If you know anything about the legendary activist Marsha P. Johnson, chances are you’ve been touched by the work of Tourmaline. Widely recognized as our community’s preeminent Johnson scholar, the Miami-based artist has explored Johnson’s life and legacy across various mediums, including film, photography, and her own activism. Now, Tourmaline is on the precipice of her latest and most substantial offering to the historic canon — Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, the first full-length biography of the Stonewall veteran, out in May, 2025, from Tiny Reparations Books.
“Marsha's been a guiding force of my life and work for so many years,” the author tells Them. “The combination of years of learning from her and listening to her and to the people who knew her… sharing that with the world is the deepest honor.”
Previously, Tourmaline has paid homage to Johnson’s memory through works of photography and film, such as the 2017 short Happy Birthday Marsha. Co-directed with the artist Sasha Wortzel, the film presents a fictionalized account of Marsha’s role in the Stonewall Uprising. Tourmaline has also curated a historical reservoir in the form of her blog, “The Spirit Was…,” which brims with digitization of lost footage, images, and newspaper clippings from Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and their revolutionary contemporaries.
In an essay entitled, “How Tourmaline Introduced a Generation to Marsha P. Johnson,” Redefining Realness author Janet Mock hailed the archivist’s blog as the “free, accessible, and deeply informative” source that introduced her — and her contemporaries — to their “resistant roots.”
Tourmaline has carried the torch of Johnson’s organizing through her own activism, too. In the lineage of organizations like Street Transvestite Action Revolutionary, which Johnson cofounded with Sylvia Rivera in 1970, Tourmaline has worked to support queer and trans young people through organizations including The Door, Critical Resistance, Queer|Art, and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project.
“With Marsha, one of the biggest lessons comes from how she lived in the midst of so much that was unwanted and how she used that awareness to clarify what she wanted,” Tourmaline shares. “In the 1960s, she would sit in these hourly motels with her friends, Sylvia Rivera and Augusto Machado, and they would daydream.”
There, as the clock ticked, these visionary organizers defined the world they knew they deserved: “a greater sense of ease, a stronger desire to show up for one another, a place that they didn’t have to leave every hour if they couldn’t afford it,” Tourmaline explains.
Some three decades after Marsha’s untimely death, Tourmaline sees her great subject’s impact everywhere — on the red carpet and in the halls of power, but especially in our community’s capacity to show up at both: to exude joy in defiance. And so, on the occasion of her biography’s cover reveal, we caught up with Tourmaline about how she first encountered Marsha, the real story of her role in Stonewall, and what she’d think of our world today.
You’ve been thinking deeply about Marsha “Pay it No Mind” Johnson for over two decades. I wanted to begin with your first brush. What was it about her that initially drew you in?
I was in my early twenties and doing outreach for an advocacy organization called The Door. We’d hang out on the Christopher Street pier all night. In that setting, I started to hear more and more about Marsha P. Johnson. What was confusing was that some people would talk about Marsha as this person who was around recently, and then others would talk about her in the context of Stonewall. And I’d be like, “But that was in 1969.”
Later, I learned she posed for Andy Warhol and that the artist Anohni had named her band after Marsha. I remember thinking, what’s going on here? There were all of these delicious moments of realization that began to lay out the constellation of her life — performance, activism, the way she turned Christopher Street into a runway.
You used the word “confusing.” I’m curious about that choice. What was surprising to you about Marsha’s life?
The landscape was so different back in the early 2000s. It’s hard to describe how fast the world that Marsha cultivated has come into full bloom. But [in her time], there were not many visible trans women of color. Even that term, “trans women of color,” I think became more popular starting in 2012, 2013. Even for me, I was [working in trans advocacy in 2005], and it was really intense to leave the house and get clocked walking down the street or while taking the subway. To imagine someone serving so generously all the time [during the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s] just filled me with awe and wonder. And this was before I was calling myself an artist. I felt this sense of wonder. It was so powerful that she gave herself permission to do all that — to be all of that.
Getting to the book, what were some of the details you unearthed that readers might be surprised to learn about Marsha?
She was a true cultural innovator on a massive scale. She found clarity from being in the midst of things that were unwanted and she immediately calibrated, tuned to what she wanted from a situation. Sometimes she would do that in the realm of organizing and activism, or sometimes she would do that on stage. That’s something I think the public doesn’t necessarily know — the extent of her output as a performer. She was doing two performances a day with the Angels of Light, [a group] that formed under The Cockettes. She was on stage all day every day for years.
One thing folks probably have heard about Marsha is her role in Stonewall — a topic that’s been discussed for decades. You have a whole chapter in the book on it. So, if you can share, I’d love to know what you think really happened?
So the truth is Marsha was one of the first, if not first person, to physically resist the police that night. Some say, “Oh Marsha didn’t arrive at Stonewall until well after.” But what’s powerful is that so many moments throughout her life, she recalled the exact song that was playing at Stonewall when the police busted in: Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” I use that detail as a jumping off point in the book to show how it wasn’t just anti-blackness and transphobia that saw Marsha not foregrounded in this story, but also neuro-normativity. As a neurodivergent person, Marsha would always talk about hearing “I Hear It Through The Grapevine,” even while at times she’d say things in interviews like, “It happened in August.”
In his book about Stonewall, the historian David Carter has a note that speaks to this idea, where he writes, “It seems reasonable to conclude that Marsha Johnson was almost undoubtedly among the first to be violent that night and may possibly have even been the first. Marsha's inability to speak with any coherence and focus is no doubt the reason we do not have a clear account of our own recollections.”
Still, the question of who was the first, or which drop was the first to make a wave turn is not necessarily the most important.
In what ways does this fixation with who threw the first brick limit the depth of our ongoing discussions of our past?
That was one of the driving questions for this book I did with Eric Stanley and Johanna Burton called Trap Door. So often visibility and firstness are really intertwined. The “trap door” of visibility can act as this beautiful bright light that is also somehow occluding work around the real basic needs. To me, when we were writing this book, so much of it is about having a “yes and” approach. There's enough focus to bask in the joy that comes from an Oscar win and the joy that comes from the last big campaign that I did when I was working at Sylvia Rivera Law Project, which was getting Cuomo to stop discriminating against trans and gender-nonconforming people who are on Medicaid accessing healthcare. That is so aligned with Marsha’s legacy — she literally went to MGM studios in Los Angeles trying to get cast, and also she was really insistent on healthcare. It's so important to say there's enough focus that we don’t have to stop celebrating anyone; it's just about turning up the dial and expanding our focus. And I think Marsha really did that beautifully.
It's so wonderful that Marsha in her life embodied that exact idea; she did both. She worked simultaneously to be a star and so that the girls on the street could have housing.
Yes. And she didn't think of it in a scarcity way. She wasn’t like, “I have to stop turning out these looks in order to make sure that we're finding housing.” She did it all throughout her life.
I wanted to ask you about how Marsha has become so visible in mainstream culture over the last decade. There are parks named for her. She was a Google Doodle. What do you make of this broadening in collective interest and appreciation of Marsha?
To me, it's really thrilling that more people know about Marsha, and I'm hoping this book will help lead people to aspects of her life that they might not have considered, like her relationship to God and her spirituality. That was really at the core of everything that she did.
How so?
She grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, going to church, and that was where she learned the phrase, “No one's promised tomorrow.” It really sat with her and motivated her path in terms of turning up the fullness of her life in the now. When she got to New York, she started going to many different churches. In conversations with Sylvia and other friends she started to learn about the saints, like Saint Barbara and Saint Lucy. And so in the different STAR houses, she’d light candles to the saints, which overlaps with Santeria and Yoruba traditions. And that was a way that people kept themselves safe. During the 1970s, she’d do seances to help people who wanted to stop using heroin or other substances. Part of her work was prayer work, and that carried her through the AIDS crisis.
Unfortunately, something that happens when a revolutionary figure becomes more widely known after their death is a flattening of their life and a defanging of their radical views. Lord knows they’ve tried doing it to Baldwin. I’m curious where you see Marsha in that sense. How intact is the memory of her radicality these days?
It's like she is a force that can’t be contained. People can certainly attempt to push [her] down, but that very active pushing down leads to a why? Or a what more? Or a what else? Marsha had a great capacity to bring all of herself into every given moment. One thing that I think a lot of people don’t know is she spent so much time in LA. She had this really big chapter over many years in Calabasas and also on Skid Row. It was her place of rest and relief. She also dreamed of being a movie star since she was a kid. So much of that is entangled with her being in a fugitive relationship to the police that is in a very concrete way trying to capture her. But to me, she continues to live such a full life. Sure, people can say whatever, but the real Marsha — the fullness of her — is readily available to understand and calibrate to.
I feel like we keep coming back to this theme of Marsha’s ongoing impact. Where do you see her legacy being embodied today?
To me, it’s in all of us. I feel pretty confident that because of people’s asking about Marsha, that inspired my looking and answering. It’s really we who have been bringing Marsha’s legacy forward. For example, there’s this organizer in Selma, Alabama named Quentin Bell, who works with the Knights and Orchids. Last year, I went down there and made a film about Quentin and the Knights and Orchids. Not just his, but the entire organization’s capacity to look at what isn’t there, be informed of what they want, and then grow it, is so a part of the ongoing life of Marsha P. Johnson. That’s something exciting people can learn through the book. This legacy of hers, it spans. It’s not just in New York, or on the coasts, it’s abundant and all over.
What do you think Marsha would make of our world today?
I think parts of it would make her laugh.
Which parts?
So much of it. I think that she had a strong desire to be famous. She talked about wanting to be like Madonna. She spoke about her with a passion. Madonna and Sylvester. In some ways, those were just people whose lives she had desired to be like. So I think she’d be really tickled about the fame, like the Google Doodle, or the celebrities referencing her during pride. And also, she’d be really thrilled about the people who are looking at what is and being like, “Well, we really need more. We need more housing. We need more healthcare. We need a greater sense of ease and also more safety — and safety from not just the interpersonal violence that’s on the streets, but these huge systems of violence.” That’s what she was really about.
You have this wonderful subheader, “the joy and the defiance.” Can you tell me about that language?
In joy lies your greatest clarity about how to navigate a big problem, how to offer a huge solution. In joy is a tremendous amount of power to support and show up for one another, and also to be fully alive. She knew she deserved to be fully alive at any given moment. And she lived in such defiance to the norms and forms. You can’t separate that from her beauty.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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