thespiritwas

[thespiritwas]

SUPPORT MERCI CHRISETTE #BLACKTRANSLIVESMATTER

On December 18th of 2015, Merci Chrisette aka Chrissy Jackson, a Black TransWoman, faced harassment by a stranger leading to an altercation on the A train in Brooklyn, New York. Part of the incident was recorded, uploaded online, and shared widely through new networks in an effort to track Merci down. She turned herself in to local authorities one week later on December 29th and is currently being detained in a male facility on Rikers Island in New York City.

We know of 22 TransWomen who were murdered last year in the United States, the majority of them being Black TransWomen. The threat that Merci felt is based in this reality, and all the violence face by Black TransWomen in this country. This is our chance to show Merci that we are here for her and that we care about her life!

Jail is not safe for anyone, especially transwomen of color!

We are urgently raising funds to get Merci out, get her the things she needs while inside, and to support her immediately after her release! Bail information is not explicitly stated on the site because technically it is against all crowdfunding site policies to raise funds for bail or legal purposes.

The judge set Merci’s bail at $20,000, which means we need to raise $2,000 to get her out. If 200 of us donate $10 we could have the total amount and post Merci’s bail. Anything above $2000 dollars will go directly to Merci to support her inside and when she is released. Let’s show for her by raising the $2000 bail amount TOGETHER! <3

PLEASE LIKE AND SHARE INCLUDING TEXT AS THE BAIL INFO IS NOT LISTED ON THE YOUCARING!

If you have any questions about this fundraising effort contact:

Jorge Hernandez at [email protected] or Mitchyll Mora at [email protected]

[thespiritwas]

“It’s gonna be legendary!” Mya Taylor as Marsha P Johnson in Happy Birthday Marsha! We are still raising post production funds so please support/share! 

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/happy-birthday-marsha-post-production/x/7917797#/

#Marsha P. Johnson #marsha p johnson #Sylvia Rivera #stefanie rivera #grace dunham #Happy Birthday Marsha #sasha wortzel #reina gossett #mya taylor

[thespiritwas]

yes!

Introducing the Trans Women's Healing Justice Project

The Trans Women’s Anti-Violence Project is now the Trans Women’s Healing Justice Project. This name change marks a renewed focus on creating positive change for trans women. This project was created to address the disproportionately high rates of violence and oppression experienced by trans women in order to bring about healing and justice for those living at the intersections of anti-trans and anti-women violence. So, rather than focusing on what the project opposes, the new name emphasizes the desired goals of the project: healing and justice.

Violence, whether institutional or interpersonal, results in both trauma and injustice. Without individual and collective healing, there can’t be true justice. And without justice, there can’t be true healing of individuals and communities. It’s the position of the Healing Justice Project that any intervention opposing the intersections of anti-women and anti-trans violence will be best when it seeks to provide both healing and justice.

[thespiritwas]

A little about me: My name is Lexi Adsit and I’m a 24 year old trans latina organizer, activist, creator, producer, and general badass from the San Francisco Bay Area. I have spent the past 8 years working in the nonprofit sector and with community around intersectional issues close to my heart, most recently training trans women of color to be comediennes! I have also previously worked on the International Trans Women of Color Network Gathering, Queer Yo Mind Conference, and more large projects all while also working or going to school full-time at San Francisco State University or the nonprofit sector. I have worked at the following nonprofit organizations: California School-Age Consortium, Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center, El/La Para TransLatinas, Youth Leadership Institute, Tri-City Health Center, San Francisco Department of Public Health, and countless others. You can learn more about the depth of my experiences here. The Vision: It has always been my dream to go to cosmetology school and I am finally making it happen. I also plan on sharing what I learn with the world through the “Looks by Lexi” brand, youtube videos, and offering sliding scale/free beauty consultations with underserved communities. It is my hope to master/explore a couple different aspects of cosmetology: bridal make-up, science fiction make-up, and standard cutting & coloring of hair/wigs/weaves. Throughout my own transition I have succeeded and failed countless times when it came to my hair, make-up, and outfits. It is my hope through online videos, consultations, coaching, and more to showcase how to acquire the confidence and beauty knowledge to discover your individual ‘look’. Why you should support Looks by Lexi: Previously, I have worked on a lot of community-oriented and driven projects and while this work has fed my soul and skillset in countless ways I am making the decision to take a break from this work temporarily. The past 8 years of nonprofit work has not been easy. I have built up a network of over 2,000 individuals, many of whom I love and envision having as life-long friends and community. However, I also have experienced a lot of trauma, tokenization, and abuse in the workplace. This has unfortunately led to a very unhealthy addiction to work and development of anxiety and major depression that has negatively affected my mental health. It is my hope that cosmetology school will help heal some of this trauma and help me build a career where I can be my own boss. I also am hoping to focus only on school full-time without taking on extra projects or responsibilities so my mental health and social life can remain stable. What Your Money Goes Towards: I have been living without an income for the past two months as I have healed, reconnected with loved ones, and taken time to re-center myself. This means I need money for public transit to/from San Francisco, where I will be going to Cosmetology school, food, paying the minimum on my bills and occasionally pitch in for cat food for Clarence, my sweet little grey cat. $3,000 covers the bare minimum of these expenses for the next year that I will be in school. My YouCaring page is set up to be active for the next few months and hopefully spread out the funds raised.

[thespiritwas]

More info: maysles.org

and follow @BlackTransMedia on twitter!

[thespiritwas]

So I wrote a thing. Please read & share! 

[thespiritwas]

[thespiritwas]

Love Positive Women (1 min)

Be my decrim valentine?

[thespiritwas]

I’m getting married to my boo cunthulhu this June. 

I think it would be rad if I could get a free custom suit for our DIY-makeshift-poor-queers wedding ceremony. 

if you like me, all you have to do is nominate me. and i will be eternally grateful and have lots of cute photos to share.

my full name: ngoc loan tran  email: [email protected] city: richmond, va twitter: @ntranloan website: nloantran.com

*you can reblog this*

[thespiritwas]

by Ngọc Loan Trần 

When I started exploring what queerness meant to me I was obsessed with my body. I was obsessed with learning how it could look, feel, taste, and be next to a body that looked like mine, a queer body just like mine, a queer body of color just like mine. I spent a lot of time imagining more comfort in intimacy, in desire, in community. And when I could finally experience it, I was grateful for the communities that welcomed me in my weirdness and our weirdness that held us all together.

I have always been proud to be queer. And I have always prided my QTPOC family for being loudly queer and weird in the face of racist and heteronormative expectations for how we must function as queer people. Queerness introduced me to a very specific politic around owning whatever it is about us that incites the violence against us. It took me a very long time but I figured it out; it definitely wasn’t just about how we have sex (and not all of us do), it wasn’t just about how we formed chosen family or relationships, and it wasn’t just about how we are tragically alienated, pushed out and abandoned (because not all of us are).

Queerness is about carving out space in this world to have what we need, to be who we want and desire, and to hopefully, one day, be free.

My vision for the QTPOC future has evolved and shifted over the years and what I consider as “being free” has changed significantly. With those I love, with those who are my kin, we have envisioned many kinds of possibilities, realities, and futures. We work, strive, and fight for the possibility of a QTPOC future every single day. And, like most things, we pride ourselves in the daily work of liberation.

What has been challenging as we talk about the daily work of liberation is the hesitation to think about disability and queerness simultaneously. Nowadays I have a lot of folks I can look to, fellow sick and disabled queers of color who know that the way to liberation requires us to engage with ableism when many of those we are closest to aren’t ready or even willing to talk about it. But still, in most dominant spaces, even the ones that are proclaimed to be radical, revolutionary, and intersectional, the obvious and transformative relationship between disability justice and queer liberation is silenced.

Continue reading…

[thespiritwas]

Black American Sex Workers Who Made History

1. Dr. Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was an American author, poet, dancer, actress and singer. She published several autobiographies, books of essays and poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. In interviews, Maya Angelou used the term prostitute to refer to her career as a sex worker. 

"I wrote about my experiences because I thought too many people tell young folks, “I never did anything wrong. Who, Moi? - never I. I have no skeletons in my closet. In fact, I have no closet.” They lie like that and then young people find themselves in situations and they think, “Damn I must be a pretty bad guy. My mom or dad never did anything wrong.” They can’t forgive themselves and go on with their lives. So I wrote the book Gather Together in My Name [about her past as a sex worker]". She was unashamed of her past, spoke candidly to her family about it, and always spoke out in her truth. When confronted rudely on her past she would say without hesitation, "there are many ways to prostitute oneself and you know a lot about that, don’t you dear?".

2. Malcolm X

Before he became world famous as a leading civil rights activist, Malcolm X (then known as Malcolm Little or Detroit Red) led a life best described as tough. Left without a dad at an early age, the adolescent Malcolm made money on the streets of Boston through selling drugs, pimping, robbing wealthy households, and gambling. He also had a side line in street sex work by picking up wealthy gay men in bars. He would brag to his friends about the money he would make after he “serviced the queers” and at one point sustained a relationship with a white business man.

Malcolm X did vaguely write about his time working the streets, but he would falsely attribute his stories to a man named “Rudy”. “[Rudy] had a side deal going, a hustle that took me right back to the old steering days in Harlem. Once a week, Rudy went to the home of this old, rich Boston blueblood, pillar-of-society aristocrat. He paid Rudy to undress them both, then pick up the old man like a baby, lay him on his bed, then stand over him and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder. Rudy said the old man would actually reach his climax from that.” The excerpt from Manning Marable’s ” Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention”, describes how the young Malcolm  X earned his money servicing a wealthy man named Paul Lennon, one of many clients he had during his career in sex work.

3. Marsha P. Johnson

Marsha P. Johnson was a transgender activist, drag queen, sex worker, and a popular figure in New York City’s gay art scene from the 1960s to the 1990s. One of the city’s oldest and best known drag queens, Johnson participated in clashes with the police amid the Stonewall Riots along with other trans women of color. She was a co-founder, along with Sylvia Rivera, of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) in the early 1970s. She also was the “mother” of S.T.A.R. House along with Sylvia, getting together food and clothing to help support the young queens living in the house on the lower East Side of New York.

4. Josephine Baker

One of the most famous Black female sex workers of all time, Josephine Baker was a proud activist, openly bisexual, and a strong mother to her many adopted children. Baker was born Freda Josephine MacDonald in St. Louis on June 3, 1906. She started her career by touring on the vaudeville circuits, where she won over audiences with her dancing and comedic skills, though she faced harsh racism from her employers.

She famously left the United States for France, where she thrived in the integrated Parisian nightclub scene. By age 21, she was the highest earning burlesque entertainer in Europe. She later served as a sub-lieutenant in the Women’s Auxillary Air Force during World War II and secretly worked for the French Resistance, for which she was awarded a medal by the French government. By the time of her death in 1975, Baker had raised 12 adopted children in a French castle, performed at Carnegie Hall, and spoke at the March on Washington.

5. Mary Jones a.k.a. Peter Sewally 

On June 11, 1836, New York City stone mason Robert Haslem went looking for a little nocturnal fun. He found it on Bleecker Street in the form of a pretty black prostitute, who took him to an alley near her house at 108 Greene St., a known whorehouse, where they got down to business. Afterward they parted ways, only for Haslem to realize that his wallet was missing. He reported the theft to police, who wasted no time in going undercover to catch the thief and she was promptly arrested. The woman gave her name as Mary Jones, and it was revealed during a police strip search that she was assigned male at birth.

The local press of the era had a field day with the case. When it was revealed that Mary Jones a.k.a Peter Sewally had actually fashioned a makeshift vagina out of cow skin that they wore tied around their waist for their clients, they were dubbed “Beefsteak Pete” and “The Man Monster”. Sewally reportedly used other aliases such as Miss Ophelia, Miss June, and Eliza Smith. They seemed surprised that anyone would be shocked by their cross-dressing. “I have always attended parties among the people of my own color dressed in this way—and in New Orleans I always dressed in this way,”. Peter was found guilty of grand larceny and sentenced to five years in state prison, but reappeared in news accounts several times in the ensuing years, invariably for the same offense. On May 16, 1853, the New York Times reported that at 3 a.m. the previous morning, Sewally was arrested just days after being released from yet another five-year sentence at Sing Sing. Terminology used to describe gender identity was non existent at the time, making it unclear if Sewally was a trans woman, gender non conforming, or a gay man.

6. Miss Major Griffin-Gracey

Best known as Miss Major or Mama, Griffin-Gracy is described as “an activist, instigator, and community organizer” on the promotional site of Major!, an upcoming documentary about her life. She is a former sex worker and a legend in the LGBT activist community, having been a defender of the rights of trans women of color for the past few decades. She was at Stonewall with Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and participated in the prisoner uprising at Attica. She also raised her son single-handedly while adopting the larger trans youth community as Mama. Currently, Griffin-Gracy serves as the Executive Director of the Trans Gender Variant Intersex Justice organization , which advocates on behalf of incarcerated trans women of color.

[thespiritwas]

About 25 activists locked themselves together to block two entrances of the Ronald Dellums Federal Building in Oakland Friday morning, check out the Storify and live feed here!

[thespiritwas]

Excerpt from Queens In Exile, The Forgotten Ones by Sylvia Rivera

There are two stories how Marsha died. One is that she supposedly committed suicide and the other is that somebody murdered her. They fished her body out of the Hudson River at the end of Christopher Street 9 years ago. It was very shocking for me when I got the telegram. Actually I was really pissed at her because our pact was that we would cross the Jordan together. She would get angry with me when I tried to off myself so we made a pact. That’s why I find it hard to believe she committed suicide.

Marcia had been on Social Security disability for quite some time because she had several nervous breakdowns She had been locked up several times in Bellevue and Manhattan State. Her mind started really going. She had a doctor who did not diagnose her syphilis right away. So when they finally caught it, it was in the second stages. Marsha lived in her own realm and she saw things through different eyes. She liked to stay in that world so with that and the syphilis infection and then her husband, Cantrell, was shot by an off duty officer. He was shot to death and she really went over the edge. She managed to come out of that one, and then she lost at again. She came over to my house dressed like the Virgin Mary in white and blue and she was carrying a wooden cross and a Bible. She came in and started preaching the Bible to me and we had a few words. Then she took the wooden cross and hit me upside the head with it. If it had been any other queen I would probably be in jail because I would have killed her. She drew blood because the nail wasn’t completely bent, and she put a gash in my head. The next day I heard they arrested her and locked her up again so she had several breakdowns.

Bob Kohler who was very close to her and to me says that she committed suicide. He was closer to her the last few months. She would always go down to the end of Christopher Street supposedly talking to her brother and wanting to go talk to her father in the water. And there is some testimony that some guys were messing with her and they threw her in the river. The police couldn’t prove that so I’m still stuck in the middle. When I heard that she was murdered I couldn’t understand why anybody would kill her. Marsha would give the blouse off her back if you asked for it. She would give you her last dollar. She would take off her shoes. I’ve seen her do all these things so I couldn’t see someone killing her. I know there are crazy people out there. I know there are transphobic people out there. But it’s not like she wasn’t a known transperson. She was loved anywhere she went. Marsha was a great woman.

[thespiritwas]

Vote Now- Get Trans Lives Matter on PBS

My short Trans Lives Matter! Justice for Islan Nettles is in the running to air on PBS. 

 Official Selection of PBS Reel 13's weekly short film contest, dedicated to the best in short film.  October 2014 is  “AFROPUNK Month.” Voting begins Now & continues through Wednesday, October 22nd  at 5pm NYC time. Vote more than once.

Get my work on PBS as part of Reel 13 on Channel Thirteen.

I know we can make this happen. Please forward widely.

http://www.thirteen.org/reel13/vote/

 Trans Lives Matter! Justice for Islan Nettles.

Synopsis A powerful and intensely moving document of a community vigil for Islan Nettles a transgender Womyn of Color. Because the brutal and increasing attacks on Trans Womyn of Color are outrageous their oppression causes outrage. Because healing and action tighten our fists and boom our voices. -supported by Ciy Lore & Bronx Documentary Center (BDC)

[thespiritwas]

support Monica Roberts!!

EMERGENCY! Monica Roberts needs our help!

Please signal boost the hell out of this!

Monica Roberts the fierce and fearless activist behind Trans Griot is being unfairly evicted.

We need to come together as a community to help one of our brightest and strongest voices!

If you have any leads on housing in the Houston TX area and/or can help in any way, please contact her immediately at [email protected]!

There is also a donation link on the Trans Griot site.

#transgriot #monica roberts #trans griot #twoc

[thespiritwas]

Barnard Center for Research On Women recently posted the video of the Janet Mock Salon last April.  I had such a great time moderating this panel/roast/celebration/salon in honor of Janet Mock’s book. Check out the unmeasurable brilliance of my sibling Che Gossett, CeCe McDonald, Brittany Cooper, Mey Valdivia Rude and of course the one & only Janet Mock!

#che gossett #Cece Mcdonald #brittany cooper #mey valdivia rude #janet mock #Barnard Center for Research On Women

[thespiritwas]

Happy Birthday Marsha!: an Interview with Reina Gossett

By Morgan M Page (Odofemi)

Making the rounds on your Facebook feed, Tumblr dash, or Twitter moment are hundreds of Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns asking for cash to fund art projects. I’m hard pressed to think of any that are nearly as exciting and groundbreaking as Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel’s Happy Birthday Marsha! - a short film about the everyday lives of Stonewall legends Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two trans women of colour sex workers who helped change history. I sat down, in an internet sort of way, with screenwriter and co-director Reina Gossett to learn more about the upcoming film, the history behind it, and the powerful ways it all relates to our past, present, and future as trans and queer people.

MORGAN PAGE: Reina, I’ve been following your work for several years now, and as a lover of history, I’ve been particularly captivated by your groundbreaking work documenting the lives of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, much of which you’ve posted to your blog thespiritwas.tumblr.com. I’m wondering how you initially learned about them and came to do this work?

REINA GOSSETT: In 2005 I took part in the first Trans Day of Action, an annual day of action organized by Trans Justice of the Audre Lorde Project to highlight the issues facing trans and gender non conforming people of color in New York City.  We were marching through the West Village and I was experiencing how the residents of that neighborhood were organizing against young low income LGBT people of color; the same community of people who helped give the West Village a name as a queer space (and therefore desirable neighborhood) were being targeted and policed.  As I was getting more involved in the organizing around this I kept hearing about how Sylvia Rivera had an encampment on the Christopher Street pier in the mid 90s and how she was supportive of the young people organizing against police surveillance and resident antagonism in 2000.  I remember asking people who knew her if this was the same Sylvia Rivera who helped lead the Stonewall Rebellion, and when learning that it was, being in awe over the span of time that she dedicated to activism. I was filled with inspiration and filled with questions.  Something about her life made my own feel validated.

I’m not sure when I first heard about Marsha P. Johnson, but it was probably a little while later.  I think the historical erasure of her happened in a different way that to me feels so similar to the attempted erasure of black lives from the days of the middle passage and chattel slavery to today. I remember hearing bits and pieces about Marsha, her early activism and then seeing amazing photos of her taken by Diane Davies and in old issues of Drag Magazine that Lee Brewester of Queens Liberation Front published.  Later as I started to befriend Randy Wicker I came into contact with amazing footage that Randy has taken over the years of Marsha and Sylvia, much of which I’ve shared on my blog.  Randy talks a lot about how Marsha’s legacy was nearly lost to history, to me another way of putting it is that the violence of erasure was organized against by people who recognized the value of Marsha’s life not only because of how her actions had huge consequences for the LGBT movement from Stonewall through AIDS activism, but because more and more people are recognizing historical erasure of marginalized lives as a form of violence to be organized against, that no one is disposable, certainly not people navigating immense and multiple forms of oppression.

MP: How much of the script of Happy Birthday Marsha! is based on what actually happened? How did you learn about that? And what was your process like filling in gaps that might’ve existed?

RG: The script for Happy Birthday Marsha! is centered on research I’ve been doing, including interviews with people who knew Marsha the best and were present in the Village during the time of the riots.

But it is informed with my experience going through archives that so often what we come to know as facts or what we come in contact with inside an archive happens through a violent discerning process of whose lives are valuable to record, whose actions are important to note. I wanted to tell a story that wasn’t constrained by what these archives tell us I can say about their lives.  As the author Saidiya Hartman writes, I wanted to write a story “that exceeded the fictions of history…that constitute the archive and determine what can be said about the past.  I longed to write a new story, one unfettered by the constraints of legal documents,” because a lot of times those legal documents and facts exist as obstacles to telling the stories of lives that navigate the violences of historical erasure. 

With that in mind, I set out to share a fuller scope of our social history that extends beyond when we were simply only oppressed or acted incredibly exceptionally.  I wanted to tell something much more complex that challenged the hierarchy of intelligible history and the archive that keeps our stories as trans and gender non-conforming people from ever surfacing in the first place. 

I did this by locating the story in the intimate and everyday actions made by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson, and not to the actions & violences that happened to them. The story moves away from the more fact based work that I have done to record the lives of Sylvia, Marsha and STAR. More important to me than “who threw the first shot glass at the NYPD,” “who had a birthday party on what day” or even “who was present at what time and on what day during the days of the Stonewall rebellion” is giving space for the for the lives and relationships of people who have been treated as disposable when it comes to recounting history in general or even LGBT history to fill the screen and to be the focus, full of agency rather than simply victims of violences.

MP: I know that you’re quite involved in prison abolitionist community work. I’m wondering how both a sense of community and a politics of prison abolitionism informed or will inform the writing and creation of Happy Birthday Marsha?

RG: One of the ways we wanted to structure the story of Happy Birthday Marsha! was to keep the focus on Sylvia and Marsha without recreating the violent gaze of the police and prison, institutions that both had to deal with on a daily basis, well before the 1969 Stonewall riots.  Both of Sylvia and Marsha recount years of violence from the police and developed brilliant analyses around the problem and how to organize around it.

Sylvia and Marsha consistently foregrounded the reality that police and prisons were primary predators for trans people, poor people, people of color, people with disabilities, people in the sex trade and LGBT people in general.  From their actions at Stonewall to the organizing they did with and on behalf of incarcerated members of the Black Panther Party held at the Women’s House of Detention center to their takeover of New York University, which they held until the NYPD tactical police forcibly evicted them, to the incredible statement Sylvia and Marsha and other members of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries wrote that named the police as a source of violence for all LGBT people, Sylvia and Marsha put a huge spotlight on policing as a tool to control their lives and hinder their survival. While Happy Birthday, Marsha! takes place before these things happened, as an origin story of two legendary figures and as a story of people already navigating and surviving police violence, the film will attempt to show how this organizing came from everyday choices - whether staying inside to avoid encounters or throwing bottles at the police to fight back - Sylvia and Marsha made in order to deal with the police and incarceration. 

MP: Marsha and Sylvia have over the past couple of years, in no small part due to your own efforts and as well as those of others within trans and queer community, come to be sort of icons or Saints of trans communities in North America, particularly trans people of colour communities. I’m wondering if you have thoughts on why that is? What about Marsha’s and Sylvia’s stories, the story of STAR, makes them so pivotal to our understanding of our past, current, and future politics? What can we learn from their lives?

RG: I think we just saw that happen in the New Yorker with Michelle Goldberg’s article, which actually exists in a context of silencing, exile & violence that trans and gender non-conforming people have had to navigate within LGBT spaces for a long time. And the lives and work of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson and other self-identified street queens reflect both having to navigate those violences and surviving, fighting back and building relationships with each other in face of them.  I think that is what a lot of people connect to when I share stories about the lives of Sylvia, Marsha and STAR. 

Whether it was what happened at the 1973 NYC pride with Jean O’Leary and the Lesbian Feminist Liberation attacking Sylvia and whole communities of trans people or their organizing other street queens involved in the sex trade to provide housing and support, I think people are hungry for these stories that have had to face incredible erasure.

I think one challenge and what I hope to move this film beyond is that it’s easy to create uncomplicated stories of our history where they are only naming the times we were hurt or times we acted heroically. I want to tell a deeper and more intimate story than I got to through the essays and talks I’ve given about STAR and Sylvia and Marsha.

MP: How did Happy Birthday Marsha! come about? What’s your process been like working with your co-director Sasha Wortzel?

RG: Happy Birthday, Marsha! came out of my time researching, documenting and sharing Sylvia and Marsha’s legacies. I believe that increasing access to the powerful lineage of trans women of color is not only a way to resist the exclusion of trans women of color from the very movements we helped create, but an assertion that our lives are valuable beyond measure in a moment when violence against trans women of color continues to take more and more lives.

Sasha and I initially set off to create a documentary about their lives and developed it in Ira Sach’s Queer/Art/Mentorship program with filmmaker Kimberly Reed.  As we started to do this, we thought it would actually be more powerful to create a film that had doc aspects but was a narrative piece. We thought having trans women of color playing trans lives with a screenplay written by a trans woman of color would be a historic way to tell the story of two larger than life figures.  So Sasha and I set off to write it and, depending on the reception, a sequel titled Star People are Beautiful People.

MP: How can we support Happy Birthday Marsha?

RG: In order to begin work on producing Happy Birthday, Marsha!, Sasha and I must complete our fundraising goal of $25,000. We are well on our way, but need support from everyone who understands the importance of story and representation in claiming a lineage and practicing self-determination. This film, written, co-produced and co-directed by a trans woman of color, will be the first of its kind to reach a wide audience, but only with your help.

Sharing the Kickstarter with friends and your social (media) network is an invaluable way for people to support the project.  For people who can donate we also really appreciate that too. If you want to support the visibility through your own blog or media platform we also really appreciate it. Thank you!