Marsha P. Johnson

Marsha P. Johnson was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1945, one of seven children of a General Motors assembly-line worker and a housekeeper. She began wearing dresses at five and stopped after being harassed and assaulted. After finishing high school in 1963 she moved to New York with fifteen dollars, and soon found the drag and street world of Greenwich Village. The "P", she liked to tell judges and reporters, stood for "Pay it no mind".

She was often homeless and often arrested, and supported herself through sex work, which she was frank about. She was a familiar presence at the Stonewall Inn at the time of the June 1969 police raid that sparked the riots, although by her own account she arrived after the fighting had begun, and later stories embellished her role. What is certain is that she was in the thick of the nights that followed and the activism they produced.

In 1970 she and Sylvia Rivera founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, and STAR House, a run-down building where they paid the rent for homeless trans and gay teenagers with what they earned on the street. It lasted only a couple of years. The mainstream gay movement of the time was embarrassed by them; in 1973 Rivera was booed off the stage at a Pride rally.

Johnson performed with the drag troupe Hot Peaches, was photographed by Andy Warhol, and was an early AIDS activist. Her body was found in the Hudson River in July 1992. Police called it suicide; friends did not believe it, and the case was reopened in 2012.