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Miss Major was a showgirl in the famed Jewel Box Revue, which featured performances by what were then called "female impersonators." She performed with another group called the Cherries, and another called the Powder Puff Revue. She went by different names at different times — "Barbara and then Olive then Valerie, Bonita, Cynthia, Margaret, Mary" — before settling back on Major, with the addition of "Miss." She added "Griffin" to her last name in honor of her mother, something she learned from European sex workers who hyphenated their names.
"You took pride in what you were doing," Miss Major says of her showgirl days. "If you were trying to mimic some star like Diana Ross or the Supremes or one of the Marvelettes, you really worked on what their mannerisms were."
FIGHTING FOR YOUR FUCKING EXISTENCE
There was something in the air on the night of June 27, 1969. As on so many nights, Miss Major and her friends had congregated at the Stonewall Inn, a small, brick-fronted, Mafia-run bar on Christopher Street in the West Village that was one of a handful of establishments that welcomed a gay and transgender clientele.
"Stonewall was a great bar, a transgender bar," Miss Major says. "You could be someplace and you didn't have to explain who you were. There were friends there. You were accepted there." After a night working on the streets or performing in a show, Stonewall was where she would head to hang out with friends or pick up a boy.
Most nights, the police would show up late and bang on the wall with their night sticks. "When you heard that sound, you knew to step away from who you were dancing with, if it was a same-sex person, and then to leave the bar, turn the lights on, and go. It was like last call."
But in the early hours of June 28, something was different. According to Sylvia Rivera, a transgender woman who was there, it "was a very hot, muggy night." People were tired, Miss Major says now, "tired of being shuffled off like cattle."
There are many different accounts of what set off the Stonewall Uprising. Some say a brick was thrown, others a shoe or a Molotov cocktail. But Miss Major, who was there that night, doesn't recall anything like that. The cops showed up, and the patrons decided to fight back. "All I know is all of a sudden you were fighting for your fucking existence," she says.
"We were not taking any more of this shit," Rivera, who went on to co-found various groups including the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activists Alliance, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, told Workers World in 1998. "We had done so much for other movements. It was time."
Miss Major's experience in jail in Chicago had taught her that it was better to piss off the cops badly enough for them to knock you out, than to keep fighting and have them keep beating you. So the first chance she got, she snatched the mask off a policeman's head and spit in his face. "He knocked my ass out," she says. "That's the last thing I remember. When I woke up, I was in the Tombs, and the next day they just let us all out."
The protests that erupted that night — and lasted for several more nights of rebellion in the Village — are largely credited as the spark that ignited the Gay Rights movement. The transgender men and women who were inside the bar that night, however, are largely erased from that picture. Many historical renderings of the events don't even mention the transgender women of color at the center of the melée.
"The shame of it was that after it happened, most of the black girls that had been involved in it, we got whitewashed out of it. The gay and lesbian community just took it over and acted not only as if we did not exist, but that we weren't even there," Miss Major says now of the mainstream LGBT Stonewall narrative. To hear that version, she says, "it was all these white fags and lesbians" fighting with the cops. "I don't know where the hell they were," Miss Major jokes. "Oh yeah, they were standing outside cheering."
While the modern LGBT movement would go on to fight for legal rights and recognition for gay people (often ignoring the 'T' in the abbreviation), Miss Major's activism was always more about protecting herself and her community in public and private, from the state and from individuals. Miss Major's turning point as an activist came after one of her friends, another trans woman, was murdered, and the police did nothing to investigate the case. She and a friend, Bunny, decided they needed to look out for one another, so they came up with a system to keep track of each other while they were working. Whenever one of them got into a car, she would write down the license plate number on a piece of paper, crumple it up, and throw it out the window for the other to collect.
"From there, it wound up progressing into keeping an eye out for one another. It went from just two or three of us to ten of us," Miss Major says. "And from there, I haven't stopped. Because if we don't look out for one another, no one else is going to. It isn't just the people who don't like us that hurt us; it's the people who do like us, who still hurt us. So that's what got it started."
JUST CALL ME
Ten years after the uprising at Stonewall, thousands of protesters gathered outside San Francisco's City Hall in rage. Dan White, the man who assassinated gay-rights icon and Supervisor Harvey Milk, as well as San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, had been convicted of voluntary manslaughter — not murder — and received a sentence of just seven years and eight months. Enraged, the gay community took to the streets, marching from the Castro to Civic Center calling, "Out of the bars and into the streets." The crowd turned over police cars and lit them on fire, stopped traffic, and fought back against cops in riot gear.
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