Paying Mind to GLBTQ Pasts

Not long before her violent death in July 1992, Marsha P. Johnson gave an interview during which she reflected on artist George Segal’s commemorative monument, “Gay Liberation,” dedicated just weeks before at its site on Christopher Street across from the bar where in June 1969 the Stonewall Riots had occurred. In flamboyant tones conveying her incredulity, Johnson observed, “Now they got two little statues in Sheridan Square Park to remember the gay movement. How many people have died for these two little statues to be put in the park to recognize gay people? How many years has it taken for people to realize that we’re all brothers and sisters and human beings and in the human race? I mean how many years does it take for people to see that? That we’re all in the rat race together?”¹

This issue of QED (1.2), “GLBTQ Pasts, Worldmaking Presence,” coincides with the 45^th anniversary of Stonewall, an amplified occasion and opportunity beyond annual festive Pride events in June to recollect and reaffirm GLBTQ history, and to rededicate ourselves to the ongoing work of making familiar and newly discovered history matter, in the multiple senses of its diverse materialization, relevancy, and challenge. We ourselves have long been personally and professionally inspired by and invested in GLBTQ pasts (including, for one of us [CM], relishing the sweet coincidence of being born on Walt Whitman’s birthday just weeks before Stonewall). Therefore this issue’s spirit and subjects have made all the more meaningful the privilege and pleasure of gathering these diverse contributors to remember and edify, to persuade us (memory and history are always rhetorical matters), or to reinvigorate us by their labor (of love, of struggle) in these archival, curatorial, preservation, oral history, memoir, exhibition, pedagogical, and performance works. Although what appears here should also importantly bring to mind how we approach remembering, whom and how we remember, and why, we believe these intersectional, cross-generational, multi-regional and locational, individual and collective, grassroots and institutional engagements embody well the call suggested by this issue’s title.

We also believe that in addition to constituting an invitation and inspiration to celebrate and mourn and contemplate GLBTQ pasts, this issue’s essays, forum pieces, and queer conversation seek to recruit and mobilize us in the necessary collaborative effort to give GLBTQ pasts worldmaking presence. We recall that on the occasion of Stonewall 20, ACT UP initiated and performed radical queer memory—a series of events, a teach-in, a handbook, action collectively entitled “In the Tradition: Lesbians and Gay Men Fighting Back”—to fight homophobia and the epidemic, its pink and black emblem Gran Fury’s “RIOT: Stonewall ’69, AIDS Crisis ’89.”² On this occasion twenty-five years later, Marsha P. Johnson is our chosen metonymy for this mnemonic project, though of course our contributors speak powerfully for themselves.³ With ACT UP in mind, even as we honor Marsha P. Johnson’s resistance to homophobic exploitation and police brutality which centrally contributed to what now is commonly embraced as that epochal event in GLBTQ history and memory, we hope to mobilize Stonewall memory by exceeding and expanding its conventions and entailments. She was there, and perhaps threw the shot glass heard round the world. We think a greater inventional wellspring and political catalyst comes with remembering Marsha P. Johnson as a fierce, generous, big hearted black trans* activist, liberationist, and abolitionist, a sex worker, a prisoner, a caregiver, a fabulous performer, a person struggling at times with mental illness and living with HIV, a victim of trans*-and homophobic violence, a survivor, a founder with Sylvia Rivera of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) who saved lives by intervening against queer incarceration, homelessness, and violence⁴—Antony and the Johnsons’ and Janet Mock’s hero.

Marsha P. Johnson’s quoted incisive remarks about “Gay Liberation” remind us just how feeble and dominating even well-intentioned and durably crafted monumental memory can be, and that the countless and mostly unfamiliar lives lived and lost should be the inducement, and...