Back in the early '90s, my partner and I ran into Marsha P Johnson a handful of times at the LGBT community center on 13th Street in Greenwich Village. I guess she probably showed up to attend Act Up committee meetings or other community organizing events.
I didn't know who she was, but my husband Lenny grabbed my arm and hissed into my ear, "That's Marsha! She was at Stonewall!"
Just a little more than 20 years on, it wasn't so rare to run into people in the Village who said they'd been at Stonewall during the riots. But Lenny seemed particularly excited about seeing Marsha, and he filled me in on her critical role the night the cops showed up to take Stonewall patrons to jail.
Marsha called herself "gay" and a "queen" (short for street queen) in 1969 and up to the time I saw her holding court at the Center.
Vocabularies have changed a lot, and people say that by the time she died not long after Lenny pointed her out to me, she was using "transgender" to describe herself.
Marsha represented, vocabulary changes aside, a pole of tension in LGBTQ organizing and activism. She represented the more radically different, the loud, gender-rebel, flashy street queens who presented a visible challenge to societal demands. She made cis/straight people uncomfortable, and she made certain gay activists uncomfortable — the sort of gay activist appealing to conformity for acceptance, the kind who argued implicitly, "We're almost exactly just like everyone else, except for the sex of our partner."
This argument leaves gender-variant people out in the cold, and Marsha was not having it.
She made herself a royal pain in the ass, and she insisted on queer inclusivity. In the 30 years since I used to glimpse her around the Village, we still see her struggle playing out.
Queer people (members of gender and sexual minorities) still come in all sorts of varieties. Public opposition to equality still focuses on the most visible of us, and some queer people still believe visibility is the reason we lack progress. Marsha thought those queer people were wrong and I think they're wrong today.
As Owen Jones, a gay man and Guardian columnist a full generation younger than me, has observed, opposition to transgender and gay people is ultimately rooted in societal enforcement of strict gender roles and rules.
That's a common cause all LGBTQ people share, and we forget it to our common peril.
In Marsha's day, the public saw little if any difference between street queens and fairly heteronormative gay men. Today, those most fiercely opposed to LGBTQ equality see little difference between trans people and gay people.
We LGBTQ people see vast differences, because those differences define who we are to ourselves.
But we should always keep in mind that the common cause we share is too important to neglect.
