Marsha by Leonard Fink
At the beginning of this year’s Pride month, a friend asked me. “Every year, we celebrate Pride in June. Why June?” The simple answer to that, is because that was the month when the Stonewall riots happened 51 years ago.
In all honesty, I didn’t know much about these riots. I knew it broke out at the Stonewall Inn (a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village) on 28 June 1969, following a violent police raid on drag queens, transgender people, and gay people – and that these riots subsequently changed Gay Rights in the US and beyond. While researching the riots, one name kept cropping up. That name was ‘Marsha P. Johnson’ - but who was she?