Stuck in Stonewall

In the nineteen-sixties, New York City was rife with laws that criminalized gay life. Members of the same sex were banned from dancing with one another. Bars were not permitted to serve gay people alcoholic beverages. If people wore fewer than three items of clothing of their supposed gender, they were subject to arrest and incarceration on charges of “sexual deviancy.” The enforcement of these laws, along with the N.Y.P.D.’s routine harassment, made being gay precarious at best and deadly at worst.

At the Cooper Union, last Saturday, the activist Jay Toole spoke to a full auditorium about these laws and their impact on gay life. Toole—who uses the gender pronouns he, she, and they—founded, in 2002, Queers for Economic Justice, a group that led the fight for policies in New York that allow same-gender couples to stay together in homeless shelters and transgender and gender-nonconforming people to choose whether to reside in men’s or women’s shelters. Toole was at the Stonewall Inn that eponymous night in 1969. “But back then every night was Stonewall,” Toole once said to me. “That was our life.”

Toole was onstage introducing a preview of the forthcoming short film “Happy Birthday, Marsha!” and a lecture by the film’s directors, Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel. The film is a lush and speculative portrait of Marsha P. Johnson, a black trans woman and New York City activist who was at the forefront of gay liberation, economic and racial justice, and AIDS activism for more than thirty years. The film reimagines moments between Johnson and her close friends in the day leading up to the Stonewall riots. Those friends include Sylvia Rivera, the trans Latina activist with whom Johnson co-founded the organization STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries). Johnson, Rivera, and their comrades kept a home on East Second Street, called the STAR House, which was a safe haven for homeless sex workers and runaways. They coördinated protests demanding better treatment of and social services for trans people, including a five-day occupation of N.Y.U.’s Weinstein Hall, in 1970.

Before making “Happy Birthday, Marsha!” Gossett worked as an organizer at Queers for Economic Justice and as the membership director at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, an organization that provides legal aid to low-income and incarcerated queer and trans people. Wortzel currently works as an arts educator at the Whitney Museum of Art. Gossett began researching the work of Johnson and Rivera in 2005, looking through early gay-liberation ephemera and long-forgotten footage, and locating former friends of the activists. Gossett pieced together a story, about their role in the riots and STAR’s impact on the gay-liberation movement, that mainstream gay histories had not accounted for. Together, Gossett and Wortzel decided that this history needed to be animated, not just archived.

In June, the month of the Stonewall riots, and in the same neighborhoods where Johnson and Rivera lived and worked, Gossett, Wortzel, and a cast and crew of friends and supporters filmed “Happy Birthday, Marsha!” Trans women played every principal role: Mya Taylor as Johnson, Eve Lindley as Rivera, Cherno Biko as their friend Andorra, Rios O’Leary-Tagiuri as their friend Bambi. Queer and trans activists and artists—some teen-agers, others who came of age with Johnson and Rivera—volunteered as extras, costume designers, makeup artists, and choreographers. I played a character named Junior, a young butch hustler based on Toole.

We filmed around Washington Square, where Johnson, Rivera, and their peers held protests, partied, and worked the streets. I drove a blue convertible down Gay Street in the middle of the night, picking up Marsha P. Johnson—now Mya Taylor, in a red dress and flower tiara—to take her to a party at our reimagined Stonewall, which the crew constructed in the back of an East Williamsburg dive bar. The crew built Marsha P. Johnson a pink apartment with a claw-foot tub in a loft on the Bowery, next door to the Bowery Mission.

The last day of shooting was a highly orchestrated crowd scene involving more than fifty extras. In an industrial Williamsburg garage, around the corner from the set, the entire cast sifted through racks of nineteen-seventies dresses, jumpers, and suits. For some of the young actors, who were scouted through organizations like FIERCE and the Audre Lorde Project, this was the first time they’d gotten the chance to try on a dress or a skirt they liked outside the gaze of a parent. After the shoot inside our Stonewall—which was flooded with pink and blue light—many in the cast changed back into clothing they could wear on the subway, or walking down the street, without feeling unsafe. Though anti-cross-dressing laws were technically taken off the books in the seventies, harassment and police profiling of gender-nonconforming people—particularly people of color—are still routine in New York City.

Movies often take history as their subject in order to prove the trajectory of progress. Big-budget Hollywood films about gay history—“Milk,” for example, or September’s “Stonewall”—are no exception. We’re supposed to see how bad things were and how far we’ve come. Laws have been overturned, legislation has been passed, and people who were once outsiders have been granted citizenship. But, while a reality for some, progress in queer life is a story for many others.

Marsha P. Johnson died in 1992, her body found in the Hudson River next to the piers where she had lived, worked, and socialized for three decades. Though the police declared her death a suicide, her close friends swore it was a homicide following an assault she had fled earlier that evening. A few years before her death, her husband, a black man, was murdered by an off-duty N.Y.P.D. officer, according to Johnson and Rivera.

Twenty-three trans-feminine people have been murdered this year in the United States, including Mya Hall, who was killed in a security breach in Maryland. Of the twenty-three murdered, twenty were trans women of color. The majority of these women died under circumstances that mirrored the alleged murder of Johnson: in city streets, doing sex work for survival, at the hands of an attacker who would never be known or apprehended. Most of these women, like Johnson, were incorrectly gendered and misnamed by the law-enforcement agents tasked with solving their murders.

Halfway through filming, the writer Diana Tourjee called Gossett and Wortzel and told them that she had discovered a VHS tape, from 1991, of Johnson talking and dancing in an East Village basement, just a year before her death. Wearing a handmade mirror and a glass-bead crown, Johnson cycles between song, laughter, and mourning—of her husband’s murder, her own discrimination within mainstream gay organizations, and the conditions that did not change after Stonewall. Gossett and Wortzel have woven this footage throughout the film, so that Johnson herself appears between the dream-like reënactments. “1967, 1969,” Johnson says in one clip. “1968. I’m still stuck in the Stonewall in 1968. I never left the Stonewall.”

Onstage Saturday night at Cooper Union, after sharing the film’s trailer, Gossett asked, “How do you tell the stories of people navigating enormous amounts of violence without simply reducing them to that violence?” This was a central question of “Happy Birthday, Marsha!” as a film and a historical approach. The violence depicted in the film—the circumstances against which its protagonists lived and worked—is ongoing. People continue to find ways of living despite that violence.


Homeless in New York: The Other Millennials

They’re recognizable by their overstuffed backpacks, dogs, and cardboard panhandling signs. They’ve been given many labels: gutter punks, crusties, street kids; when the weather grows cold, many will hitchhike or “hop freight” to warmer cities in the South or out West.