The Wide Umbrella of “Queen”

Emmeline Clein interviews Tourmaline about her new book “Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson.”

By Emmeline CleinJuly 10, 2025

• Biography & Autobiography

• Gender & Sexuality

WHETHER CO-FOUNDING the guerrilla activist group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), performing internationally with the Hot Peaches, providing care work for friends and comrades suffering during the AIDS epidemic, or hustling in Times Square, Marsha P. Johnson was always in flight, eternally performing and prophetically organizing. Thirty-three years after her death, she is finally receiving the definitive, defiant literary treatment her life and legacy have long deserved, in the form of Tourmaline’s Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, a book as chameleonic as its subject herself.

Less a traditional biography than a striking Polaroid of a movement in motion, Tourmaline’s roving literary lens captures Marsha’s multitudes in all their protean, mesmerizing glory. I was lucky enough to speak to the author just after the book’s publication in May, a conversation as kaleidoscopic as the volume that sparked it, which covers parties, protest, critical fabulation, madness, memory, and more.

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EMMELINE CLEIN: You’ve approached Marsha through so many media: film, archival assemblage, visual art, and now literature. Can you speak about why she lends herself to such a kaleidoscopic form of historicization?

TOURMALINE: Okay, I love this—you’re like, “I will not be asking you the same question that everyone else is.” The answer is: Because of the fullness of her life. Sylvia Rivera, her friend, talked about Marsha seeing the world through different eyes. It was a nonlinear way of being—she was so neurodivergent, she was a mad queen. Marsha was deeply in touch with spiritual realms, deeply in touch with the immaterial. To me, it was really important to reflect that fullness not just through the early 2010s Tumblr archival project but also in the biennial, and in the film Happy Birthday, Marsha! (where Sasha Wortzel and I tried to blend the archival with narrative). The book allowed me to go deeper in each part—Marsha really invites abundant exploration. She was someone who was hanging out with Andy Warhol at the same time that she was doing seances for people trying to kick heroin.

The book’s structure really reflects that. Each chapter is an exploration of a role Marsha played, by which I mean lived: hustler, writer, performer, activist, care worker, even mythic figure in death. There’s an element of performance to each role, as well as an element of genuine identity. She had a chaotic but graceful ability to, as you put it in the book, “vibe-shif[t] and shape-shif[t].” How did you decide to use those roles as the book’s structural spine?

A project lasting 20 years will have unique entry points. Back when I first moved to New York, when I was 19, it was about asking questions of everyone and befriending them. And then, doing teach-ins when I was at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and writing newsletters to incarcerated trans people. Every time I structure a film, a newsletter, a teach-in, a conversation in a particular way, I get something really different out of it. Which allowed me the insight to see that, rather than a straight-up biography, I wanted the book to have a focus point that allows for things to gather, allows for an underpinning vibe of care and care work throughout, along with the through line of performance.

Your mention of Sylvia Rivera really intrigues me, because there were moments when this book almost read like a joint biography of her and Marsha. Was that a formal choice intended to parallel Marsha’s priorities, her deep commitment to a communal orientation?

It was really important to show the constellation that Marsha was in. She didn’t just arrive at this fully formed, completely self-actualized version of herself. She was a butch queen coming from Elizabeth, New Jersey; she was a little sus about all the street queens hanging outside. They had to say, “Ooh no, you’re Marsha.” And then she realized, “Oh—I am Marsha.” It’s the power of friendship and relationship, reflecting each other’s beauty and care.

In the sixties, Sylvia and Marsha talked about the questions that they would ask each other in hotel rooms rented by the hour: When might we feel safe to go outside? What would it be like to know our beauty and not be harassed because of it? What would it be like to dream beyond these harsh conditions that we’re in? They asked those same exact questions over and over and over and over again. I do a lot of public speaking, and that’s a strategy I use in oration: I’m gonna hit you with it three times in a row. I really tried to do that in the book. Fred Moten talks about speculation as a way of deepening your practice. You’re asking the same question over and over again, but it’s not really the same question because you’re arriving at a deeper answer each time. So, the question of “what would it be like to move through the world in an even more beautiful way?” hits differently—or I hope feels different—at the end of the book from how it does at the beginning.

It definitely does, and I feel like that practice of speculation is related to the themes of birth and rebirth in this book. One of the many moments of rebirth we read about here is Stonewall. I loved how you wrote it—as a violent uprising, of course, but also as a simply fabulous party. The first brick was actually a shot glass? I gasped. You write about the way Marsha started hormones in the wake of the event, the way it led her to speculate on, perhaps, a new type of birth. And she, in some moments, misremembers the date as her birthday—which feels related to her identity as a “mad queen.” How did questions (and problems) of memory inform your approach to rendering her on the page?

I was talking to a couple of my friends about this last night. It is so beautiful that [Marsha was] like, “No, actually, it was my birthday.” It’s just a joyous way to move through the world, and it’s clearly also informed by trauma, informed by a life lived with limited access to mental health care. It’s not a binary; it’s a beautiful way to know memory as malleable. One of the most profound clips I’ve seen of Marsha is from an interview for a film called Saint Marsha. You can’t really find it anywhere, but the cinematographer shared it with me and Sasha when we were making Happy Birthday, Marsha! He told us we were about to watch her in a K-hole, talking about Stonewall. Whether or not she was in a K-hole, it was really clear that she was moving through memory. She says, “Stonewall? It was in the seventies—no, 1963, 1969, Marvin Gaye was playing ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine.’” She’s beaming, and then she says, “I got lost in the music and I’m still lost in the music.” It’s just so powerful to witness how she moves through time, and gathers these moments, all kind of unified by her birthday happening.

Which raises the question of what a birthday is, right? Is it when you were physically born, or can it be when you became yourself, or the next version of yourself?

That’s exactly it. Which is partly why there’s a level of, like, returning to the same words throughout the book. It’s meant to be akin to a chorus.

You provide an intellectual foundation for those eccentric explorations of memory through disability theory, in concert with Saidiya Hartman’s work about the necessity of imaginative forms of writing when it comes to historicizing groups whose archives have either been lost or actively destroyed. I was curious if you could talk about the interplay between those two?

When I was making Happy Birthday, Marsha!, I read “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman’s powerful essay about critical fabulation, about creating an archive when one has been destroyed. Sasha and I wanted to tell a story that was true, whether or not the archive or newspaper affirmed it. For the book, I wanted to highlight the importance of that approach, and at the same time, it was a biography—so it’s fact-based and fact-checked. There’s a level of tension there. I wanted to make sure that people knew that this is a very important way of navigating the world and reflecting back our lineage and our legacy’s value, even when the ephemera or the evidence has been misplaced.

In 2009, I was in the New York Public Library trying to find anything about Marsha. At that time, all her stuff lived in gay rights activist and journalist Arthur Bell’s box, and you wouldn’t find her name on it. I was reading his Village Voice articles, and there was mention of Sylvia, so I had the idea that maybe if I go into his box, I’ll find some stuff. I did—it goes back to the fact that we don’t have a consolidated archive.

You balanced the necessity of fabulation with fact-checking really effectively. Partly, that was through the way you created such a bedrock of New York City history, so we understand that these queer and Black communities have been here for centuries.

Yes, you know what she was entering into. That felt really important, for example, with the Times Square chapter. People don’t necessarily know how it was connected to the SoHo brothels. Not many people know there was a Tenderloin district in Manhattan. All of that really informed Marsha’s experience, but also her community’s experience.

You write about the different monikers people adopted to convey to their own community what their identity, which was often in flux, was at any given moment. You use the gorgeous phrase “the wide umbrella of ‘queen,’” and I thought “girlie” was wielded in a similarly expansive way. I’m curious what you think those words meant in Marsha’s life—and what you think about how fascist we can sometimes be about terminology these days?

I think that people are feeling the constriction of deep specificity and going far more broad in this moment. At one point, they were like, “We can’t say ‘miss thang’ anymore,” which I thought was so interesting. They thought it was derogatory. They were really in that laboratory with language. Way before I was making art formally, I was organizing, and all my words were so carefully chosen. I love how Marsha is like, “Yes, and now I’m just going to knock it over across the table and go with ‘girlie.’”

It’s both so specific and so deeply inclusive. And, honestly, reflective of the way you reveal how personality and rizz can inform how your gender is manifesting—“gender” as a far more expansive, spectrumy concept than we often allow it to be. If gender expands beyond existing categories, why would the words match the normative language standards? On that note, I wanted to ask you about including the STAR manifesto in full in this book.

That document was one of the first things that I found in that Arthur Bell box. It felt really important to foreground their own writing; how they were making wayward lives. Hartman talks about how these rented rooms are laboratories for experimenting in democracy. STAR House really felt like one of those labs. I wanted to bring a level of concreteness to a scene in which not everything ends up fully manifested. Sometimes a conversation is the most profound thing—a lot of times, for a community that’s not in an archive or not documented. Those immaterial conversations have profound effects. The way to know that we were here is to see the effects upon the world that are happening now.

But in rare moments, there is a document. There is a material, touchable, tangible thing. So, it felt really honest and important to illustrate not only that the laboratory was producing forms and norms that we get to revel in today but also that they were deep in study. Marsha was, in terms of access and gender-affirming care, reveling in how her new breasts were a “handful,” and you can hear the joy in her voice, the euphoria. Also, she was writing this important manifesto. It’s the range that was so important; what they were doing was right there alongside other formations.

On that note, I’d love to hear you speak about how your own very long and inspiring history of activism informs your approach to writing.

I wrote a little bit about myself because I wanted to show her legacy living and breathing. My rendezvous with Sheila Cunningham in Times Square is a further realization of the dream that Marsha was dreaming in those hourly hotels. We get to joyously walk in a parade that’s not even an LGBT parade, it’s a Black Pride parade, and then rendezvous in Times Square with a level of peace and freedom. Let’s connect the dots: this is a product of those hourly hotel dreamers. Every time I referenced or cited a moment in my life, it was an example of legacy. Inheritance in action.

Speaking of living legacy, I found your choice not to devote very many pages to the circumstances of her death moving and beautiful. Many writers would have sensationalized or true-crime-ified it a bit, because there are questions surrounding it—which should be acknowledged, of course. But I want to hear you talk about deciding not to center that.

It would have been counter to how Marsha understood life, because she was so keenly aware that there was nothing that anyone could do to end her life. So much more of her life was lived before she entered her body and so much more of her life is being experienced now that she has left her body. That moment wasn’t anything other than a transition. It wasn’t an ending, it wasn’t a period, it wasn’t even a comma. It was just going to the next scene. This book is about the whole aliveness of Marsha, and our awareness of it, whether it’s me and Sheila Cunningham rendezvousing in Times Square, or the many forms of activism that people are doing, or the powerful performances. Her life is palpable.

That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be talking about the harsh conditions that so many of us have to navigate, and live through, that cause people to die in their bodies. Marsha lived with a bullet in her back for 11 years, and that deeply impacted how she was able to maneuver through the world. Less than a month before she died, she wrote a song [that goes] “When I die, please don’t cry.” She’s saying: “I’m literally eternal.” There’s a powerful moment in an interview where she says, “If anyone should ever write my life story, I want to thank all those wonderful people on my way up the hill from Elizabeth, New Jersey.” It felt really important to listen to Marsha. What were her intentions for her life story? And partly they were life eternal, and partly they were don’t forget about my Black family in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

You really capture that expansive, ricocheting energy—her conviction that a revolution is a party, and so is a funeral, and both events are rooted in layers of community. I loved your writing about her childhood, the way her upbringing in Elizabeth was part of her political awakening, with her proximity to a barbershop that also educated people on voting (to name just one example). Your writing about the disturbing, sordid, and violent stuff happening at Bellevue Hospital was also fascinating to me, because I’ve long been interested in the terrifying history of that establishment. I’m curious what your research process was like, and what role that hospital played in Marsha’s psyche.

Around the time of the occupation of NYU, Sylvia and Arthur Bell went to Bellevue to interview this Black trans person, Chris, who was being held, who was experiencing a tremendous amount of transphobia. Chris, today, would maybe be called a trans woman or a trans nonbinary person. One of STAR’s demands when they occupied NYU was against forcible control of gender nonconforming people and gay people [by psychiatric institutions like Bellevue], and Marsha was really adamant about that, and she also went to receive care there.

So I wanted to say yes, people are going there for care that they expressly desire, and it’s so important to understand how psychiatric institutions have historically been and continue to be generally entangled in the prison-industrial complex. Marsha, Sylvia, and STAR were organizing against that. More than occasionally, Marsha went herself to get care there. That tension highlights questions like: What happens when we defund spaces that are punitive psychiatric facilities? What happens when care can happen in community? What happens when you’re not at risk of being locked up because you’re trans when you’re going in for an asthma attack? That was Chris’s story. It was important to highlight the ways that Bellevue was really an important part of the quote, unquote “gay liberation movement” that Sylvia and Marsha were part of; and also, in an intimate, personal way, that Marsha was held there; and also, in an intimate, personal way, that Marsha decided, “I’m going to go to Bellevue because I’m having a breakdown and I actually need care.”

Right—it’s the layers of agency that are always already compromised in the world we live in. You might need to take care to protect yourself against something that is designed to hurt you, in order to survive certain circumstances. Speaking of the “quote, unquote ‘gay liberation movement,’” and to bring us to the present moment: There’s a scene in your book at the Washington Square Park rally when a transphobic lesbian is very cruel to Sylvia, which brought to mind the very dark TERFification of some of our feminisms today. I’m curious to hear you talk about the resonances there.

I remember going to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in the early 2000s with my friend AJ. It was really funny; they literally thought I was there to fix their air-conditioning. It was so wild. That’s also where the tape of that Pride moment lives, and Sylvia’s name wasn’t on it. Sylvia’s speaking in a real way about the divisions in the movement, and she’s really pained by them; yet she’s still trying to transmute a wound into a source of healing. Then she goes home and tries to commit suicide, and something in Marsha’s head told her to rush home, break down the door, and take Sylvia to Bellevue.

When I was originally working with this source material, it was really important to me to show that these residues of TERFdom actually haven’t ended, and they do have a real impact on our capacity to show up in the world. That kind of oppression doesn’t just affect our material conditions—it also affects how we feel about ourselves, and our desire to stay in our bodies. We’re seeing a similar level of oppressive tactics happening now. It’s the Supreme Court in the UK. It’s the US too—hundreds of bills are being brought about to target trans women.

It’s very important to show that as much as the landscapes are similar, Marsha was navigating them knowing that these were changeable conditions. Yes, things are really harsh and challenging. And—we get to dream beyond them. The thing we want is possible, and if we keep moving in its direction, we are going to end up with a more fully realized landscape that reflects our beauty, where it feels safer to move around—and then we’ll have an entirely new set of things that we want to change. It’s never-ending. That was a theme of the book: something’s always happening just offstage.

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Tourmaline is an award-winning artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist whose work is dedicated to Black trans joy and freedom. She is a TIME 100 Most Influential People awardee and a Guggenheim Fellow. She has frequently appeared on ABC News, as well as in The New York Times and Vogue. Her art is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate, and the Getty Museum. She created the critically acclaimed film Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2018), and she has directed Pride campaigns for Dove, Marc Jacobs, and Reebok. She previously worked with Queers for Economic Justice and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. She lives in Miami.

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Featured image: Photo of Tourmaline by Sam Gregg.