Gay History: Marsha P. Johnson

Marsha P. Johnson (1945-1992), who would cheekily tell people the "P" stood for "pay it no mind", was an outspoken transgender rights activist and is reported to be one of the central figures of the historic Stonewall uprising of 1969. Following the Stonewall uprising, Johnson joined the Gay Liberation Front and was active in the GLF Drag Queen Caucus. On the first anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, on June 28, 1970, Johnson marched in the first Gay Pride rally, then called the Christopher Street Liberation Day. One of Johnson's most notable direct actions occurred in August 1970, staging a sit-in protest at Weinstein Hall at New York University alongside fellow GLF members after administrators canceled a dance when they found out that it was sponsored by gay organizations. 

During a gay rights rally at New York City Hall in the early '70s, photographed by Diana Davies, a reporter asked Johnson why the group was demonstrating, Johnson shouted into the microphone, "Darling, I want my gay rights now!"

Along with fellow trans activist Sylvia Rivera, Johnson helped form Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a radical political organization that provided housing and other forms of support to homeless queer youth and sex workers in Manhattan. The two of them became a visible presence at gay liberation marches and other radical political actions. She was also a popular figure in New York City's gay and art scene, modeling for Andy Warhol, and performing onstage with the drag performance troupe Hot Peaches from 1972 through the ‘90s. Johnson was also an AIDS activist with AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP).

Johnson's body was found floating in the Hudson River in 1992. Initially and quickly ruled a suicide by the NYPD, controversy and protest followed, eventually leading to a re-opening of the case as a possible homicide.

( ~ Wikipedia)

Gay History: Audre Lorde

A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde (1934 - 1992) dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Lorde was born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents. She attended Catholic schools before graduating from Hunter High School and published her first poem in Seventeen magazine while still a student there. Of her poetic beginnings Lorde commented in Black Women Writers: “I used to speak in poetry. I would read poems, and I would memorize them. People would say, well what do you think, Audre. What happened to you yesterday? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing. In other words, I literally communicated through poetry. And when I couldn’t find the poems to express the things I was feeling, that’s what started me writing poetry, and that was when I was twelve or thirteen.”

Lorde earned her BA from Hunter College and MLS from Columbia University. She was a librarian in the New York public schools throughout the 1960s. She had two children with her husband, Edwin Rollins, a white, gay man, before they divorced in 1970. In 1972, Lorde met her long-time partner, Frances Clayton. She also began teaching as poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College. Her experiences with teaching and pedagogy—as well as her place as a Black, queer woman in white academia—went on to inform her life and work. Indeed, Lorde’s contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory intertwine her personal experiences with broader political aims. Lorde articulated early on the intersections of race, class, and gender in canonical essays such as “The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House.”

 “I have a duty,” Lorde once stated, “to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigating pain.”

( ~ poetryfoundation.org)

From the House of Yemanjá

by Audre Lorde

My mother had two faces and a frying pot   

where she cooked up her daughters

into girls

before she fixed our dinner.

My mother had two faces

and a broken pot

where she hid out a perfect daughter   

who was not me

I am the sun and moon and forever hungry   

for her eyes.

I bear two women upon my back   

one dark and rich and hidden

in the ivory hungers of the other   

mother

pale as a witch

yet steady and familiar

brings me bread and terror

in my sleep

her breasts are huge exciting anchors   

in the midnight storm.

All this has been

before

in my mother's bed

time has no sense

I have no brothers

and my sisters are cruel.

Mother I need

mother I need

mother I need your blackness now   

as the august earth needs rain.   

I am

the sun and moon and forever hungry   

the sharpened edge

where day and night shall meet

and not be

one.

Audre Lorde, “From the House of Yemanjá” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1997 by Audre Lorde. Reprinted with the permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., www.nortonpoets.com.

Source: The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997) 

Gay History: Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) was an activist and playwright best known for her groundbreaking play “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a struggling Black family on Chicago’s South Side. After the play’s release, Hansberry became the first Black playwright and youngest American to win a New York Critics’ Circle Award. “A Raisin in the Sun,” named after a line in Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem: A Dream Deferred,” opened at New York City’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre in March 1959, becoming the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. The iconic work was then made into a 1961 film starring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee.

Prior to “A Raisin in the Sun” fame, Hansberry — who never publicly acknowledged she was a lesbian — joined lesbian rights group Daughters of Bilitis and contributed letters about feminism and homophobia to its magazine, “The Ladder,” according to LGBTQ historian Eric Marcus, host of the “Making Gay History” podcast. Marcus notes that Hansberry didn’t officially come out until nearly a half-century after her death — when in 2014 her estate unsealed diaries and other writings in which she reveals her sexuality. Hansberry died in 1965, at just 34 years old, of pancreatic cancer.

( ~ nbcnews.com / Photo: David Attie / Getty Images)

Gay History: William Dorsey Swann

William Dorsey Swann (1860 – 1925) was an American LGBTQ activist in a time where leadership in the movement was uncommon. An African-American born into slavery, Swann was the first person in the United States to lead a queer resistance group and the first known person to self-identify as a "queen of drag".

During the 1880s and 1890s, Swann organized a series of drag balls in Washington, D.C. Most of the attendees of Swann's gatherings were men who were formerly enslaved who gathered to dance in their satin and silk dresses. This group was known as the "House of Swann". Swann participated in dances such as the cakewalk, a dance performed by enslaved people in America, mimicking the mannerisms of plantation owners. The cakewalk’s improvisational movements and subtle expressions of communication resemble voguing, the style later popularized in Harlem’s ball scene.

Swann was arrested in police raids numerous times, including the first documented case of an arrest for female impersonation in the United States, on April 12, 1888. This event was Swann's thirtieth birthday celebration. According to The Washington Post, he was "arrayed in a gorgeous dress of cream-colored satin". After the celebration was raided by police, Swann was "bursting with rage", as he stood up to one of the arresting officers and declared "you is no gentleman".

Swann's choice to resist that night rather than to submit passively to his arrest marks one of the earliest-known instances of resistance in the name of gay rights. The arrests made at Swann's parties were published in local newspapers, so townsfolk risked their reputation by attending. However, acts of public shaming like this one are the only reason we now know who Swann was.

In 1896, he was convicted of "keeping a disorderly house", a euphemism for running a brothel, and was sentenced to 10 months in jail. After his sentencing, he requested a pardon from President Grover Cleveland. This request was denied, but Swann was the first American on record who pursued legal and political action to defend the LGBTQ community's right to gather.

(~ Wikipedia)