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Miss Major was there, but before things got too out of hand, she left. "I became frightened that something would happen to Christopher," she says, "and I went back home. We drove back to Menlo Park and just watched it on the news."
Christopher was Miss Major's son, born in 1978 to her and a long-term girlfriend. Miss Major's release from Dannemora around 1974 had initiated a new phase in her life. She didn't want to go back to prison, and while she didn't stop doing sex work, she was much more careful about breaking the law. When Christopher was born, Miss Major decided that she could give him a better life in California. When she split with Christopher's mother, Miss Major retained custody of her son, something she says she will be forever grateful for.
"I'm always his dad, whether I'm in a push-up bra, blond hair, red hair, three-inch heels, flats, whatever. I'm always his dad. It's been marvelous knowing that he's breathing on the earth somewhere, this little piece of me," Miss Major says of her son, who is now 36 and working as a chef in New Mexico. "I don't know how he got to be older than me," she jokes.
She ended up adopting and raising three other sons as well, runaway boys around Christopher's age who she took in and raised. "We met them in the park, and they used to come around for meals. Then when we moved, they moved with us," she says. "They've never known me without breasts or without me being femme. Two of them call me mom. The other two call me dad. That's on them. Whatever — just call me."
Throughout the '80s, Miss Major worked to support her community as it was ravaged by the AIDS epidemic. "No one wanted to take care of those gay guys when they first got AIDS," she recalls, "and a lot of my transgender women stepped up to the plate to do it." For many trans women, it was their first opportunity to work a legitimate job, a silver lining to the trauma of losing so many friends.
"They were getting diagnosed on Monday or Tuesday and dead by the end of the week," Miss Major says. "You didn't want to meet anyone new, cause you didn't know if you would know them by the end of the week." She founded a drop-in center for trans people at the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center and continued to build community and to support as many of the girls as she could.
That community continues to gather around Miss Major today, calling her Mama Major or Grandma Major, and supporting her in her old age, because she never paid taxes and never qualified for any Social Security. One of the women in her community, Danielle Castro, first met Miss Major the same way Janetta Johnson did — by phone.
Castro was 16 and living in San Jose in 1992 when she began questioning her gender identity (she had been assigned the male gender at birth). She called the local LGBT Center and asked for help, but was told it didn't have any services for trans people. The center took her phone number and said, "If we run into any trans people that want to volunteer, we'll have them call you."
Six months later, Castro picked up the phone. "It was Grandma Major," she recalls. "She just shared that I'm not a monster. That everything's going to be okay. She gave me some pointers on how to go through the process for transition." Miss Major also recommended Castro read the book My Story by Caroline "Tula" Cossey, a trans actress and model who was outed by the press in the early 1980s. The book and Miss Major's message helped Castro keep going.
Fifteen years later, Castro met Miss Major for the first time in person, at the Transgender Leadership Summit in Los Angeles. "I melted," Castro recalls. "I started crying. I said, 'You really impacted my life, and if it weren't for you, I probably would have given up.'"
Castro now lives in San Francisco and is part of Miss Major's adopted family, which includes a tight network of daughters and sons, granddaughters and grandsons. They gathered at Miss Major's Oakland apartment earlier this month for a Fourth of July barbecue.
"We're a close-knit little family. Technically, we're a tough bunch of bitches." Miss Major says. "Because our blood families are so hostile and cruel to us, we create our own family. We're not related by blood, but we're related by ties of love. It gets us through."
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