Lately, I have been reading Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, a 1972 anthology of texts from the american Gay Liberation Front that I swapped with a pal for my copy of Come Together: The Years of Gay Liberation, 1970-1973, which is an anthology of texts from the u.k. branch.[1] It’s an interesting volume you could say a lot about, and that I might talk more about later.
One thing that struck me was an article entitled ‘Rapping with a Street Transvestite Revolutionary: An Interview with Marcia Johnson’. That name, and even that title, is so obviously familiar, and I realised that actually, I have read it before. It appears in the short collection of texts from Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries published more recently by Untorelli Press. There, however, the article is titled ‘an interview with Marsha Johnson’, and all references in the text to ‘Marcia’ have been amended to ‘Marsha’.
I don’t know if Marcia is another name Marsha used, or if the original interviewer, Allen Young, simply took Johnson’s name down wrong. But some possibilities may be elucidated by Marcia’s answer to the very first question Young asks;
You were starting to tell me a few minutes ago that a group of STAR people got busted. What was that all about?
Well, we wrote an article for Arthur Bell, of the Village Voice, about STAR, and we told him that we were all “girlies” and we’re working up on the 42nd Street area. And we all gave our names – Bambi, Andorra, Marcia, and Sylvia. And we all went out to hustle, you know, about a few days after the article came out in the Village Voice, and you see we get busted one after another, in a matter of a couple of weeks. I don’t know whether it was the article, or whether we just got busted because it was hot.
It is at least worth contemplating that the switch from Marcia to Marsha, the name she is more commonly known by, was one attempt to avoid the kind of circuit of visibility and violence this response describes.
I have felt for a while now that so much talk about what ‘the LGBT+ community’ owes to trans women, sometimes specified as trans women of colour and sometimes as Black trans women - the most obvious form of which is the one in which the LGBT+ movement begins at Stonewall, which was begun by Marsha Johnson - ends up reproducing the same circuits of visibility and violence that constitute transmisogyny and transmisogynoir. This is only reinforced by the fact that it seems that the Untorelli Press collection of STAR texts is the product of uncredited (put more bluntly, stolen) labour from Tourmaline, a Black trans filmmaker and artist who unearthed the texts at the New York Public Library - and where she was publicly accosted and surveilled in the process of that work.
At the same time, there would be a version of that critique that deflected a necessary orientation to the work of Black trans women, an orientation of support both materially and intellectually. There are still important lessons to learn from the legacy of STAR and other such organisations. I am still working out what that critical orientation might look like for me, as a white trans woman.
This week I have also been re-reading Lenin’s ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: an infantile disorder, where he writes;
the 'left' Communists have a great deal of praise for us Bolsheviks. One sometimes feels like telling them to praise us less and try to understand the tactics of the Bolsheviks more, to familiarise themselves with them more![2]
Perhaps the space between Marsha and Marcia is one such tactic we should be more familiar with.
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[1] I wrote a (slightly long) review of Come Together, mostly focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the u.k. GLF, here, if anybody is interested: https://medium.com/@ignatios/review-come-together-the-years-of-gay-liberation-1970-1973-6d7e538a9a3b
[2] Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, Bookmarks 1993 edition, p. 69. Cf. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch07.htm