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Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson will be the first full-length biography of the queer icon ever to be published.
The artist Tourmaline, a lifelong scholar on the life of Marsha P. Johnson, is publishing a book on the queer historical icon.
Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson is the first full length biography penned about Johnson, who is most famous for her work in the queer liberation movement and presence at the Stonewall Uprising. Tourmaline sat down with them to speak about Johnson's impact and what we can expect from her biography.
“Marsha's been a guiding force of my life and work for so many years,” said Tourmaline. “The combination of years of learning from her and listening to her and to the people who knew her… sharing that with the world is the deepest honor.”
Johnson's impact on Tourmaline, both as a person and an artist, can already be deeply felt. She co-directed Happy Birthday Marsha, the 2017 short film, with Sasha Wortzel. The short film depicts a fictionalized version of Johnson and her role in the Stonewall Riots.
Tourmaline's strictly nonfiction work can already be found through Tourmaline's blog, "The Spirit Was...". This book is an opportunity for Tourmaline to continue sharing her collection of archival film, photography, and newspaper clippings documenting Johnson's life with the world.
On some of the details readers might be surprised by, Tourmaline said of Johnson, "She was a true cultural innovator on a massive scale. She found clarity from being in the midst of things that were unwanted and she immediately calibrated, tuned to what she wanted from a situation. Sometimes she would do that in the realm of organizing and activism, or sometimes she would do that on stage. That’s something I think the public doesn’t necessarily know — the extent of her output as a performer. She was doing two performances a day with the Angels of Light, [a group] that formed under The Cockettes. She was on stage all day every day for years.
Johnson's role in the Stonewall Uprising is also hard to overstate. Tourmaline explained, "So the truth is Marsha was one of the first, if not first person, to physically resist the police that night. Some say, 'Oh Marsha didn’t arrive at Stonewall until well after.' But what’s powerful is that so many moments throughout her life, she recalled the exact song that was playing at Stonewall when the police busted in: Marvin Gaye’s 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine.'"
She continued, "I use that detail as a jumping off point in the book to show how it wasn’t just anti-blackness and transphobia that saw Marsha not foregrounded in this story, but also neuro-normativity. As a neurodivergent person, Marsha would always talk about hearing 'I Hear It Through The Grapevine,' even while at times she’d say things in interviews like, 'It happened in August.'
Tourmaline also explained where the subtitle of "joy and defiance" came from. She expressed that, "In joy lies your greatest clarity about how to navigate a big problem, how to offer a huge solution. In joy is a tremendous amount of power to support and show up for one another, and also to be fully alive. She knew she deserved to be fully alive at any given moment. And she lived in such defiance to the norms and forms. You can’t separate that from her beauty."
Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson is set to be released by Tiny Reparations Books on May 20, 2025, and is available for preorder here.
