No Pride Without Justice
The Legacy of Marsha P. Johnson
Pride on the Page | Week One
“How many years has it taken people to realize that we are all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race?”
— Marsha P. Johnson
Defenders,
Welcome back. Whether this is your first time here or you've been following along for a while, I’m grateful you’ve found your way. Every one of us is needed in this fight—and if no one has told you yet today: you are important, now and always.
June has arrived—and so begins Pride on the Page.
Here at Lady LiberTea, we believe that resistance without remembrance is repetition waiting to happen. While we will continue our focus on Justice—holding representatives of the people and the powerful accountable—we cannot chart a course forward if we have no understanding of where we’ve come from. We must know where we’ve been.
And so, for the month of Pride, we turn our full attention to the warriors, artists, and truth-speakers who came before us—the ones they tried to silence.
What to expect this month:
🗓 Daily Notes responding to reflection prompts by
📜 Three weekly long-form essays honoring LGBTQ+ heroes—not only to remember them, but to ask: What do they demand of us now?
To kick off our long-form posts, we begin Pride with a towering figure of resistance—someone who stood at the intersection of race, gender, and class, and dared to defy every imposed narrative. Her very existence—her daily act of living—was a form of rebellion against the systems that sought to define and diminish her. With each act of defiance, she rejected the narrow roles society tried to force upon her, refusing to become just another nameless, forgotten voice.
Today, we honor a name they tried to bury, but which history—and this author—refuse to forget.
We begin with Marsha P. Johnson.
🌈 Living In Rebellion
Today, Pride is often associated with parades and rainbows, drag queens and glitter. For many straight, liberal-minded college students—and the thousands of corporations eager to sell to them—Pride has become a rainbow-washed marketing tool. Performative justice with the thinnest veneer of solidarity.
But Pride began in fire.
Its origins are rooted in protest and rebellion—led not by the powerful or the palatable, but by the marginalized who had had enough. And through that lens, Marsha was one of its first generals.
To understand her legacy, we must start in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
The Stonewall Inn, a small, mafia-owned gay bar on Christopher Street, was one of the few places at the time where LGBTQ+ people could gather semi-openly. Even still, it was frequently targeted by the police. Raids were routine, humiliating, and violent. Patrons were arrested, publicly outed, or physically assaulted—all for the “crime” of existing in public while queer or gender non-conforming.
But that night, something changed.
When the NYPD once again stormed the Stonewall, the crowd—already fed up with years of harassment—fought back. Tensions boiled over into a spontaneous uprising. People resisted arrest. Threw bottles, bricks, and debris. Chanted. Screamed. Took to the streets.
It wasn’t just a bar fight. It was the spark of a movement.
The riots—led largely by trans people, drag queens, lesbians, and queer youth of color—lasted for six days. They transformed mourning into militancy. The following year, on the anniversary of the uprising, activists organized the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, widely regarded as the first Pride.
And Marsha P. Johnson was there—early, visible, bold.
While it remains debated whether she threw the first brick, what’s beyond dispute is that she showed up in the chaos and stood among those refusing to be silenced. Her presence helped turn resistance into revolution.
She was no sanitized symbol made for textbooks. She was human.
A Black trans drag queen.
Unhoused for much of her life.
A sex worker, performer, protester.
A Christian who prayed openly and marched loudly.
A mother to the abandoned, the outcast, the rejected—because she herself knew that exile all too well.
In 1970, alongside her dear friend and fellow activist Sylvia Rivera, Marsha co-founded STAR—Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.
STAR was more than a collective. It was an act of radical love.
They housed queer youth in a building they paid for themselves. They fed and clothed those cast out by the very families meant to protect them. They demanded space in a world that offered none. They became the safety net the state refused to be.
And here’s where history still echoes:
Today, LGBTQ+ youth make up nearly 40% of the under-18 homeless population in the United States.
Let that sink in.
Forty percent.
Thrown out of their homes—not for what they did, but for who they are.
For daring to live authentically, they were deemed unworthy of affection.
Unworthy of shelter.
Unworthy of survival.
What STAR built was revolutionary in 1970.
It remains revolutionary today.
As the AIDS epidemic ravaged New York City in the 1980s and early '90s, Marsha P. Johnson once again stepped into the breach. The virus was devastating queer and trans communities, particularly Black and brown people, sex workers, and the unhoused—those already pushed to the margins. And once again, the government looked away.
Marsha refused to let them.
In 1987, she joined ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a direct-action group demanding urgent government response to the crisis. She marched, protested, and organized vigils for those lost to AIDS, refusing to let their deaths go unnoticed. Her activism was not abstract—it was personal. In 1990, Marsha herself was diagnosed as HIV-positive .
Even as her own health declined, she continued to fight. She wore her ACT UP “Silence = Death” button during performances with the drag troupe Hot Peaches, using her art to amplify the call for justice .
Marsha’s AIDS activism wasn’t just about policy—it was about people. She brought food, comfort, and dignity to those abandoned by their families and ignored by the state. She showed up, again and again, for those the world had left behind.
⚖️ Justice Delayed, Justice Denied
Marsha died in July of 1992. Her body was found floating in the Hudson River, just days after the New York City Pride March—a march she helped make possible.
Police quickly ruled her death a suicide.
But the facts refused to cooperate.
The autopsy revealed:
Blunt force trauma to the head
Defensive wounds on her body
No signs consistent with drowning or self-harm
Multiple witnesses reported seeing her harassed in the days before her death. One individual later claimed to have seen her attacked and thrown into the river.
Still, the NYPD closed the case.
Just another dead Black trans sex worker. Not worth the trouble.
It wasn’t until 2012—twenty years later—that public pressure and the documentary Pay It No Mind forced authorities to reopen the case as “suspicious.”
To this day, there have been:
No suspects
No trial
No justice
🔥 The State Tried to Silence Her — and That’s the Point
Let’s be plain: the state did not fail Marsha.
It targeted her.
Her life was an act of defiance.
A mother to the motherless.
A sex worker and a believer.
A Christian trans woman who knelt in prayer even as she marched in protest.
She shattered every label they tried to impose—and they hated her for it.
They tried to erase her while she lived.
They tried to bury her when she died.
But still, she speaks.
Marsha’s story is not rare—it is heartbreakingly familiar. The indifference. The violence. The refusal to investigate. This is the justice our LGBTQ+ siblings have been taught to expect.
And that’s exactly why her legacy matters now.
Because in America, justice is too often rationed by how well you conform to comfort.
And so we return to a truth worth repeating:
“We are all of us endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable Rights—among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
— From the Declaration of Continued American Ideals, Lady LiberTea
In a nation that fails to honor these promises—not just for the LGBTQ+ community, but for anyone who dares step outside the lines—the rights of all are at risk.
Marsha’s story isn’t just LGBTQ+ history.
It’s American history.
And it’s a warning.
🕯 Final Words
We begin Pride on the Page with Marsha—not because her story is easy, but because it is the all-too-common reality of the marginalized.
Justice in America should not be a privilege reserved for the wealthy—or the “acceptable.”
It should be the right of all.
Marsha did not ask to be a hero. And I doubt she would have called herself one.
She simply lived as best she could.
She helped where she could.
And in doing so, she became one.
More than 30 years after Emmett Till’s murder, another Black body was pulled from the water.
And again, justice was denied.
“I wanted the world to see what they did to my boy.”
— Mamie Till-Mobley, on her decision to hold an open-casket funeral for her son
Emmett’s body was displayed so the world could not look away.
Marsha’s story, too, must be told with eyes wide open.
She was not merely a victim of her time.
She was a product of a system that still persists.
And we owe her more than remembrance.
We owe her action.
May her name be a battle cry.
May her story be a shield.
And may her fight light the path for all of us who refuse to be erased.
Until our next bold move,
— Lady LiberTea
🛠 Call to Action: From Remembrance to Resolve
Marsha P. Johnson did not get justice. But we are not powerless. Her story can be more than a memory—it can be a mandate. If you have read this far, take some time to look at the places below and see how you can use your voice, to get in the fight.
If her death still matters, if her life still teaches, then we owe her more than words. We owe her action.
📞 Demand the Case Be Re-Opened and Fully Investigated
Despite the NYPD labeling her death "suspicious" in 2012, the case remains unsolved.
➡️ Contact the NYPD Cold Case Squad:
Phone: (646) 610-6910
Email: coldcase@nypd.org
Let them know the world is still watching—and waiting.
📝 Contact the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office
Marsha's death occurred in Manhattan. Pressure can push prosecutors to prioritize long-neglected cases.
➡️ DA Alvin Bragg’s Office:
Phone: (212) 335-9000
Email: info@manhattanda.org
Tell them Marsha’s legacy demands accountability.
🎗 Support the Ongoing Work of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute
This organization continues her fight for Black trans lives, and works to dismantle systems of oppression and violence.
➡️ marshap.org
You can donate, volunteer, or amplify their work on social media.
📚 Educate Others
Share Marsha’s story. Speak her name. Challenge the silence.
Use the hashtag #JusticeForMarsha and tag your local officials.
Let them know history is not finished with her—and neither are we.
@Lady Libertea,
I want to thank you—not just for writing this, but for insisting that truth has a body. That injustice, when unacknowledged, does not disappear but continues to rot the structures from within.
Reading your account of Marsha P. Johnson’s life and death stunned me—not because I don’t know discrimination. I grew up in Germany. I know institutionalized exclusion, its bureaucratic silence, its clever disguises. I’ve studied the mechanics of “othering,” felt their breath on my neck.
What stunned me was the suicide claim.
Blunt force trauma to the head. Defensive wounds. Witness reports of harassment. And still—declared a suicide? Case closed?
Even in the 1970s, as flawed and patriarchal as German systems were (and still are), such a death—under these conditions—would not have been dismissed so quickly. The forensics alone would have triggered an investigation. A coroner's report with contradictions? That alone would have reopened proceedings. And yet, in New York City, her life and death were treated as disposable.
It was a systemic refusal to see her life as worth protecting.
It was a strategic decision to avoid accountability.
And it was a legal system calibrated to ignore the deaths of those it had already pushed to the margins.
What’s unbearable is not just the violence. It’s the fact that institutions closed ranks to uphold it. They didn’t fail her. They succeeded in doing what they were designed to do: to protect power and erase resistance.
I’m sitting here in Germany, aware that this story likely never made it across the ocean. That I, like many others here, never heard her name until now. That absence isn’t accidental either. It is part of the same system that buried her.
Thank you for refusing to let that burial hold. For honoring her not as a tragic figure, but as a revolutionary force.
I carry this with me now—not as a story from another place, but as a mirror. A warning. And a call.
—Jay
for #PrideOnThePage