To celebrate Pride Month, our LGBTQ+ staff-led interest group blogs about the sheroes, heroes and queeroes who've inspired them.
Marsha P. Johnson
Marsha P. Johnson identified in different ways throughout her life and has been described in different ways since her death. What is more certain is the description of this pioneering Black activist for gay, lesbian, trans and homeless communities as an icon of the Gay Liberation Movement, and one the originators of the Stonewall riots. As such, the HRA’s celebration of Pride Month has ties to Ms Johnson and other pioneers in advocacy, like Latina legend Sylvia Rivera.
Marsha, Sylvia and others not only participated in the Stonewall riots, but they also spent their lives courageously marching in the streets of New York City, demanding visibility and acceptance for transgender people. With Rivera, Johnson established STAR House, a shelter for homeless gay and trans youth in 1970 and paid the rent for it with money they made themselves as sex workers.
Marsha’s body was found in the East River in 1992 with a large wound to the back of the head, yet her death was quickly ruled to be suicide. Under pressure, reopening of the case reclassified it as ‘undetermined’ at a time when violence against LGBT people raged, abetted by the police. Marsha P. Johnson remains a permanent fixture in NYC. In 2020, on what would have been Johnson’s 75th birthday, East River State Park on the Brooklyn waterfront was renamed Marsha P. Johnson State Park in her honour.
Thank you, Marsha, Sylvia and many other women and queens of colour.
A blog written by the HRA's LGBTQ+ staff-led interest groupRuth Coker Burks
’Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?’
In 1984, Ruth Coker Burks came across a hospital room door with a ‘big, red bag’ over it warning people not to enter. Ruth’s encounter with the dying young man inside changed her life. The gravely ill man, mistaking Ruth for the mother who nurses told Ruth had rejected him, led her to becoming the final caregiver for hundreds of people dying of AIDS, most of them young gay men who had been shunned by their families.
She used her salary as a real estate agent to care for AIDS patients whose families and communities had abandoned them. Because of the prejudices, fears, and stigma surrounding the disease at the time, she was often the patients' only caregiver until they eventually died, often as she held their hand. Her church ejected her from its finance committee. Children stopped inviting Ruth’s daughter, Allison, to their parties. The Ku Klux Klan twice burned a cross on her lawn. Nonetheless the ashes of many are interred in Ruth’s own family’s cemetery plots.
Read Ruth’s interview with The Guardian.
Audre Lourde
Audre Lorde was self-proclaimed ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ who was prominent member of LGBTQ+ movement both before and after the Stonewall riots. She often spoke out against categorising people by single identities, wrote about the intersectionality between sexual orientation, gender identity and race, and spent her life writing about the importance of raising your voice against oppression.
Lorde was unapologetic about who she was, which is one of the reasons that she’s synonymous with Pride Month for us. As the Paris Review put it, we ’ ‘bear witness to all the unforgettable ways she made herself, and all Black women, gloriously visible’. This visibility resonates for us during Pride Month, as her message is often one of confronting injustices. Let’s not forget, Pride started as a riot. And to this day, it does not have to be a choice between the political and partying.
Paul Harfleet
Paul Harfleet is the founder of The Pansy Project, which plants pansies at sites of homophobic and transphobic abuse. Many of us have endured such abuse through our childhood and teen years. During the horrendous Section 28 years, some SIG members were at school and suffered as a direct result of this and the hatred instigated by Margaret Thatcher who said publicly that being gay is at odds with ‘moral values’. Homophobic and transphobic abuse has been increasing in recent years as division and hatred is stoked in politics and in social media – our communities are under constant threat and attack. Staff have reported hate incidents outside of work, and also while travelling to an HRA office. The Pansy Project’s founder, Paul, refers to the project as a ‘gesture of quiet resistance’ which reveals a frequent reality of LGBTQ+ experience, and is no less powerful for its quietness.
Alok Vaid-Menon
Poet, artist and LGBTQ+ activist, Alok is leading the way in exploring biases around beauty and gender norms. Their advocacy focuses on de-gendering stereotypically binary ideas, like body hair and fashion. Their book ‘Beyond the Gender Binary’ is a 64-page whistle stop tour as to why gender isn’t a binary issue and why we should be moving past this thought process. I recommend this book to everyone. I even have a spare copy if anyone wants to borrow it.
Abigail Thorn
Abigail Thorn is a trans British YouTuber, actress, and playwright, best known for producing the YouTube channel Philosophy Tube. Philosophy Tube began in 2013, when she sought to provide free lessons in philosophy, in the wake of the 2012 increase in British tuition fees. Abigail continues to produce educational, theatrical style video essays about current social issues, including the discrimination trans people are facing in the UK.