The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson

In a new Netflix documentary, Marsha P Johnson’s life begins with her death.

A drag queen, a prominent LGBT activist and a beloved member of her community, Johnson is celebrated in Greenwich Village at a time when transgender bodies, unprotected by police, would regularly wash up on the street.

Johnson is found floating in the Hudson River and the mystery of her death endures to this day.

Some blame the mafia, others cry suicide but many more suspect something a little more commonplace. The harassment, abuse and eventual murder of cross-dressers and transgender women at the hands of johns, pimps and passing male strangers.

The year is 1992 but it could very well be 2013 or today.

Twenty-one-year-old Islan Nettles has been beaten to death by a man who flirted with her, realised she was born male and used his fists in a warped reclamation of toxic masculinity, punching her to a pulp in public amidst hurled slurs.

Their stories are brought to the fore through Victoria Cruz.

A Puerto Rican transgender woman who is one of three foregrounded in director David France’s documentary.

Zooming in on Johnson and transgender activist Sylvia Rivera, France witnesses Cruz launching her own investigation into Johnson’s cold case while weaving in the rise of the LGBT movement from the Stonewall riots to the present day.

Dogged in her pursuit of justice for Johnson, Cruz is a living activist celebrated alongside Rivera whose spirited speech about the sidelining of transgender people and their issues within the LGBT movement is incorporated in archival footage.

Grainy, black and white video that catapults viewers to a 1973 Christopher Street liberation rally where a young Rivera, one of Johnson’s best friends, is booed off stage after highlighting the LGBT movement’s mistreatment of the transgender community, many of whom fought and continue to fight for gay rights.

Her work as a transgender activist is a thing of legend and Johnson, as beloved and famous as she continues to be, joins grisly company.

The deceased cross-dressing and transgender women whose murders go unsolved due to a seeming lack of interest from the police coupled with society’s inability to see trans people as legitimate human beings.

Cruz hears these women crying out from their graves and so she revisits Johnson’s case before retiring from the Anti-Violence Project where she has dedicated her life to helping LGBT rape and assault survivors.

In the documentary alongside snippets of their own, Cruz is their voice.

A trans woman of colour much like filmmaker Reina Gossett who has accused France of appropriating her work and effectively silencing, or at the very least talking over, trans women of colour.

Alleging that France was inspired to make his documentary after viewing an Arcus Foundation grant application video by Gossett and Sasha Wortzel vying to make one of their own, Gossett claims the director stole her contacts as well as her work on ‘STAR’.

“He told the people who worked there — I sh*t you not — that he should be the one to do this film,” writes Gossett in a statement shared on Instagram. “This kind of extraction/excavation of black life, disabled life, poor life, trans life is so old and so deeply connected to the violence Marsha had to deal with throughout her life. I feel so much rage and grief over all of this.”

France, a white cisgender gay man, vehemently denies the claims even while Kamran Shahraray, an archival assistant for his film, has come forward stating Gossett’s work was on hard drives and other materials used during production.

While the dispute continues, in an essay for Teen Vogue (11 October), Gossett says:

“As France’s documentary starts to make its way to large audiences, I can’t stop thinking about the voices that have been pushed aside in the process. Too often, people with resources who already have a platform become the ones to tell the stories of those at the margins rather than people who themselves belong to these communities. It is more important now more than ever for trans and gender non-conforming people to be the architects of our own narratives. While trans visibility is at an all-time high, with trans people increasingly represented in popular culture, violence against us has also never been higher.”

Gossett’s crowdfunded narrative film ‘Happy Birthday, Marsha!’ will premiere in 2018.

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