is seventy eight. She was born a year
after Marshall, and I believe if Marsha was still alive,
she would be in a similar position to Major. A
mother to many, a revered activist, and a fearless leader
with a lot of wisdom to share about how to
survive in this world.
Speaker 9 (34:12):
All of us know. It's seen one of the You've seen.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
All of us.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Miss Major met Marcia a few times in New York.
They weren't exactly in the same circle, but they had
shared experiences. In the early sixties, they both struted the
streets of Times Square.
Speaker 9 (34:30):
The sixties was placed to be. It was a time
to really get out there and shake your fucking tail feathers.
Speaker 10 (34:40):
Just go for it.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
After Marsha moved out of Elizabeth, she went right to
the place where her mother told her not to stare
at the dolls so many years before, Marcia and Major
were two among many in a quote haven of undesirables,
as The New York Times put it in a night
teen sixty article about Times Square, I.
Speaker 9 (35:03):
Mean you show how it changed. It is not like
that no more. You know, it's all cleaned up and
kid friendly. One day it's this seer is there, it's booming,
and the next it's done.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
The article may have called it the worst block in town,
but it was a refuge to both Martia and Major.
The piece said it was an area filled with flagrant
devians who walked with the swish, but it was also
a place where Marcia could connect with people like herself
for the first time in her life. Discovering yourself in
(35:44):
a place the rest of the world looks down on
it doesn't make things easy. On an average day, seventy
five police officers were patrolling the block around Times Square.
Speaker 9 (35:57):
Back then, it took you to see they were arresting
us and sitting us a jail. It's hard to live
like that.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Sometimes the girls were sent to jail, but other times
they were sent to a mental hospital. Back then, being
any kind of queer was considered a mental health disorder.
Speaker 9 (36:21):
It was just a madic. The way it happened, you know,
it just take you away.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
It seemed like the smallest infraction could land you behind bars.
You could be picked up for not wearing three articles
of mail clothing, or for doing sex work, or for
loitering aka just standing there being yourself.
Speaker 9 (36:42):
You couldn't go leave your apartment, go across the street
to buy a pack of cigarettes, so asta and go
back to your place. You got supped in between it
and got suped up. So that's something wrong that you're
not allowed to dafe.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
I asked Mama Major how the girls out there helped
each other survive. She said it was easy enough. If
you didn't know anybody, you just crossed the street to
chat and asked what was going on. This is how
sex workers have protected each other for centuries. The other
girls would tell you what blocks to stay away from,
if there were police sweeps happening, if they knew about
(37:25):
any undercovers around. They tell you who to look out for.
You could find out which John's had a reputation for
being violent. By the early nineteen seventies, Marcia was already
referring to herself as a cat with nine lives. In
her formative years in the city, she was arrested, incarcerated,
(37:46):
and survived multiple attempts at her life from John's, but
somehow she carved out space for freedom too, freedom to
be who she wanted to be.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Oh my goodness's strutting up there waving to the policeman
in the cars. And then you could get arrested, But
pay it no mind. I'm a woman, a real woman.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Augusto Machado was a friend of Marcia's. He's a celebrated
performance artist as well as an amazing visual artist who's
known for his shrines honoring a long lost downtown New
York scene and the people who were a part of it.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
I'm mister iving dinosaur.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
This was definitely Augusto's first podcast interview.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
So this is going to go on the gadget for
history's sake.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
He wasn't the first queer elder. We had to explain
podcasts to the season, and we love them for this.
Augusto says he met Marsha around nineteen sixty four or
sixty five, so a year or two after Marsha moved
to the city. Marshall was a leader to Augusto and
so many of their friends.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Her encouragement and her confidence that every day's a new day,
and you don't know how much you're given, why not
act and dress the way you want it.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
In those early years living in New York, Marsha found
a variety of ways to make money to live the
way she wanted. When Marsha first moved to the city,
she got a job at Child's Restaurant, one of the
first chains in the country. She had to wear this
hospital like uniform that symbolized food safety in a really
campy way. Marcia had this job, but let's not forget
(39:37):
and I did.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Honey, I'm not gonna want to be a Hamburger jingling.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
For the rest of my life. I want to be
a drag queen.
Speaker 7 (39:46):
I want to be one of the world's biggest drag queens.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
This is an interview from nineteen ninety two recorded by
Michael Casino, the director of the documentary Paying No Mind.
Marsha wanted more, more experimentation, more freedom, more money. Soon
she realized people would pay her for sex and like
(40:12):
miss Major. She hustled on corners and got to know
the other girls who hung around those corners too. It
was these girls who essentially christened her with a new name.
Marcia was born.
Speaker 8 (40:27):
They start calling me Marshall, Miss Marshall, so let me
say so.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
They took call me.
Speaker 7 (40:35):
I'd like that, neither didn't.
Speaker 8 (40:37):
They start called me Marsha and tell me honey when
they stuck call me Marsha.
Speaker 7 (40:41):
I liked that name, so I decided to pick it
up for myself.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
And the drag Queace.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Later, Marcia came up with Johnson, herself named after another
restaurant chain, Howard Johnson's. There was a location in her
hometown and her new hat Times Square. The community of
working girls she found there was great, even if the
work wasn't.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
Yes, we had to do sex work and what have you,
but that's just a job. We didn't dwell on it.
It's just something you have to do and you get
your money and forget about it. You keep moving.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
She also hustled in the area's porn movie theaters alongside
a gust though.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
It was a struggle, but you didn't dwell on it.
Marcia was very upbeat. We are going to enjoy our
lives no matter what.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
At ten dollars for a hand job, they could make
good money some days, and they'd use it to take
care of each other.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
To put it in context, a slice of pizza was
fifteen cents. For a quarter, you got a drink, and
so a couple of dollars lasted a long time.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
At some points they could afford hotel rooms rented by
the hour, or an sroo single room occupancy rented four
a week for ten to fifteen dollars. They would cram
all their friends into these rooms, sometimes even twenty five
of them. They'd spare anyone they could from sleeping in
the port authority bus terminal.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
Marsha always told girlfriend, use your head if it's freezing
and cold during the day, and you know you may
spend the night at Grand Central, or as a port
of authority is, go to a public library.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Marsha, a high school graduate, was older than many of
her friends who had run away when they were barely teenagers.
Marcia was caring and offered them guidance, and she was
full of practical advice. She even knew where to find
sheep wigs or makeup or pantyhose.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
No matter where you are, you can sit there look
at the Thatcher magazines and what have you. But you're
out of the cold, and it really made sense. Oh
but I don't have a library. You don't need a
library card. There are newspapers and fashion magazines and you
can just dream away on the clothes those other people
are wearing.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
She became kind of like a big sister to the group.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
She was so generous. If someone really admired a little
pen or approach, or a necklace or something, she would
share with the other queens.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
At that time, in the mid sixties, Marshall was putting
a lot of her outfits together by dumpster diving. She'd
scour for anything she could get, turn a look, and
then just give it away. Marshall's generosity was known far
and wide, and it extended beyond material things. She shared
her sense of hope, encouraging those around her to dream
(43:49):
about big futures.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
She always aspired to be on stage and do shows.
She always gave the positive thought thought of life is
not downtrodden. You can have your hopes and dreams and
fulfill it.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Marcia the Dreamer. Around this time she started a lifelong
practice of asking passers by for spare change. She would
extend her hand and say spare change for a starving actress.
Marcia was declaring to the world that she was, in
fact a performer already. She was defiant and unafraid to
(44:31):
break the rules. Every day, through small gestures, she changed
her own life, and she changed the lives around her too.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
She would take some of the younger queens to Macy's.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
You have to understand this was unheard of to leave
one of the queer corners of the city in strut
as a homeless queen of color into a department store.
This was just not done. More than and that it
was illegal to be publicly gender nonconforming. You can hear
(45:05):
how shocked the interviewer, Steve Watson is when Marcia says,
she does this.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Body Taylor and did my okay?
Speaker 9 (45:13):
Really? Did my fat?
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Really?
Speaker 9 (45:19):
How do you do that?
Speaker 7 (45:20):
You up to them and try and all the makeup?
Speaker 2 (45:23):
How that's happened?
Speaker 3 (45:25):
We started intimidating that you walk with confidence. I'm looking
for some lipstick. What shades do you have?
Speaker 1 (45:34):
I imagine for Marcia and her friends, this was close
to living out a fairytale. To test out makeup and
this women's department store may have felt like the height
of femininity, something she may have been curious about since
she was a child, but never got a chance to try.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
And these sweet, middle class white sales girls wouldn't know
how to deal with a queens of color who wanted
to see the eyeshadow.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
I can picture them crowded around as they watched one
another tried different colors, pretending to be selective and fancy,
acting like they were going to purchase something. Maybe they
shared nervous glances or laughter. These tough queens, who constantly
had to fend for themselves were getting to show a
(46:25):
softer side.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
She always instinct her to be nourished, that royalty in you,
that woman in you.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
In a time when the world was not writy, Marcia
and Augusto and Miss Major were still there. They tried
to live as freely as they could, even if it
wasn't always easy. Working the streets, crammed into CD hotels,
inside jail cells, they dreamed and prayed and waited for
(46:57):
something better created the communities they wanted and needed to survive.
The world may not have been ready for them, but
the world would just have to change a revolution was
coming and Marcia would be on the front lines. It
(47:17):
was one of the most liberating things that I have
ever done to a fucking cop.
Speaker 10 (47:22):
St banging on the door of the stone were like
one boom, boom, boom.
Speaker 9 (47:28):
They were very embarrassed that they were called in to
put down a bunch of baggots.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
They didn't count our ingenuity.
Speaker 8 (47:36):
People just started throwing bottles and they're throwing bricks, and
you know.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
What's so said, some people do all the work and
get none of the credit. That's next time on Afterlives.
Thank you so much for listening to Afterlives. Please leave
us a rating and review to let us know what
(48:01):
you think. Afterlives is a production of the Outspoken Network
from iHeart Podcasts in partnership with School of Humans. I'm
your host and creator Roquel Willis. Dylan Hoyer is our
senior producer and scriptwriter. Our associate producer is Joey Patt.
Sound design and engineering by Jess Crinchich, Story editing by
(48:26):
Julia Furlan, fact checking by Carolyn Talmage. Score composed by
Wisei Murray. Our production manager is Daisy Church. Executive producers
include me, Roquel Willis, and Jess Crinchich from The Outspoken
Podcast Network, Amelia Brock, Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Elsie
(48:49):
Crowley from School of Humans and The Cats Company. The
image of Marsha in Our Show Art is provided by
the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art Founder's gift p. Fifteen
dot six nine nine dot one O six. A special
thank you to everyone who provided archival tape, including interview
(49:10):
with Marsha P. Johnson nineteen eighty eight from one National
Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, Jimmy Camicho's
Hot Peaches Records at NYUS Fells Library, and Special Collections
Marcia nineteen ninety two by Michael Casino courtesy of Michael Casino,
(49:30):
and Marsha P. Johnson's nineteen seventy nine interview with Stephen
Watson courtesy of Artifacts. Full interview available at www dot
Artifacts dot movie
Afterlives. It's a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Outspoken
podcast Network in partnership with School of Humans. Just to
heads up, the following episode mentioned suicide, sexual assault, and
police violence. Take care while listening.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
King stops at Zeccas Elizabeth.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Elizabeth On a cold sunny day at the end of January,
our team headed to Elizabeth, New Jersey mobile tickets to act.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I'm ready.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
It's Marsha's hometown. About thirty minutes outside of Midtown Manhattan.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Sounds a neighbors one Menday.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
From the train station, producers Dylan, Joey and I head
passed Deli's Beauty salons smoke shops. A sign lets us
know that historic midtown Elizabeth welcomes you. We drive past
two and three story buildings, some very old. Others knew
it was bustling and vibrant, nothing fancy. Then we pull
(01:20):
up in front of a fourteen story apartment building towering
over the neighborhood story.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Oh yeah, this is good, Thank.
Speaker 5 (01:33):
You, thank you, Jay Brock.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
We head up to the eighth floor where al Michael's
greets us at the door.
Speaker 6 (01:43):
Hye back out, nice to me too.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Al Is Marsha's nephew. And in the kitchen is Marsha's sister, Jeanie.
Speaker 7 (01:55):
I beck up, Nice to meet you.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
My name is jean Everybody who will reach okay.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
We all settle in at a big brown wooden kitchen table.
Jeanie wears a button up blouse and red readers are
dangling on a chain. She has a black leather hat
with white letters that read I don't care, I compliment.
It turns out it was a birthday gift.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
That's what we did for my birth Datus.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
All sits between his mom and me. Behind them is
the makings of your typical middle class kitchen, white walls
and cabinets, overhead fluorescent bulbs. Al leans back in his chair.
He's bald and bearded and wearing a bald colorful sweatshirt.
Speaker 5 (02:40):
A lot of people to this day don't know that
the Michael's family is still around, that Marsha's family's still here.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
They don't think Marcia has no family.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
It was exciting to enter the orbit of Marsha's closest
living relatives. To be honest, though I didn't know what
to expect, I had a sense from talking to other
guests for the show that Marcia had a support her family,
but it wasn't entirely clear if she was accepted for
who she was.
Speaker 5 (03:07):
There's that rumor, and we all discussed this every time.
I have an interview where they said Marsha wasn't welcome
home and Marsha never came home.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
It's not true. Marsha came home all the time.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
The spirit of Marcia came to life while we set
around that kitchen table. The love they have for her
runs deep. In our last episode, we talked about Marcia's
legendary status and we explored how complex and even contradictory
her legacy can be. To begin to understand how she
(03:39):
changed the world, we're starting where she did and Elizabeth
New Jersey.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Well, we're here and we know the truth.
Speaker 5 (03:47):
That's why we tried every time we talked to put
more of the truth out there.
Speaker 7 (03:54):
They called me an age because there's so many quaints.
Speaker 8 (03:57):
God that I'm one of the few.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Quaints still that if you wait, still.
Speaker 7 (04:02):
That I didn't make the best of every day anywhere.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
I'm Rachael Willis and this is Afterlives Episode two. From
Elizabeth to Times Square talking to Marsha's sister Jeanie and
her nephew Al comes easy. It felt like I was
(04:30):
just hanging with some of my own relatives, sitting around
the kitchen table. The memories just start flowing.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
You know, the kids used to go to people's house
and in Christmas Carol.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Right, my mind is imagining snowy Christmases with Marsha and
her siblings bundled up and hats and scarves. But just
as I start picturing a bunch of tiny angelic voices,
Genie interjects.
Speaker 7 (04:58):
Watch couldn't sing.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Marcia couldn't sing. She was totally off key. Neighbors who
opened their doors weren't getting the typical version of silent
night or whatever. With that voice. Things were not looking
good for a bunch of kids hoping to make a
little money before the holidays. But in a sign of
things to come, Marsha's charm won out.
Speaker 7 (05:22):
Marsha was the one getting all the money.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
I said, you know, you can't see.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
March said, you see, I'm getting all the money.
Speaker 7 (05:28):
I said, I'm staying right with you.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Somehow they raked it in. Genie thinks maybe the people
they were caroling for were just drunk, or maybe they
were applauding Marsha's nerve.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
I'm gonna tell you the story that her little brother,
my uncle Robert told me.
Speaker 5 (05:45):
Robert told me they paid Marcia not to see Marsha.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Shout is so bad. They gave Marsha the money not
to see.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
I love the story. It's like seeing the seeds of
Marsha's legacy before they fully bloomed into a magnificent flower crown.
Marsha was a performer all her life. Years down the line,
she owned the stage with an off off Broadway theater group.
People would chant her name. The thing is, she would
(06:20):
sing off key, then too she'd forget the words, she'd
have to restart her act, and still people loved her.
This has always been part of the legend. So eccentric,
confident and charming that she could command a room even
(06:41):
if she couldn't carry a tune.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Marsha was a performer, wasn't a singer.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
She was a performer, a star even then. I imagine
that for many reasons. As a queer kit of color
coming up in the fifties, Marsha yearned for something different.
Yet here's a glimpse of the personality that stayed with her.
All her life. Singing badly may have been a stick
(07:09):
in a family with seven kids. Maybe it was a
ploy for attention, or maybe she found a way to
be a little different and still be safe. Marshall was
born on August twenty fourth, nineteen forty five, to Alberta
and Malcolm Michaels. She grew up in a small apartment
(07:32):
with plenty of siblings.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
My brother Harold, my brother Alfred, my brother Charlie, me
my sister Norma Marsha, and my brother Bobby.
Speaker 9 (07:44):
Well, we all got along.
Speaker 7 (07:46):
Close family, close knit family back then.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
She was just another one of the Michaels. The siblings
shared bedrooms and even doubled up in beds. The kitchen
was really the heart of the home where they sat
around to catch up after school and watch Alberta cook dinner.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
My mother used to do everything sicks, the TV ain't
used to wallpaper.
Speaker 5 (08:08):
My grandmother cooked every not every day, but Sundays all
the time, and every other day she would cook something
because she was a housekeeper domestic. She did housework to
take care of this family on Edison, New Jersey, to
take care of them and then come home and take
care of us.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Marsha looked up to her mother, partly as a model
of femininity. Being close to her mom may have been
away from Marsha to nourish an unmet need within herself.
It was a matriarchal household. Marcia's mother raised them after
she and her husband separated when Marsha was a toddler.
(08:47):
They still saw their father regularly, though the family stayed
tightly knit even as Marcia's siblings grew up, entered the workforce,
and had kids of their own.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
I was lucky to grow up in the era where
basically your family unit was all in one house.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Al is about fifteen years younger than Marsha, but he
grew up alongside her too, so you.
Speaker 5 (09:12):
Had different floors of the house. You had your aunts,
you had your uncles, you had your grandmother.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
You know. I saw my aunts and uncles every day.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
When Marsha was older, she would come and go, but
never totally left Elizabeth or her family behind. She was
a large and loving presence in our's life. Elizabeth was small,
but not homogeneous. Marsha's neighborhood and schools were integrated before
many others across the country.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
The street I was born on it was all nationalities
on that street, all nationalities. My mother used to go
to work, all the neighbors would watch the children for
all nationality.
Speaker 7 (09:51):
We all got along.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Jeanie has a rosy view of living in a diverse
neighborhood and going to integrated schools all their lives.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Now that's my mother's experience basically.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
So my mother and them were low income because they
weren't destitute, but I'm saying they were low income.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
They lived at row houses and stuff.
Speaker 5 (10:08):
So you had people of all nationalities and stuff like
that because the common denominator, you were poort. So they
got along. They was their own United Nations. I cheated
a little differently because Elizabeth was segregated.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Beyond their corner of the community, the city was more
starkly divided into Black, Italian and Jewish neighborhoods. Civil rights
demonstrations raised consciousness and demanded the end of segregation at
local establishments and institutions. Elizabeth and its sister city, London
were industrial areas, home to factories like Exon Singer Sewing Company,
(10:48):
Gordon's Gin, and General Motors, where Marsha's dad worked. Before
there were regulations against pollution. The air and parts of
Elizabeth could be so thick with smog it was hard
to see. Sometimes it smelled like rotten eggs. On some streets.
Trucks word by and construction projects pounded on. On Marsha's block,
(11:10):
they could hear chickens the chicken Walk.
Speaker 7 (11:13):
It was right on our street.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Marsha's mom would bring the kids to pick up chickens
for dinner. It was a memorable experience, to say the least.
Speaker 5 (11:22):
Listen, my grandmother grabbed me one time, took me by
the hand. Come on, we're going I'm like, what is
a zoop?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
So no and.
Speaker 5 (11:30):
Going in orders that chicken, and that guy grabs that
chicken and starts ringing his neck and I'm like, oh
m G, I am not eating that.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Over time, though, it sounds like they all came around.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
That was nice pressed chicken, and that was the best
chicken from the chickens.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
It was they ate well. Alberta was a good cook.
Marsha was too. The Italian bakery near their home would
let the neighborhood kids come by at night and pick
up homemade roles for free. This is how the days
and weeks passed. Simple weeknight dinners visits with their dad.
(12:10):
Marsha liked going to the local movie theater, where twenty
five cents was enough for a triple feature. On the weekends,
Alberta made Jeanie and Marsha go to Sunday School at
Mount Timon, an African Methodist Episcopal church. It was the
oldest black church in Elizabeth, and in summertime, along with
the hot sidewalks and late sunsets, came one of the
(12:33):
city's biggest events, the Fourth of July Parade. Genie and
al impressed upon me that this was the event of
the season, biog.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Be the whole city.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
In front of all these people, Marcia took the helm.
She led the whole shebang as the drum major, and
she was decked out.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
The full the big hat like the heavy majors where.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
Heavy said at the time, I said, oh yeah, it
get if she comes.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
The whole uniform.
Speaker 4 (13:04):
They splitch it all everything and everybody was waiting.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
They was waiting.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
I wish so much that we had this on film,
But the way Alan Jeanie light up talking about it
says it all. Marcia left her mark on Elizabeth, and
Elizabeth left its mark on her too. The parades were
just one way Marcia spread joy and found the inspiration
(13:30):
growing up through performing, She dared to be different, to
be flamboyant, to be the center of attention for all
Elizabeth and her family had to offer. There was more
out there for Marcia to discover. She got a hint
of it early on on a trip to New York
(13:51):
with her family.
Speaker 7 (13:52):
My mother took us.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
All over I don't know where we didn't go in
New York. It took us around the music Internet. He
took us around New York.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Marcia's mod didn't just take them to the typical touristy sites.
They also went to Tomes Square. It wasn't all lit
up billboards and mascots and the eminem Store like it
is today. Instead think cedy hotels, porn shops, movie theaters
playing explicit films, and Neon signs advertising it all. It
(14:23):
was where sex was bought and sold. Forty second Street
was queer as hell, and Marsha's mom wasn't afraid to
show that world to her kids.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
My mother just said, when you go over to forty
second Street and you look around, what you're going to
see is some of women and some.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Of me Marcia's mom told them not to stare, but
I can imagine Marcia couldn't help but stop and take
a closer look.
Speaker 4 (14:47):
You don't know the difference, and don't stare, and the
people on going, And that's.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
What we did.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
That trip was a gift to Marcia from her mother,
a chance to see people that probably opened her eyes
and her heart in a way that felt new but
also deeply familiar. Her queerness may have been hidden beneath
the surface, but it was always inside of her. These
are parts of Marcia that I want to uncover to
(15:15):
after the break. Were you shocked at all that she
came out as gay?
Speaker 7 (15:28):
No, she said that before she went.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
She just said, I'm gay and I'm going to New York.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Welcome back to After Lives. When I asked Marcia's sister
Jeanie about Marcia's identity, I got a couple of different answers.
One thing Jeanie said was that yes, they all knew.
Speaker 4 (15:51):
It main't no difference does no nobody cared why.
Speaker 7 (15:55):
She was just Marsha.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
I can tell that Janie likes to focus on the
positive when looking back at her childhood, but Jeanie wasn't
attuned to queerness the way Marsha was growing up.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Did you think at any time that Marshall was gay?
Speaker 9 (16:09):
No?
Speaker 1 (16:09):
I didn't.
Speaker 7 (16:11):
We were so close, No I didn't.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
I didn't get a clear answer about how Marsha was
perceived growing up, if she was a misfit or blended
in nobody is ever one thing to their family. But
when Marcia talks about her own childhood, she tells a
story where her identity is central. Like here's an interview
with her from nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 8 (16:35):
See, I was young kid, raised in church, and my
mither didn't tell me anything about gay life. Ever. She
used to say this doork bought us, you know, And
she used to tell me all kinds of little fairy tales.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Marsha was getting a picture of how her family felt
about gay people.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Though.
Speaker 8 (16:54):
That's the judas a hypocrite going to church.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
In case you didn't catch that, Marcia says one of
her sisters called her a hypocrite for going to church.
Queerness can feel like a double life. When Marsha thinks
back to church, she doesn't just think about the choirs
and the Sunday school. She thinks about hypocrisy and the
ways she was left out.
Speaker 8 (17:17):
I used to meet all these different people, and they
used to take me all kinds of different places, but
nothing was no sex to discussed there or anything. It
was just like the Lord all the way.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Marcia didn't grow up in a gay haven, but Elizabeth
wasn't totally straight either. Nobody is a girl.
Speaker 9 (17:38):
You know.
Speaker 7 (17:38):
It was like a mercantile city that also had a
pretty powerful underground queer and trans night I've seen.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
This is Marcia's biographer, Tourmaline. She's been uncovering archival interviews
and records about Marcia's life for nearly twenty years. She's
also like a big sis to me. Oh goodness, see you.
Speaker 7 (18:01):
So good to see you.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
I'm so excited when Benito, I'm me, I'm Tourmaline is
a major reason why so many people know Marcia's name today,
including me. You have to go get yourself a copy
of her new biography, Marcia The Join Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson.
In her research about Marcia, Tourmaline learned a lot about
(18:25):
the underground scenes where Marcia grew up.
Speaker 7 (18:29):
Everyone was going to drag bars that Marcia's mom went
to and Marcia's siblings went to, but not really talking
to each other about it.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Elizabeth had a handful of gay bars. One of them
was even famous for its drag shows. We know this
because they were written up in police reports. The laws
in New Jersey from the thirties through the sixties were simple,
no liquor license if you weren't conforming to gender norms.
So when government agents notice quote unquote female impersonators, the
(19:03):
bars were shut down and their liquor licenses revoked. Marcia's mom, Alberta,
would go to these drag shows, and Marsha would ask
her about them.
Speaker 8 (19:14):
And then she started telling me if you were gay
people out there, you know, But she didn't tell me
they had sex or anything.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Young Marsha was left knowing that queerness was out there,
but maybe not understanding what it was exactly. I think
that's probably familiar to a lot of us who grew
up before Pride Month or before the Internet was ubiquitous. Ultimately,
Marsha was guided by her own spirit to be who
she was always going to be.
Speaker 7 (19:43):
From an early age, she started dressing in drag. She
would wear sometimes her sister's clothing or her mother's clothing.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
But Marcia's mother let her know that this was not
the way a boy behaved.
Speaker 7 (19:57):
One time she beat me up and known what bo back,
and she caught me a dragon.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
This is Marcia in a nineteen ninety two interview. She's
sinking back to when she was nineteen or twenty and
was visiting home after she moved to the city. I
came get house full of dragon and said, mom, that's
what you get for making fun of home and sexuals.
All these years, Marcia and her mom had a complicated relationship.
(20:25):
Her mom could disapprove at times very strongly, but Marcia
kept coming back, often with queer friends in toe who
were fed and cared for. Al says Marcia's mother loved
her through all the ups and downs, and there were
volatile moments, for sure, but Alberta mellowed out over the years.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Was there problems at first?
Speaker 5 (20:48):
Yes, I remember when Marsha first started coming home and
my grandmother had a problem with it. But you have
to writ back in that day, the whole neighborhood win
the bus. So my grandmother was embarrassed and she would
tell Marsha getting this house, well, I take them closure,
you know. But as I got older, she became more
open to it and it wasn't the problem at all.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
When Marshall was young, there were signs everywhere that gender
nonconformity was wrong. And on top of the dynamics with
her mom, Marsha's classmates went after her.
Speaker 7 (21:19):
Too, and it also was met with a kind of
unwanted sexualization from her peers. And she had moments where
she was sexually assaulted by her like a neighbor and
a friend, and she talks about that frequently.
Speaker 8 (21:41):
Did you ever get to use as a sushi or
anything like that? Yes, I didn't pay any attention. I
was almost raped when I was sixteen years old by
the boy next door.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
This interview with Marsha from nineteen eighty eight a lot
of insight into what she was going through as a kid,
the things that maybe her family didn't know about.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
Did you have any romances in school? Oh?
Speaker 8 (22:10):
No, I wouldn't go out with anyone anyone that was
interested me. I always used to chase them away.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Interviewing Marcia is Jim Kepner. He was an early gay
rights activist who dedicated his life to collecting stories about
the movement.
Speaker 9 (22:27):
Did your mother or your relatives?
Speaker 3 (22:30):
I ask you, well, when are you going to get married.
Why aren't you going.
Speaker 9 (22:33):
Out with girls there?
Speaker 8 (22:36):
You still always is that?
Speaker 3 (22:38):
How do you handle it?
Speaker 9 (22:40):
Well?
Speaker 8 (22:40):
What I the way I used to hand the light
is just said I didn't have any time. I was
too busy shining shoes, going to school.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Marcia found ways to deflect these questions, but they didn't stop.
Elizabeth was a city, but not big enough for anyone
to be anonymous. People knew what you were up to,
They knew if you were different were.
Speaker 10 (23:04):
Growing up there. There was many beautiful things about it
and there were awful things about it.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Tommy Lanagin Schmidt grew up between Elizabeth and its sister city, London,
at the same time as Marsha.
Speaker 10 (23:15):
Because when you're kind of effeminis back then people want
to force you into being more masculine.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Tommy is an artist. His work is inspired by his
youth as a gay kid living on the streets, and
is featured in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney, and
the Met just to name a few.
Speaker 10 (23:35):
There was a person in the town that was on
Louis the Queer.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Like Marcia, Tommy lived in a racially mixed, low income
section of town. They didn't know each other growing up,
but they met later hanging out in Greenwich Village.
Speaker 10 (23:50):
Okay, now this is crazy. One day I'm walking down
the street and there's a big, fancy like car with
fifty spins. You've probably seen those cars.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
As a white, sis gay man. Tommy's experiences are different
than Marsha's, but can still give us insight into the
way it's queerness was looked on in their community.
Speaker 10 (24:11):
And someone who looked like a cross between Jane Mansfield,
Marilyn Monroe and Richard Bardeaux. That's a steering wheel and
this person drives while speeding and playing the radio reeled
out and everyone says, who is that beautiful woman? And
someone there alway says that's not a woman, that's Louie
the Queer.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Louis the Queer was the town's token gender non conforming person.
Tommy says, for the most part, Louis wasn't bothered, maybe
because he was rich enough to pay off the police,
but he was a fixture for the town to rumor mill.
People gossiped that he stole women's boyfriends and paid people
for sex. And remember the label queer was a slur then,
(24:52):
so if you were like Louis or Marsha or Tommy.
There were only a few options. You could risk police
rates at the the ground drag bar, or you could
be openly tokenized by your entire town. Living like that,
you could see how shame might build and build and
build beneath the surface. It was ingrained from a young age,
(25:17):
like Marcia. Tommy left Elizabeth behind, choosing to sleep on
the streets of New York rather than hide who he was.
But not everybody made it out. That was a part
of the culture too.
Speaker 10 (25:31):
Okay, there was Freddy.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Like this kid, Freddie, who Tommy went to high school with.
Freddie stayed in Jersey and opened a store in town.
Speaker 10 (25:40):
Every time I come back from New York to is
my parents, I passed my go in talking Hi Hi.
Freddie h and his boyfriend was like this big shot
mafia kid and they were in love and they were
really in love. This is a very sad story.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Freddie's boyfriend was set up by his parents. They wanted
him to marry a woman, and he did.
Speaker 10 (26:03):
Freddie got in his car, took a bunch of pills,
got on the turnipipe, stepped on the gais and bang
it into a concrete Buttminium committed suicide. That's that, and
that's Linden.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Freddie's obituary didn't mention anything like that, but everyone in
the town knew what really happened. I wonder if Marcia
heard those kind of rumors growing up. I wonder what
she would have written in her journal, what she would
have confided to a trustworthy friend. Did she have bad
(26:42):
dreams as a little kid in church? Did she ever
pray to be different than she was? I can't know
these things, but what I am sure of is that
Marcia was brave, because it takes courage to be yourself,
even just to be curious about who he might be.
Speaker 8 (27:03):
I was very, very very late coming out in the
homosexual life because I want an education first. So after
I finished Thomas Satist in high school, I started to
going out thirteen to see if there was really anything
out there.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Marcia started making trips to New York on her own
to see where she fit in, but before she moved
to the city for good.
Speaker 8 (27:23):
So when I was seventeen years old, I was in
Nined States Navy.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
She joined the Naval Reserves. It was just a quick
stop on her way to becoming the Saint of Christopher street.
Speaker 8 (27:36):
But I only made like six months in reserves before
I was kicked duck if some boy touched my ans
and I just punched him in a jool.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
By the time Marcia got an honorable discharge at the
end of nineteen sixty two, she figured out that the
city was where she wanted to be. Her mother would
get upset when she left for trips to New York.
Maybe she knew what it meant. By the end of
high school, she told her yes, she was queer.
Speaker 8 (28:04):
When she used to go to these boys. You see
all these drag queens and everything, and I tell God
gave you one of your own.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Now I'm obsessed with this. Could she have said it
more perfectly? God made her this way and she is
a gift. We should all be so lucky to have
a drag queen in our lives.
Speaker 7 (28:26):
Gender has evolved in this very beautiful way, and how
people self identified back then has continued to evolve.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
This is Marcia's biographer, Tourmaline Again. Marcia's coming out was
a big deal, and it also raised us some big
questions that we haven't come to yet, Like what does
it mean to say you're a drag queen? What was
Marcia coming out as what does it mean for me
(28:57):
to refer to her as a trans woman today? Let's
look at some language, shall we. The word transgender didn't
exist in nineteen sixty three, when Marcia was on her
way out of Elizabeth. There was a totally different set
of words for queerness.
Speaker 7 (29:14):
There was just queens and queens aren't trans people? Well,
it's more complicated than that.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Some sis gay men called themselves queens, but it could
mean a range of things.
Speaker 7 (29:25):
Like some of those people who identified as queens and
had access to makeup, that might have been all you
had access to was full face makeup. You didn't necessarily
access to hormones. You didn't necessarily have access to changing
your name on your ID.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Things that we associate with transness today weren't really available then.
And as those conditions changed, how people identified evolved alongside it.
Marcia had different eras of how she presented and what
language she used.
Speaker 7 (29:59):
It's like at one point Marsha was identifying as a
butcher queen, and so she was like dressing more in
like suits and what people would call him al attire.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Pabody's all three pieces suits.
Speaker 9 (30:12):
Really he wore three piece suits. Yeah, when was that?
Speaker 7 (30:16):
Oh, yes, before it's stone.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah, that's Marcia in a nineteen seventy nine interview with
journalist Steve Watson. By the early seventies, she started identifying
as a transsexual woman and began taking estrogen.
Speaker 7 (30:33):
She very explicitly stated her desire to get gender confirmation surgery,
get a vaginal plasty, and one to really make that
happen for herself. Like she was like, I'm gonna go
overseas to make that happen for me.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
I think I'm the god. Get some more hormones. I
haven't taken him race because I want made us some
German arma, from German horma chuds.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
What different?
Speaker 7 (30:57):
Well German rama.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Just put your up to fight.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Your care. But as the years passed, Marcia didn't talk
about that much anymore. It was a desire never realized.
Speaker 7 (31:12):
And then later because of housing, insecurity and instability, just
like wasn't able to make that happen for herself. Some
things started to shift, and then later she would just
identify as a queen, as a drag queen. Do your hair, Yeah,
(31:33):
where do you do your hair?
Speaker 8 (31:34):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (31:34):
I just do it any place.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
I just walking down the street, Marshall was all of
these things. When I see her, I see one of
the girls. Some people will tell me I'm projecting, that
I'm forcing an identity onto her that didn't even exist.
But I believe that I could hold both truths, that
(31:58):
she was a nineteen sixties free Stonewall queen and that
she was my trancestor a piece of who I am today.
At points during our series, you'll hear friends and family
refer to Marcia as he or him. I've talked to
a whole gaggle of queer elders that knew her. They
(32:20):
used different pronouns, but from what I've gathered, they've always
called Marcia Marcia. Some of them said that she was
entirely her own category. You can't put her in a box.
But no matter what gender binaries Marcia escaped or was
trapped by in her lifetime, she has outlived how any
(32:42):
individual person saw her. The legacy she built for herself
forces people to acknowledge her femininity, and we know that's
something she desired very deeply. No matter what words she
used after the break, Marsha pay it no mind. Johnson
(33:03):
hits the Big City.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Oh my goodness, She's strutting up there, waving to the
policeman in the cars, and then you could get arrested, but.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Pay it no right, We'll be right back.
Speaker 9 (33:21):
Times Square was a party town. I mean, it was
one block of absolute.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
Heaven.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Meet Miss Major, or as I know her, Mama Major.
She's a living legend.
Speaker 6 (33:37):
My name is Miss Major. I am considered to be
this community, and I still believe inviting for our right.
You know, we're still behind the barrel.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Miss Major is seventy eight. She was born a year
after Marshall, and I believe if Marsha was still alive,
she would be in a similar position to Major. A
mother to many, a revered activist, and a fearless leader
with a lot of wisdom to share about how to
survive in this world.
Speaker 9 (34:12):
All of us know. It's seen one of the You've seen.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
All of us.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Miss Major met Marcia a few times in New York.
They weren't exactly in the same circle, but they had
shared experiences. In the early sixties, they both struted the
streets of Times Square.
Speaker 9 (34:30):
The sixties was placed to be. It was a time
to really get out there and shake your fucking tail feathers.
Speaker 10 (34:40):
Just go for it.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
After Marsha moved out of Elizabeth, she went right to
the place where her mother told her not to stare
at the dolls so many years before, Marcia and Major
were two among many in a quote haven of undesirables,
as The New York Times put it in a night
teen sixty article about Times Square, I.
Speaker 9 (35:03):
Mean you show how it changed. It is not like
that no more. You know, it's all cleaned up and
kid friendly. One day it's this seer is there, it's booming,
and the next it's done.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
The article may have called it the worst block in town,
but it was a refuge to both Martia and Major.
The piece said it was an area filled with flagrant
devians who walked with the swish, but it was also
a place where Marcia could connect with people like herself
for the first time in her life. Discovering yourself in
(35:44):
a place the rest of the world looks down on
it doesn't make things easy. On an average day, seventy
five police officers were patrolling the block around Times Square.
Speaker 9 (35:57):
Back then, it took you to see they were arresting
us and sitting us a jail. It's hard to live
like that.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Sometimes the girls were sent to jail, but other times
they were sent to a mental hospital. Back then, being
any kind of queer was considered a mental health disorder.
Speaker 9 (36:21):
It was just a madic. The way it happened, you know,
it just take you away.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
It seemed like the smallest infraction could land you behind bars.
You could be picked up for not wearing three articles
of mail clothing, or for doing sex work, or for
loitering aka just standing there being yourself.
Speaker 9 (36:42):
You couldn't go leave your apartment, go across the street
to buy a pack of cigarettes, so asta and go
back to your place. You got supped in between it
and got suped up. So that's something wrong that you're
not allowed to dafe.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
I asked Mama Major how the girls out there helped
each other survive. She said it was easy enough. If
you didn't know anybody, you just crossed the street to
chat and asked what was going on. This is how
sex workers have protected each other for centuries. The other
girls would tell you what blocks to stay away from,
if there were police sweeps happening, if they knew about
(37:25):
any undercovers around. They tell you who to look out for.
You could find out which John's had a reputation for
being violent. By the early nineteen seventies, Marcia was already
referring to herself as a cat with nine lives. In
her formative years in the city, she was arrested, incarcerated,
(37:46):
and survived multiple attempts at her life from John's, but
somehow she carved out space for freedom too, freedom to
be who she wanted to be.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Oh my goodness's strutting up there waving to the policeman
in the cars. And then you could get arrested, But
pay it no mind. I'm a woman, a real woman.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Augusto Machado was a friend of Marcia's. He's a celebrated
performance artist as well as an amazing visual artist who's
known for his shrines honoring a long lost downtown New
York scene and the people who were a part of it.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
I'm mister iving dinosaur.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
This was definitely Augusto's first podcast interview.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
So this is going to go on the gadget for
history's sake.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
He wasn't the first queer elder. We had to explain
podcasts to the season, and we love them for this.
Augusto says he met Marsha around nineteen sixty four or
sixty five, so a year or two after Marsha moved
to the city. Marshall was a leader to Augusto and
so many of their friends.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Her encouragement and her confidence that every day's a new day,
and you don't know how much you're given, why not
act and dress the way you want it.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
In those early years living in New York, Marsha found
a variety of ways to make money to live the
way she wanted. When Marsha first moved to the city,
she got a job at Child's Restaurant, one of the
first chains in the country. She had to wear this
hospital like uniform that symbolized food safety in a really
campy way. Marcia had this job, but let's not forget
(39:37):
and I did.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Honey, I'm not gonna want to be a Hamburger jingling.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
For the rest of my life. I want to be
a drag queen.
Speaker 7 (39:46):
I want to be one of the world's biggest drag queens.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
This is an interview from nineteen ninety two recorded by
Michael Casino, the director of the documentary Paying No Mind.
Marsha wanted more, more experimentation, more freedom, more money. Soon
she realized people would pay her for sex and like
(40:12):
miss Major. She hustled on corners and got to know
the other girls who hung around those corners too. It
was these girls who essentially christened her with a new name.
Marcia was born.
Speaker 8 (40:27):
They start calling me Marshall, Miss Marshall, so let me
say so.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
They took call me.
Speaker 7 (40:35):
I'd like that, neither didn't.
Speaker 8 (40:37):
They start called me Marsha and tell me honey when
they stuck call me Marsha.
Speaker 7 (40:41):
I liked that name, so I decided to pick it
up for myself.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
And the drag Queace.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Later, Marcia came up with Johnson, herself named after another
restaurant chain, Howard Johnson's. There was a location in her
hometown and her new hat Times Square. The community of
working girls she found there was great, even if the
work wasn't.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
Yes, we had to do sex work and what have you,
but that's just a job. We didn't dwell on it.
It's just something you have to do and you get
your money and forget about it. You keep moving.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
She also hustled in the area's porn movie theaters alongside
a gust though.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
It was a struggle, but you didn't dwell on it.
Marcia was very upbeat. We are going to enjoy our
lives no matter what.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
At ten dollars for a hand job, they could make
good money some days, and they'd use it to take
care of each other.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
To put it in context, a slice of pizza was
fifteen cents. For a quarter, you got a drink, and
so a couple of dollars lasted a long time.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
At some points they could afford hotel rooms rented by
the hour, or an sroo single room occupancy rented four
a week for ten to fifteen dollars. They would cram
all their friends into these rooms, sometimes even twenty five
of them. They'd spare anyone they could from sleeping in
the port authority bus terminal.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
Marsha always told girlfriend, use your head if it's freezing
and cold during the day, and you know you may
spend the night at Grand Central, or as a port
of authority is, go to a public library.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Marsha, a high school graduate, was older than many of
her friends who had run away when they were barely teenagers.
Marcia was caring and offered them guidance, and she was
full of practical advice. She even knew where to find
sheep wigs or makeup or pantyhose.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
No matter where you are, you can sit there look
at the Thatcher magazines and what have you. But you're
out of the cold, and it really made sense. Oh
but I don't have a library. You don't need a
library card. There are newspapers and fashion magazines and you
can just dream away on the clothes those other people
are wearing.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
She became kind of like a big sister to the group.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
She was so generous. If someone really admired a little
pen or approach, or a necklace or something, she would
share with the other queens.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
At that time, in the mid sixties, Marshall was putting
a lot of her outfits together by dumpster diving. She'd
scour for anything she could get, turn a look, and
then just give it away. Marshall's generosity was known far
and wide, and it extended beyond material things. She shared
her sense of hope, encouraging those around her to dream
(43:49):
about big futures.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
She always aspired to be on stage and do shows.
She always gave the positive thought thought of life is
not downtrodden. You can have your hopes and dreams and
fulfill it.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Marcia the Dreamer. Around this time she started a lifelong
practice of asking passers by for spare change. She would
extend her hand and say spare change for a starving actress.
Marcia was declaring to the world that she was, in
fact a performer already. She was defiant and unafraid to
(44:31):
break the rules. Every day, through small gestures, she changed
her own life, and she changed the lives around her too.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
She would take some of the younger queens to Macy's.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
You have to understand this was unheard of to leave
one of the queer corners of the city in strut
as a homeless queen of color into a department store.
This was just not done. More than and that it
was illegal to be publicly gender nonconforming. You can hear
(45:05):
how shocked the interviewer, Steve Watson is when Marcia says,
she does this.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Body Taylor and did my okay?
Speaker 9 (45:13):
Really? Did my fat?
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Really?
Speaker 9 (45:19):
How do you do that?
Speaker 7 (45:20):
You up to them and try and all the makeup?
Speaker 2 (45:23):
How that's happened?
Speaker 3 (45:25):
We started intimidating that you walk with confidence. I'm looking
for some lipstick. What shades do you have?
Speaker 1 (45:34):
I imagine for Marcia and her friends, this was close
to living out a fairytale. To test out makeup and
this women's department store may have felt like the height
of femininity, something she may have been curious about since
she was a child, but never got a chance to try.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
And these sweet, middle class white sales girls wouldn't know
how to deal with a queens of color who wanted
to see the eyeshadow.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
I can picture them crowded around as they watched one
another tried different colors, pretending to be selective and fancy,
acting like they were going to purchase something. Maybe they
shared nervous glances or laughter. These tough queens, who constantly
had to fend for themselves were getting to show a
(46:25):
softer side.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
She always instinct her to be nourished, that royalty in you,
that woman in you.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
In a time when the world was not writy, Marcia
and Augusto and Miss Major were still there. They tried
to live as freely as they could, even if it
wasn't always easy. Working the streets, crammed into CD hotels,
inside jail cells, they dreamed and prayed and waited for
(46:57):
something better created the communities they wanted and needed to survive.
The world may not have been ready for them, but
the world would just have to change a revolution was
coming and Marcia would be on the front lines. It
(47:17):
was one of the most liberating things that I have
ever done to a fucking cop.
Speaker 10 (47:22):
St banging on the door of the stone were like
one boom, boom, boom.
Speaker 9 (47:28):
They were very embarrassed that they were called in to
put down a bunch of baggots.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
They didn't count our ingenuity.
Speaker 8 (47:36):
People just started throwing bottles and they're throwing bricks, and
you know.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
What's so said, some people do all the work and
get none of the credit. That's next time on Afterlives.
Thank you so much for listening to Afterlives. Please leave
us a rating and review to let us know what
(48:01):
you think. Afterlives is a production of the Outspoken Network
from iHeart Podcasts in partnership with School of Humans. I'm
your host and creator Roquel Willis. Dylan Hoyer is our
senior producer and scriptwriter. Our associate producer is Joey Patt.
Sound design and engineering by Jess Crinchich, Story editing by
(48:26):
Julia Furlan, fact checking by Carolyn Talmage. Score composed by
Wisei Murray. Our production manager is Daisy Church. Executive producers
include me, Roquel Willis, and Jess Crinchich from The Outspoken
Podcast Network, Amelia Brock, Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Elsie
(48:49):
Crowley from School of Humans and The Cats Company. The
image of Marsha in Our Show Art is provided by
the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art Founder's gift p. Fifteen
dot six nine nine dot one O six. A special
thank you to everyone who provided archival tape, including interview
(49:10):
with Marsha P. Johnson nineteen eighty eight from one National
Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, Jimmy Camicho's
Hot Peaches Records at NYUS Fells Library, and Special Collections
Marcia nineteen ninety two by Michael Casino courtesy of Michael Casino,
(49:30):
and Marsha P. Johnson's nineteen seventy nine interview with Stephen
Watson courtesy of Artifacts. Full interview available at www dot
Artifacts dot movie
Host
Raquel Willis
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