six: "lost in the music"
Hi everyone,
I am still thinking about Saidiya Hartman. For weeks I’ve been infatuated with the following quote:
“Beauty is not a luxury; it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, a transfiguration of the given. Only the wayward appreciated this girl’s riotous conduct and wild habits—her longing to create a life from nothing. Only they could discern the beautiful plot against the plantation that she waged everyday.”
Beauty is not a given. Beauty is sketching a door in a windowless room, creating something out of nothing, where nothing connotes erasure and sabotage. This quote is a necessary reminder, a friend whispering in my ear to say that beauty is not at odds with rebellion. It isn’t inherently frivolous, distracting, or materialistic. Beauty is an improvisation, intimately acquainted with defiance. We’ve been witnessing beautiful plots against the state for weeks, years, centuries.
It has been a long month of unlearning and listening and dreaming and crying and shedding and mourning and realigning.
Hartman’s line takes me back to the decadent bedroom in Happy Birthday, Marsha! A room of longing and ethereality. A room that holds all versions of yourself. I love pausing on this scene and luxuriating in the details. A lacy empire lampshade with fringe. A slinky marshmallow-beige cat. Crystal goblets. Votive candles. Fragrant flowers and dried herbs. And Mya Taylor channeling Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson, regal in a low-V magenta dress, her blonde afro perfectly coiffed and moisturized. Bluish glitter swirling around her dark brown eyes like brilliant galaxies. We have been following Marsha since the morning, as she made her way through Greenwich Village, interacting with friends and bar owners and cops. We watched her in the tub, soaking away fresh bruises. (I wonder if the bath water is filled with healing properties: epsom salts, lavender, honey, chamomile, sweet orange, eucalyptus). We see Marsha lost in thought, reclined in her plush chair, smoking a cigarette in her elegant dress. It’s her birthday. She prepares her cake. The pink frosting looks like globs of clouds. She calls Sylvia, agitated that she’s forgotten her birthday party. Sylvia, drowsy from a nap cut short, suggests going to Stonewall.
Written, directed, and produced by Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel, Happy Birthday, Marsha! follows Marsha in the hours leading up to the 1969 Stonewall Riots. You can watch the short film on Amazon Prime (boo amazon/bezos, but as of now, this is the only way to stream the film; you can buy the DVD if you’d like an alternative). A revolutionary black trans artist and activist, Marsha was a vital force in the movement for LGBTQIA+ liberation for over three decades. Born in New Jersey, she moved to the Village after graduating high school in 1963 with $15 and a bag of clothes. Known for her charismatic aura and unshakeable propensity for care, she was a popular figure in the NYC queer art scene, performing in the downtown theater troupe The Hot Peaches and modeling for Andy Warhol. Her signature feature was her floral crown-she would use discarded or plastic flowers, in addition to artificial fruit, ribbons, and shimmering materials), and her flamboyant sense of style communicated an intimacy between freedom and beauty, rebellion and fashion.
When the police raided Stonewall Inn on June 28th, Marsha and other street queens (unhoused Black and Puerto Rican trans women) were at the forefront of the clash, resisting arrest and fighting back against the racist and homophobic police force. At the time, anti-cross dressing laws were in full affect, and the police enforced the draconian measures randomly and without mercy. The uprising was, in part, a reaction to the years of NYPD harassment. Galvanized by the encounter, Marsha, along with close friend and fellow trans activist Sylvia Rivera, went on to stage a sit-in at an NYU dining hall in protest of the administration’s decision to cancel a series of dances and fundraisers organized by local gay groups. After this success, Marsha and Sylvia formed Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, and started STAR House, a shelter and community space for trans sex workers and queer homeless youth.
As mothers of the house, Marsha and Sylvia traded sex for money, which went towards rent and food. They encouraged the development of a robust political ideology, stressing the importance of liberation of all oppressed people. Members were critical of policing and incarceration, and called for free access to education, healthcare, food, and more. STAR disbanded a year later (after a liberation march where they were heckled by cis participants “unsupportive of [their] organizing efforts”), but Marsha kept organizing. She advocated for people in prisons, and became an AIDS activist, participating in ACT UP. In 1992, she was found dead in the Hudson River. They police ruled it a suicide, but friends of Marsha have remained critical of their non-investigation.
Tourmaline has been instrumental in reaffirming Marsha’s place in the gay rights struggle. For over a decade she visited “living rooms and libraries,” tracing Marsha’s stories from people who knew her, documents, and more. Her research work reveals the failures of the archive, its ability to legitimize some figures as worthy while delegitimizing other figures—trans, nonbinary, queer, poor, black—as unimportant. “Historical erasure of black trans life means so many of us are disconnected from the legacies of trans women before us, denied access to stories about ourselves, in our own voices,” Tourmaline writes. To combat the silence of the archive, she began lovingly compiling and sharing (via Tumblr and Vimeo) a treasure trove of historical research centering trans, queer, and gender nonconforming lives. (Salacia, Tourmaline’s latest film, is about Mary Jones, a Black trans sex worker and outlaw in 1830s New York. MoMA recently acquired the short speculative film for their permanent collection. You can watch it online through July 6th. Like her other films about trans legends, Salacia is a cosmic swirl of archive and sensuous dreams).
Before turning to films, Tourmaline was an organizer for over 15 years, working with low-income and incarcerated queer, trans, and gender nonconforming communities. She describes her art as a natural extension of her own abolition work. Initially she wanted to make a documentary about Marsha, but the lack of documents and testimonials complicated things. Instead, Tourmaline and Wortzel decided to engage with the gaps in knowing, a nod to Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation. Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard writes:
“Critical fabulation facilitates creative interpretation of the past in order to resuscitate those overlooked in the historical record (Hartman’s methodology is specific to the fraught retrieval of facts surrounding Black women’s lives under the reign of chattel slavery’s terror.) Hartman does not advocate baseless conjecture, but stresses the importance of sketching forgotten lives in greater detail. Otherwise, history risks collapsing the marginalized into the circumstances of their deaths.”
If we only know Marsha by her death, what do we really know about Marsha the dreamer, Marsha the lover, Marsha the flake, Marsha in her creative power, Marsha the song? By collapsing the possibilities of living, history traps figures like Marsha into violent foreclosures. Happy Birthday, Marsha! does the opposite, calling into question our assemblage of historical time, performance, and biography. Drawing upon years of research and interviews, Tourmaline and Wortzel reimagine the daily textures of Marsha’s life, i.e. a fondness for amber nail polish, her habit of losing herself in the lushness of her reveries, her command of the stage. They refashion other details—Marsha’s birthday wasn’t the same day as the uprising (she’s a virgo irl), but in changing the date the film foregrounds its celebratory tone, while further conflating Marsha’s presence (and by extension, the presence of poor Black and Latinx trans and gender nonconforming people) with the cataclysmic activation occurring in Stonewall’s wake.
Experimental in form and content, the film cuts between fiction and archive, blending evocative summer scenes (cinematography by Arthur Jafa) of Marsha and Sylvia and friends in recreated 1969, and low-def VHS footage of the real Marsha, sequins gleaming in her hair, the camera rapt by her presence as she chats about the past. Filmed in 1991 in a friend’s Greenwich Village basement, her electric smile jumps across the boundaries of time and technology, shaking you on the other side of the screen.
We move between the two Marshas, the film refusing to smooth over the frictions existing between the performance and the archive.
“Is the camera rolling?” she asks, brash and flirty in a black & white extreme close up, fussing with a strip of gauzy fabric. The VHS clip glitches then cuts to a scene of Mya exiting a cab, a red fascinator adorning her head. She walks to a bar and requests a song on the jukebox. The camera follows her as she winds through the crowd back to her seat, but her outfit is different. She’s wearing the magenta dress and her copper pixie cut has been replaced by the blonde afro. We hear Marsha from the basement, narrating the story of her name. In under two minutes, Tourmaline and Wortzel create a dizzy portrait of past, present, possibility. They reject the simplicities of the Hollywood biopic, the genre’s tendency of whittling down a person’s lived realities to fit the stuffy conventions of a linear plot. The two Marshas are jarring, but that’s the point. People are messy, complicated, opaque. The portrayals layer over each other, forming a dissonant harmony of multidimensionality. The film’s refusals also interrogate the sanitization of cultural figures, as the creative collaborators explain to Artform, “Often when we put a person on a pedestal by mythologizing them, their lived realities that can’t be assimilated into a mainstream narrative get erased.”
What is usually erased about Marsha: she had disabilities, she was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, she was HIV positive, she lived on the streets for stretches at a time, she was arrested over 100 times, she had very little money. These erasures reveal a deeper investment in respectability rather than honesty. A deeper investment in control than love. After all, respectability is another tool of coerced normality, an attempt to stifle wayward expression. By blurring Mya’s performance with the archival, the film questions our need to valorize coherency and ability. The time shifts, the clash of grainy VHS and Jafa’s glossy cinematography, the unsynced sound, use of slow-mo, the multiple Marshas… these elements confuse our attempts to read the film as a traditional biopic, documentary, or drama. It is all three, beyond those categories, a seance. It’s Marsha telling us to embody liberatory expressions of beauty.
In one scene, an emcee beckons Marsha on stage, calling her “the saint of Christopher Street.” Backlit by a metallic foil curtain and fluorescent lights, Mya addresses the roaring crowd, carnations blooming from her headpiece, her blonde hair now shoulder length, triangular and bombshell frizzy. She performs a poem of refusal:
If I wanted to be a saint
I would have died for our sins
Honey, I would be a zombie
I’d have turned my sisters in
If I wanted to be a saint
I would sleep when it was dark
I’d be a loyal to the law
Not the queens in the park
The poem is Marsha’s fiery call and reminder to us. Are we loyal to the people in the streets or the law that represses them? Are we loyal to the contradictions of living or the enclosures of cishet white supremacy and ableism? Marsha supported communities ignored and punished by US society. Her own waywardness made her vulnerable to further attacks and harassment, not protection. Like so many others now and then, she had to “make a way out of no way.” The mainstream deification of Marsha wants us to forget her anger, her radicalness, her fears, her contempt for the state. They want to neutralize her unruly impact, instead of celebrating the tangles of joy and pain, beauty and disjointedness. For Tourmaline, “her sainthood only exists in her contradictions;” denying her multiplicity is to continue a cycle of harm. Mya, who also starred in Tangerine (which won her an Independent Spirit Award for best, supporting actress), captures Marsha’s absurdist whimsy, her ingenuity, her zero tolerance for bullshit.
Marsha is awake to the enormity of the worlds, choosing her vision of living instead of our hollow, capital-obsessed status quo. When the poem ends, the film cuts to Marsha from the 90’s, mid-laughter, misremembering the year of Stonewall:
“I got lost in the music in 1963 at Stonewall… No! No, it was Stonewall—it was 1967 that I got lost. In 19– oh my dear, Stonewall, I got lost at Stonewall. Heard it through the grapevine. 1969! I got lost in the music and I couldn’t get out. Still can’t get out of the music.”
The slur of dates points to the slipperiness of historical records and time itself. Stonewall is usually thought of as the origin point of the modern queer liberation movement, but, as the film reminds, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people have always rebelled, fought back, refused. The designation of a beginning is arbitrary and misleading, an attempt to silence the stories living outside the written archive. An attempt to erase those living outside our tidy narratives. At the same time, even though Stonewall isn’t a singular event, there would be no Stonewall, no Pride, no progress without trans people of color. As Dr. Angela Davis noted at recent Dream Defenders event on abolition:
"If we want an intersectional perspective, the trans community is showing us the way. The trans community has taught us to challenge that which is perceived to be normal. If we can challenge the gender binary, we can challenge prisons."
On June 14th, fifteen thousand people gathered outside of the Brooklyn Museum to march for Black trans lives. They were marching for Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, Riah Milton, Layleen Polanco, Nina Pop, Tony McCade, Tete Gulley, and countless others taken too soon. Activist and writer Raquel Willis gave a stirring speech. “If you have an organization that has no Black people in leadership, if your organization has no funding or programs specifically for Black trans people, you are obsolete.”
Obsolete. I roll the words in my mouth, feel them drip down my being til they reach the bottom of my soles. As many have said, continue to say, will always say—freedom for all means centering the most vulnerable communities: those who are disabled, without secure housing, poor, trans, queer, incarcerated, sex workers, undocumented. If you aren’t fighting for them, your freedom is conditional. Marsha, and her comrades past and present, advocated for a radical new world(s), one where the revolution began first in your heart, mind, soul, and ways of relating.
Do you feel the uprising singing out from your core?
Take care,
Allison
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