5 hours ago
4
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a trailblazer of the transgender rights movement, longtime community organizer and veteran of the Stonewall riots, died on Monday, her representatives announced.
The acclaimed activist died at her home in Little Rock, Arkansas, surrounded by family, the House of gg (the final organization she founded and led) announced. She was 78, and the group’s statement did not give a cause of death.
Miss Major was one of the US’s most celebrated trans rights pioneers and elders, at the forefront of the fight for trans rights for more than five decades. She spent her final years providing a sanctuary for trans and gender-nonconforming people in her conservative home state, while continuing to travel the country to rally for trans rights and meet with young trans people and other LGBTQ+ organizers.
Miss Major, known by her first name, earned a reputation as an outspoken and fearless champion for the liberation of Black trans women, fighting for communities that have long suffered extreme discrimination and violence and have been neglected by the gay rights movement.
She was considered a mother to trans women across the country, some of them prominent community organizers themselves. She told the Guardian in a 2023 interview that she stopped counting after taking on 20 daughters.
Her mantra, “I’m still fucking here!”, captured the joy and humor she brought to her activism and became a rallying cry for the resiliency of Black trans people – a call to live long, full lives in a society that pushes to marginalize and erase the community.
Miss Major was born in Chicago. Her parents, a postal service administrator and beauty shop manager, took her to her first drag show but did not support her when she identified with the performers. Her family sent her to psychiatric institutions as a teenager to “get the gay outta me”, and her mother burned her dresses, she recounted in her 2023 book, Miss Major Speaks, a series of conversations with the writer, Toshio Meronek.
She went on to perform in Jewel Box Revue, a drag show in Chicago, helped by a mentor named Kitty who gave her a wig, did her makeup and taught her to embrace her identity.
Forced out of college in Minnesota for being trans, she ended up in New York, where she survived by doing sex work. Some of her early activism was rooted in the networks of sex workers who worked together to keep themselves safe from police and violent clients, she told the Guardian in 2023.
Miss Major recounted suffering repeated police violence, including on 28 June 1969, when the New York police department raided the Stonewall Inn in the West Village, the rare gay bar that she said did not shun trans people.
She and others fought back, and Miss Major recalled being knocked unconscious and jailed. “The cops beat on you till you drop. Everybody that stood up to them went through that. It wasn’t pretty. It was a riot. We were fighting for our lives. It was so sad,” she said in the 2023 interview.
The Stonewall protests launched Pride and were considered the birth of the contemporary gay rights movement, but the trans women of color involved in the demonstrations were cast aside by the mainstream activism that followed.
“We fought for no reason. It’s a shame the way it turned out. We started the riots and what did we get? Nothing. Nothing,” she said, recalling that gay and lesbian leaders were “ashamed to be seen with us”.
During a later stint in a New York prison, Miss Major became a mentee of Frank “Big Black” Smith, who had led a major prison uprising and taught her principles of organizing, and how “you can’t throw anybody under the bus”, a guidance that drove her later work, she recalled.
In the 1980s, Miss Major formed the Angels of Care, a group of trans women who served as caretakers for gay men dying in the Aids epidemic, with efforts in California and New York. In San Francisco, she became an accomplished community leader, driving the city’s first mobile needle exchange van and running a drop-in center for trans sex workers, despite pushback from its affiliated Aids non-profit.
Miss Major went on to lead the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), a group that fights the abuse of trans people of color in prison and provides support during re-entry. Janetta Johnson, one of her adopted daughters, now leads the organization, which today is called the Miss Major Alexander L Lee TGIJP Black Trans Cultural Center.
In recent years, Miss Major suffered repeated health challenges, yet she continued her work through the House of gg, which she also nicknamed Telling It Like It Fuckin’ Is (Tilifi). The organization brings trans leaders to her colorful Little Rock guest house, called the Oasis, to provide a refuge for rest and relaxation.
“I’ve gotta make joy here, because it doesn’t exist in the normal world,” Miss Major said during a 2023 interview at her home. “They want us to live in the 1950s. No. Get off our fucking backs and let us live … I know the world I would like to live in. It’s in my head, but I try my best to live it now.”
Miss Major is survived by Beck Witt, her longtime partner; her three sons, Asaiah, Christopher, and Jonathon; and her “many daughters”, House of gg said.
“She was a world builder, a visionary, and unwavering in her devotion to making freedom possible for Black, trans, formerly and currently incarcerated people as well as the larger trans and LGB community. Because of her, countless new possibilities have been made for all of us to thrive – today and for generations to come,” the organization said in a post on Monday. “While her physical presence has shifted, we have gained an immensely powerful ancestor and there is no doubt that she is and always will be with us – guiding, protecting and reminding us that she is ‘still fucking here!’”
