Introducing Marsha by Tourmaline
The June Audacious Book Club selection
In her 2018 film Happy Birthday, Marsha!, Tourmaline and her collaborator Sasha Wortzel offer a fictional account of how Black trans pioneer Marsha P. Johnson' spent the hours leading up to the 1969 Stonewall Riots. Marsha, played by Mya Taylor, invites friends to her birthday party, plans the celebration, and eventually makes her way over to the Stonewall Inn. Along the way, Marsha is harassed by security at the Stonewall and by police. That harassment rises to a crescendo when police try to remove Marsha from the bar and she fights back; that crescendo escalates into the Stonewall Riots.
Fiction, of course, sometimes takes liberties with history in order to tell a good story. In Tourmaline’s film, Marsha’s birthday and Stonewall occurred on the same day, but in fact, Stonewall took place on June 28, and Marsha’s birthday wasn’t until August 24. Tourmaline’s new biography Marsha—the first definitive biography of this Black trans activist and icon—offers a meaningful reason for that narrative choice: Marsha remembered it that way. According to an interview with Eric Marcus that Tourmaline cites, Marsha insisted that Stonewall and her birthday happened on the same night. The reason for this memory, Tourmaline says, is twofold: Marsha “thinks of Stonewall as a party, a birthday party, a celebration of life” and “conflates it with her own birthday because of its life-giving, raucous, celebratory energy.” Tourmaline also shares Marsha’s tendency to describe her mind to her friends as a computer that gets “tangled up” and to speak of her memories of June 28 as being “lost in the music.”
Other Stonewall historians have pointed out Marsha’s inability to speak “coherently” about the night as the reason for some of the nebulousness surrounding the history of Stonewall. But Tourmaline is not just a Stonewall historian. She is a historian of Marsha herself, and she observes something different in Marsha’s narrative. Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews, and the work of scholars such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Saidiya Hartman, Tourmaline reads Stonewall as a site of disability and madness and Marsha’s narrative—and indeed her life—as a kind of critical fabulation, a necessary reimagining of the often whitewashed historical record, by a Black trans woman who was a key instigator in a revolutionary moment that fueled the gay liberation movement.
If this argument were Tourmaline’s only contribution to the literature of Stonewall, it would be more than enough. But she has also written a book that deftly deconstructs the Marsha P. Johnson iconography that is too often flouted without context. By detailing Marsha’s childhood, her family life, her relationships, her foibles and talents, and her consistent acts of care for others, readers become acquainted with Marsha P. Johnson as a vulnerable, volatile, loving human being, which gives both her legacy and her death a deeper resonance. Marsha is a rigorous, meaningful book, especially in the world we live in now, and I’m looking forward to discussing it with all of you throughout the month of June. We’ll be talking with Tourmaline on June 24 at 8 p.m., and I hope many of you will join us.
I’m enjoying Tourmaline’s book. I also wanna pass along the information that the film you mentioned, Happy Birthday, Marsha, is on the Kanopy app (available through many libraries). Looking forward to the June 24 chat!
Beyond thrilled to be reading Tourmaline's MARSHA. Thank you for selecting it!