Saint Marsha P Johnson and the birth of a religion

I realised quite early, as a child, that religion was all nonsense. It’s one of the benefits of being brought up with Catholicism – that you get a thorough grounding in morality while also understanding that all the incense and chanting is covering an empty fraud at religion’s heart. Since that time I’ve been fascinated by the creation of myths, legends and religions. Where did these stories come from? How do foundational myths change over time? How do individuals become main characters in the stories? How much gets changed in the retelling? How can people be so gullible? How much of what gets retold is believed by the re-teller and how much is cynically changed to manipulate and mislead? How much of what gets re-told is about the age it is re-told in and not about the characters or events which it features? Why do supposedly intelligent people believe Bronze Age myths as if they are supernatural?

It’s fascinating. What I didn’t realise as a child is that I’d be able to watch a modern-day religion evolve, and create its own myths, today.

A modern religion-in-the-making is gender identity theology and one of its religious myths-in-the-making is the lionising of a character called Marsha P Johnson. Try reading the accounts of ‘her’ life and works and you will be convinced that ‘she’ was one of the black trans women of colour who won all the rights that gay and lesbian people enjoy today. Here’s a typical statement repeated again and again until it almost seems like it must be the truth:

Many eyewitnesses have identified Marsha as one of the main instigators of the uprising and thus, some have recognised her as the vanguard of the gay liberation movement in the United States.

‘She’ was “one of the main instigators” of the Stonewall riots and “the vanguard of the gay liberation movement”? Here’s one demonstrator who is convinced of it:

You will be told by supposedly authoritative sources that Marsha P Johnson ‘threw the first brick’ at the Stonewall Riots, that ‘she’ was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front.

None of it is true.

Marsha P Johnson is the subject of one of the most fascinating re-tellings of the history of modern times and ‘her’ real story is as far from the myth as it is possible to be. Here are just a few of the false retellings of ‘her’ story:

Rewriting history – Vogue

Here’s a Vogue UK Art & Lifestyle article on Marsha P Johnson from June 2020: https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/who-was-marsha-p-johnson

Here’s what it says:

A monument dedicated to Marsha P Johnson, the late African-American transgender activist and pioneer, will be unveiled in New York in 2021. But Johnson spent much of her life being ostracised by society. Almost 30 years on from her death, Johnson is getting the attention she was denied when she was alive, with tales of her activism circulating on Instagram like never before, bringing her legacy to the attention of a new generation of admirers in Pride month.

There it is: ‘She’ was an “African-American transgender activist and pioneer”, and “tales of her activism circulating on Instagram like never before”.

The truth is that the ‘legacy’ of Marsha P Johnson has only just been invented and has been written and rewritten on Instagram. And there’s now a monument to ‘her’.

Rewriting history – Netflix

There’s the Netflix drama on Marsha P Johnson called The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pADsuuPd79E

They say:

Marsha P Johnson was the Rosa Parks of the LGBT movement.

Really? Marsha P Johnson is such an important figure that ‘she’ is compared to the civil rights activist Rosa Parks, the “mother of the civil rights movement”? Can it be true? How come we’ve never heard of her? Has ‘she’, and ‘her’ influence, really been forgotten and has the truth only just been discovered?

Rewriting history – CBBC

Naturally, the BBC have to get in on the act. There’s a CBBC article on the BBC’s Children’s channel aimed at children aged six to twelve, with their take on Marsha P Johnson: https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/52981395

Marsha P. Johnson was a trans-rights activist who played a big role in important moments for the LGBTQ+ movement, such as the Stonewall protests.

Really? “Played a big role in important moments for the LGBTQ+ movement”?

Rewriting history – Wikipedia

Marsha P Johnson helped found the STAR House. Wikipedia contains a detailed entry on the STAR House:

In 1970, STAR founded STAR House in the East Village, Manhattan. The house, which was open from November 1970 to July 1971, provided food and shelter for transgender youth.

STAR stood for Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. “Food and shelter”? That’s not what they provided. ‘Street’ meant prostitute.

Rewriting history – an MP in Parliament

We even have a Member of Parliament spouting the same revisionist nonsense in Parliament. Hansard is the official record of what is said in Parliament. Here’s Chris Bryant making an impassioned speech where he brings up the life and works of Marsha P Johnson:

Sir Chris Bryant was appointed Minister of State at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on 8 July 2024. He was elected as the MP for Rhondda and Ogmore (previously Rhondda) on 7 June 2001. He was an ordained priest. Apparently he thinks Marsha P Johnson ‘was at the forefront of our movement’.

Rewriting history – CBeebies

The BBC has been keen to indoctrinate their audience through their CBeebies website, which is aimed at children under six years old.

Their series on ‘Inspirational Mums’ for International Women’s Day included Marsha P Johnson as an inspirational mum: https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/grownups/inspirational-mums

Here are Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera as ‘Inspirational Mums’ on the CBeebies website:

The BBC want you to feel that Marsha P Johnson was a mother, and not just any mother, but an inspirational mother.

Rewriting history – Google

Here’s Marsha P Johnson celebrated in a Google doodle:

Why would Google do this?

There’s now a Marsha P Johnson Institute and Google donated $500,000 to it.

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/marsha-p-johnson-google-doodle-june-style-trnd

Google thinks that we should all be honouring ‘her’ “every single day”.

Rewriting history – everywhere

Here are just some of the many, many recent articles glorifying Marsha P Johnson and describing ‘her’ legacy:

The sordid truth is as far from inspirational motherhood as it is possible to be.

Who was Marsha P Johnson really?

Who was Marsha P Johnson, then, and why are we now surrounded by stories of ‘her’ heroism, including the BBC teaching ‘her’ achievements as an inspirational mother to the under-sixes? Why does ‘she’ appear with a halo, in stained glass, dressed in religious robes and with the title of saint, as St Marsha P Johnson on the BBC’s CBeebies website?

Given the glowing coverage, it might surprise you to know that Marsha P Johnson was a man called Malcolm Michaels, and that he was a drug-addicted cross-dressing male prostitute who lived in New York, who pimped out children to pay for drugs and alcohol, and who had severe mental problems exacerbated by undiagnosed syphilis.

He was a man, not a ‘her’ or a ‘they’. He referred to himself as a gay man, and told people his name was Michael. He was a transvestite, not transgender. Why did he cross-dress? He dressed as a woman partly because the men who used him as a prostitute would pay him more if he dressed as a woman.

The STAR House they refer to would be better described as a bordello. That was the meaning of ‘House’ in the 1960s in the USA. STAR stood for Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and Malcolm Michaels was a street transvestite, a male prostitute who wore women’s clothes for work. The only ‘stars’ the house featured were the runaway children they housed, who were pimped out to the mob-owned building next door, where they were sexually abused and ‘starred’ in what was called child pornography.

The ‘House’ had no utilities and was a filthy drug den.

The four-bedroom house was in poor condition, with no electricity or heat, inadequate plumbing, and piles of rubble littered across the premises.

The mafia set rent for the house at $200.

Drug use was also common, particularly alcohol, cocaine, heroin, and methadone. STAR members continued to raise money through begging, sex work, and theft, as well as a bake sale.

Personally I don’t think there’s any such thing as sex work. There is only being sexually abused for money.

The money the ‘mothers’ made from sexually exploiting the children who stayed there was used to buy drugs and alcohol. The children were taught to steal to feed themselves. One of the ‘mothers’ overdosed and died before STAR were evicted by the mafia who owned the building for not paying the rent.

Inspirational? A mother? I don’t think so. It’s history rewritten by activists on Instagram. It’s been copied and pasted by lazy unprofessional journalists who have become activists and revisionists themselves. We are watching the origin story of a religion being created before our eyes, this time not on papyrus scrolls but on Instagram. It is a story which is so far from the reality it purports to represent that it shares few if any features.

This is Malcolm Michaels:

The BBC wants under sixes to think that a man was a mother. And not only a mother, but that the gay, drug addicted, transvestite, prostitute who pimped out children for drug money, and whose mental health problems were worsened by undiagnosed syphilis was an ‘inspirational mother’.

How do I know this? Apart from listening to Malcolm Michaels speak about himself, here’s Fred Sargeant, a man who was actually there, an original eye-witness to it all, writing in Spiked about Sylvia Rivera: https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/14/sylvia-rivera-the-dark-truth-about-a-trans-icon/

How much of what we know about other religions has been through the process of being rewritten to fit a narrative to satisfy the stories believers want to hear? It’s less a case of “History is written by the victors” and more “Religion is rewritten by true believers until the truth is unrecognisable”.

Remember, if you don’t want to know any of this, there are always Puffins.

“Never have so many said so much about people who did so little.”

Fred Sargeant

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