From Tiffany Carlson, project and marketing manager:

I graduated NIU with a degree in marketing and have worked my way up over the years into Project Management and now Marketing Manager roles. I love the creative side of things, making visuals, writing copy, etc. But also love the detail-oriented side, planning timelines, budgets and wrangling the team to stay on track.

In my off hours I’m a big reader, I love anything to do with fashion/beauty and LOVE to travel!  I just got back from Belize where I finally snorkeled with sea turtles, and I held my first shark!

“Working mom” is at the top of my list. No one calls my husband a working dad, yet he takes on just as much responsibility with our children as I do. No one asked him if he was returning to work after our children were born, yet that was a hotly debated topic in my circle. When I was pregnant with my son back in 2016, a friend of mine expressed sincere shock that I was planning to return to work after I had the baby. Nothing will give you back those precious years; how could you waste them at work? I cried for two days straight because of comments like these. Okay, some of it was hormones, but I was still upset.

Then I realized, I am a better mother because I work. I don’t judge my friend for giving up her career; everybody should make the choices that make the most sense for themselves and their families. But I like my job, I like my coworkers, and I feel like they make me, well, me. In fact, I was excited to come back from parental leave because it felt like getting back to myself. I’ve spent years building my career, so having the professional part of my life stop abruptly to focus on a new baby was incredibly jarring.

For me, there was so much worth in turning that part of my brain back on and realizing the contribution I can make to people outside of my household. I feel valued by my coworkers in a much different way than I feel valued as a mother or spouse. I realized that I need both in my life. It also sets an example not only for my daughter, who is too young right now to understand, but also for my son who sees that a woman can be both a mommy and a boss and that those two things are not mutually exclusive.

Returning to work was an adjustment. In fact, going back to the NYC rat race after my first child was born was more jarring than the sudden stop. The pace, the commute, and getting back into that swing took time. There was a much easier transition back after my second child, who was born during the pandemic. I didn’t have the opportunity to see friends or much family, so the feeling of external judgement wasn’t there anymore. It was also a much more manageable process easing back in the second time around.

Back to the subject of phrases that should be retired — “work-life balance” is next on my list. There was never a balance for me; the scales tip one way or the other and your attention needs to shift where the load is the heaviest. The idea of an uninterrupted, harmonious balance is an unachievable concept that sets us all up for failure.

Now that many of us have spent the better part of two years working from home, that scale is broken… gone for good. Kids interrupt your Zoom meetings, you take work calls at 8:00 p.m. while cleaning up from dinner, and there is never any break or differentiation between home and work. It is all one and the same. So how do you achieve perfect balance when there is no separation? You don’t.

It can often feel like we live in a constant state of no winning. There is no help, no life raft, especially with small children. You try your best to be present, but you are constantly splitting your focus between all the people that need you. You feel depleted with no end in sight. But you keep going and take some solace in the fact that we are all in it together and that your situation is not unique.

My employer gets it. I work for an organization that understands we’re whole people and that we don’t work in a vacuum. What happens in the world or within your own home impacts your work. And that’s okay. I’m lucky that my employer offers parental leave when so many others do not. And I’m lucky to have a team who understands that life happens and gets in the way of work sometimes. What is shocking to me is how many organizations do not realize that. So many parents are trying to fit within the constraints of a professional box that was built for another time and another place with different expectations.

There are easy days and difficult days, but what keeps me going is knowing that I, like every other “working mom” out there, am doing the best I can. And sometimes my focus needs to be on taking care of myself when I can’t take care of everyone else. Thankfully I have a partner who is in it with me, and we work through it together.

 

Author.

Lauren Ferrara is the Creative Circle VP of Recruiting & Delivery. She’s also a wife and mother of two.

 

From Kitty Snyder, designer and writer:

I was once a purposeful but meandering fish with varying sea changes, as the currents carried me over time: as the daughter of a successful Fisher Price toy designer, then as a young English grad and songwriter, then as a longtime commercial and video producer, and now as a professional designer and copywriter. But in retrospect, it’s all been under the same sunlit surface: storytelling. 

After a solo trip to Italy just weeks before the pandemic, I returned invigorated and wanting to tell stories even more deeply. I realized that as an empath, the practice of UX/UI is a natural fit in my career. I find my happiest work is with projects that make a difference: mental health issues, DEI, environmental issues. I also believe we can find purpose in just about anything; we just have to dig profoundly and breathe life into it.

What is my ideal project? One whereby we discover your unique story together, and I help bring your brand and journey to life. Web design, branding, presentation decks, blogs, marketing design, copywriting/editing; anything using captivating imagery and words. And with my background in producing, I pride myself in being a great communicator during each project.

Thank you, Creative Circle; it’s an honor to be on your roster!

The Evolution of Feminism 

What does it mean to be a feminist today? We have a long way from the days of suffragettes and Rosie the Riveter. Of bra burning and free love. From first wave to third wave to intersectionality, we’ve learned lessons and won victories along the way. Women in the United States won the vote (1920), can open our own bank accounts (1960s), and are recognizing the intersections of class, race, privilege, and gender identity in this struggle for… what exactly? 

The issue with broad movements is that without a specific ask, it’s hard to know whether you identify with the movement or not. The general understanding of feminism changed sometime in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Suddenly, radical thinkers were out and corporate feminism was in, although it didn’t get that name until later. We were no longer trying to change the system, but please let us have a slice of the patriarchal pie, thank you. 

Now, much of feminism is capitalist. We have T-shirts and slogans and very expensive scarves, saying words that have been stripped of their meaning, their authors nothing but relics in the wind: 

The Future Is Female | Girl Power | Unite Women | Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History | Woman Up | Smash the Patriarchy | Sisterhood | We Should All Be Feminists 

Corporate Feminism 

Corporate feminism says that anything that puts women in power is feminist. We’ve waited long enough for a seat at the table; now it’s time to do whatever it takes to get more of us there. This is the feminism of SheEOs and the #girlboss, but is replacing men with a fair share of women really the way to an equitable society? 

That wasn’t a real question. Of course it’s not. Capitalism may have coopted #feminism, but you can’t smash the patriarchy by simply throwing matriarchs in men’s places of power. The point is not to pull up a seat to the table. The point is to get rid of the table. The point is liberation. Which is different from freedom, but we’ll get to that. 

Since the pandemic began, we have seen the fall of the girl boss. While Nasty Gal founder and author of #Girlboss Sofia Amooruso had a limited run of success, Nasty Gal went under like lead in a pool. In her 2020 Atlantic piece, The Girlboss Has Left the Building, Amanda Mull explained, “Like Sheryl Sandbergs self-help hit Lean In before it, #Girlboss argued that the professional success of ambitious young women was a two-birds-one-stone type of activism: Their pursuit of power could be rebranded as a righteous quest for equality, and the success of female executives and entrepreneurs would lift up the women below them.”  

But that didn’t happen, and it never will. Like the boybosses before them, the only person that particular kind of power helps is the person wielding it. 

 

Why I Am Not a Feminist 

Somewhere along the way, feminism became trendy and the real message got lost. Suddenly, women wanted to embrace the title without stepping too far out of the mainstream. In 2017, Jesse Crispin published an incredible piece of feminist writing called Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto. In it, she scoffs at the young feminists who have become almost apologists for feminism, distancing themselves from radicals like Andrea Dworkin. She’s talking to the aforementioned aspiring girlbosses. Crispin explains candidly, Asking for a system that was built for the express purpose of oppression to um, please stop oppressing me?’ is nonsense work. The only task worth doing is fully dismantling and replacing that system.” 

A problem with the broad idea of feminism is that women have different wants and needs, and the public face of the movement somehow turned into upper middle class educated women, usually white, always ambitious. And these women look down upon working class women who would rather find safety in marriage and homemaking than work in grueling conditions. 

The house might be a prison, but when freedom looks like wiping up someone else’s vomit and urine under migraine-inducing fluorescent lighting, can you actually blame someone for asking to be let back into their cell? 

She goes on to explain how the feminist trajectory exemplified individual freedom over community support, family, marriage, and other structures, leaving us as individuals without the aid or assistance of others because we should be able to do it on our own. How very American, and a lovely parallel to our current public health crisis, but that is an analysis for another time.  

Certainly, there are intersectional lenses of feminism that value community support. Such as the feminism of women of color, like the late bell hooks who asked us to imagine more in Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics: Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction.” But that is not the feminism that has been sold in stores and seminars. That’s not the feminism of lucrative book deals. The mainstream narrative has pushed independence. This means freedom, I suppose but that is not the same as liberation. Crispin asks: 

 

How are women faring in the job market compared to men? Does that really matter when due to overwhelming student loans debt, sharply decreased job stability, the gutting of social services and work benefits, rapacious CEOs and boards of directors, and globalization, the world of work and money is hurting everyone? 

 

Feminism, Community Development, and Worker Reform 

The history of feminism is intimately tied to worker reform. The establishment of a federal minimum wage in 1938 was actually the first step in bridging the gender pay gap, at least on an hourly basis. But as Karina Margit Erdelyi points out, there are plenty of places where the gap remains. And then there’s domestic labor and the labor of childbirth and childrearing, which is unpaid and yet essential to the functioning of our society.  

But that’s not the only labor women performed for free. Before women entered the workforce en masse, particularly during and after World War II, women who could afford leisure time thanks to their husbands’ or families’ money were pivotal leaders in philanthropy and community building, even laying the foundation of the social work profession. But today, communities, schools, and children have suffered because that pivotal element of volunteer community organization no longer happens. Women have fewer hours in the day for volunteering. They’re too busy at work. Now there are organizations like nonprofits where women can get paid for the labor of service, but women only make up 43% of leadership in these organizations — despite making up the majority of leadership when their philanthropy was an unpaid service. 

In Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, she draws complex lines between witch hunts, the exploitation of women’s unpaid domestic labor, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the rise of capitalism: 

…capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism. For capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations — the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, and the promise of prosperity vs. the reality of widespread penury — by denigrating the “nature” of those it exploits: women, colonial subjects, the descendants of African slaves, the immigrants displaced by globalization. 

So how do we say Girl Power and Black Lives Matter in the face of all that? 

This is an extreme view that I’m sure plenty of folks may not be 100% on board with, but it does force us to think about the implications of systems and the ways that we participate in them. There may be a way that the capitalist grind can overcome oppression. It may be obvious to some. It may not be necessary to others, which is part of the problem. 

Feminism is fragmented because many women come from complex backgrounds and a variety of belief systems. Not all women are feminists, and they shouldn’t have to be. Not all women are united under the intersectional lens because, despite their own intersectional identities, not all women think the same way. 

Facing the Truth of Biology and Work 

Growing up in the ‘90s, I was fed the narrative that I could do anything a man could do. That not letting my womanhood get in the way of success was essential. As an adult, I realize that is not equality. That is not equity. The fact is women get periods. Women get pregnant. We create life, birth it, and are more often than not the primary caregivers to this offspring. And without those things, our species would die out. Many developed countries have begun to acknowledge that and make sick time available for menstruators with painful cramps. They have generous parental leave policies that include fathers, which ultimately lessens gender discrimination as it encourages both parents to take leave from work. But that is not the case in the United States, which is a big problem. 

I’ll admit, a lot of this is personal. I’ve been a competent student and professional my entire life, but now I am also pregnant and tired. I am nauseous and fatigued and in pain a lot of the time, but I still feel the pressure of showing up and getting my work done and not losing the strides I’ve made for myself in my career. I haven’t felt good in over two months, and my question is this: Is pregnancy that awful, or am I just asking too much of a body that is trying to build a human?  

Because right now, I don’t feel capable and strong and powerful, but maybe that’s because I’m coming up short within a paradigm that doesn’t support the functions of my body. I don’t know what the right answer is when it comes to creating a more equitable society, but I do know that the emotional and mental tolls of living in a female body have been immense. 

I’m not the only one that feels that way. In 2012,  Ann-Marie Slaughter wrote Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. In this deeply personal and poignant piece, she explores the issue of having ambition while wanting to care for your children. Maybe, she hesitatingly suggests, many of us actually want to have the flexibility to be home with our kids. And if we’re a nation that values family, why don’t our policies reflect that? 

I felt resistance turning this discussion about feminism into a discussion about pregnancy and childrearing, but the fact of the matter is that our anatomy and the blessings and curses of it are at the focal point of our oppression. (That’s why birth control and abortion access was and is such a massive deal when it comes to women’s rights.) Let me introduce you to a term I recently learned: the feminization of poverty. This term refers to how the burden of pregnancy and childrearing and life events like divorce affect women overall more than men and worsen their economic situation.  

Not only that, but there is such a thing as the “motherhood penalty” and the “fatherhood reward” when it comes to employment. According to research by sociologist Sherry J. Correll, mothers make 4% less per child while fathers make 6% more. And when the burden of childcare falls on mothers, hiring managers looking out for their bottom line will of course choose a mother last for a job or promotion. During the pandemic we experienced a “she-cession” as many mothers bowed out of the workforce to care for their children who were no longer in school.  

Further evidence of the disregard with which we treat working mothers is that the United States has higher maternal mortality rates than other developed nations. This is often attributed to having less paid leave. 

Until parental responsibilities are equally distributed, this kind of discrimination will not stop. That can’t happen until all parents are awarded parental leave, which has been shown to help even the burden and reduce stigma against working mothers in other developing countries. It also improves maternal health and decreases infant mortality. 

It’s not just about putting more women in leadership roles or eliminating the gender pay gap, but about addressing an entire system built on our unpaid labor. A system that needs and adulates mothers while simultaneously punishing them. 

What Can I Do? 

Here are a few simple initiatives that companies can take to alleviate some of the burden: 

  • Prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion by understanding unconscious bias, and not only recruiting with that in mind but also when making promotions and leadership hires. 
  • Offer generous parental leave that includes both parents so that the burden and stigma of time off does not solely fall on mothers.  
  • Include employee resource groups and offerings for community organizations both internally and externally. Maybe even offer paid time off for charity work. 
  • Vote for policies that support women, children, and families. That includes access to education, contraception, medical services, community support, and financial support for low-income families. 
  • Imagine a future that values cooperation over competition, and implement those values in your organization. 

About the author. 
Alessandra is the mentor, educator, and writer behind Boneseed, a private practice devoted to deep self-inquiry through a range of physical, energetic, and mental modalities. She has over 500 hours of yoga, mentorship, and facilitation training and can be found slinging knowledge on her website, newsletter, and @bone.seed. 

Photo: Mattel/Barbie


Say hello to two new iconic Barbies: Celia Cruz, Afro-Cuban Queen of Salsa, and Julia Alvarez, lauded Dominican-American activist, author, and poet.

These one-of-a-kind role model muñecas were released by Mattel this September 15 in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month — just one example of a broad effort by toy companies to be more inclusive. And Barbie, long criticized for presenting girls with an unrealistic ideal of the female body, has been helping lead the charge towards greater inclusivity. In 2019, Mattel introduced a line of gender-neutral dolls called Creatable World, which are customizable and not limited by gender.

Companies that ignore diversity and inclusivity do so at their peril. Research conducted by Mintel, a marketing research company, shows that nearly nine in ten parents worry about the world in which their children are growing up. If they can help bridge some of the myriad divides that exist by getting toys their kids can relate to, it’s something they are willing to pay for.

Let’s take a look at the legendary icons who Mattel chose to honor.

Celia Cruz

Celia Cruz, “La Guarachera de Cuba,” is a symbol of Cuban and Latin culture and was a pioneer of Afro-Latinidad. She was known as the “Latin Triple Threat” — a powerful stage performer, on-screen actor, and musical recording sensation who managed to find immense success in the male-dominated music scene.

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“Her long and storied career serves as an endless inspiration for aspiring musicians. Through the Celia Cruz Foundation, her legacy continues to provide scholarships for young Latino students,” Barbie said on Instagram.

Born in 1925 in Havana, Cruz was one of an extended family of 14. After winning a talent show and making a name for herself, she quit school to go after her dream of making it big in music.

In 1950, Cruz became the first Black woman to be the lead singer of the famed La Sonora Matancera orchestra. But despite the group’s success in radio and film, when nightlife evaporated after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Cruz had to migrate. She first went to Mexico before landing in the United States, where she found fame by becoming part of the salsa music scene of the early 1970s.

The Queen of Salsa is famed for her opera-like voice, flamboyant costumes, brightly colored wigs, and higher-than-high heels. Cruz won three Grammys and four Latin Grammy awards and has been the subject of numerous films and documentaries. She passed away in 2003 from brain cancer. Her autobiography was published posthumously in 2004, and just this year, a street in the Bronx was named after her.

Julia Àlvarez

Award-winning multi-hyphenate Dominican-American author, educator, and activist Julia Álvarez is the other icon Mattel is celebrating. Born in New York City in 1950, she spent the first ten years of her life in the Dominican Republic, until her father’s involvement in a failed political rebellion forced her family to flee their country back to New York.

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“Julia Álvarez is an award-winning Dominican-American writer, educator, and activist, whose vast body of work explores multicultural themes as they relate to children and adults alike,” Barbie wrote on Instagram.

Much of Álvarez’s work has been influenced by her experience as a Dominican-American. She is known for closely examining cultural expectations of women both here in the United States and the Dominican Republic and taking a penetrating look at cultural stereotypes.

Álvarez rose to prominence with the novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), and Yo! (1997). Many literary critics consider her one of the most significant Latina writers due to her widespread international commercial success, and her preeminence was entrenched when President Barack Obama awarded her the National Medal of Arts in 2013.

Representation matters for those of Hispanic and Latinx origin, perhaps now more than ever.

The Census Bureau projects that by 2060, one in three women will be Hispanic in the United States. Mattel likely hoped to be heralded for their effort to be more representational by creating these two Barbies, but this may have backfired. Many have taken to social media to decry what they see as an empty gesture and well-timed publicity stunt. Why? Because these one-of-a-kind dolls are not for sale, according to the official Twitter account of Barbie.

As you might imagine, the Twittersphere is not happy — many are upset and see this as a faux equity gesture. But perhaps Mattel will reconsider if there is an overwhelming clamoring for these iconic Barbies to be commercially released. We hope they decide to bring the Celia Cruz and Julia Álvarez Barbies to market, because the Hispanic community deserves to see themselves represented beyond the tokenism of a one-of-a-kind doll.


About the author
An award-winning creator and digital health, wellness, and lifestyle content strategist—Karina writes, produces, and edits compelling content across multiple platforms—including articles, video, interactive tools, and documentary film. Her work has been featured on MSN Lifestyle, Apartment Therapy, Goop, Psycom, Yahoo News, Pregnancy & Newborn, Eat This Not That, thirdAGE, and Remedy Health Media digital properties and has spanned insight pieces on psychedelic toad medicine to forecasting the future of work to why sustainability needs to become more sustainable.

There is perhaps no political demonstration more iconic, well known, or influential in American history than the 1963 March on Washington. Hundreds of thousands of people participated in the event, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech” and the actions taken that day spurred congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While the March remains a benchmark in civil right history, one of the key architects of the March itself is all too often overlooked.

Bayard Rustin was a fearless and prolific leader for civil rights, the labor movement, socialism, and gay rights in the United States, and played a significant role in many of the biggest political demonstrations in the 20th century.

Rustin was born on March 17, 1912, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents. Rustin was exposed to civil rights activism from a young age, as his grandmother was a member of the NAACP, and he credited his own activism with being raised Quaker. His grandmother was also accepting of the fact that Rustin was gay: when he told her he was more interested in men than women, she is said to have responded, “I suppose that’s what you need to do.”

Rustin spent his early adulthood cutting his teeth on organizing and activism. He was expelled from Ohio HBCU Wilberforce University for organizing a strike and eventually landed in New York where he joined the Young Communist League; he left after being ordered to “cease protesting racial segregation in the US armed forces” — and pursued a career as a vocalist.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Rustin worked with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist justice organization founded by A.J. Muste as well as A. Philip Randolph, who founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly Black labor union. Together the three men organized a March on Washington in 1941, to protest racial segregation and discrimination in the armed forces, but the March was cancelled when then President Roosevelt issued an executive order banning racial and ethnic discrimination in the defense industries.

Rustin was arrested and imprisoned a number of times for his political demonstrations. He served 26 months for resisting the draft as a conscientious objector and was arrested multiple times for desegregating buses, including organizing the Journey of Reconciliation, also known as the First Freedom Ride.

His outspokenness and activism for Black liberation was inextricably linked with being openly gay. Rustin stated that to protest was to educate children and adults that segregation and racist treatment of Black people in America was not okay, going on to say:

“It occurred to me shortly after that that it was an absolute necessity for me to declare homosexuality, because if I didn’t, I was a part of the prejudice. I was aiding and abetting the prejudice that was a part of the effort to destroy me.”

Rustin was fearlessly and unapologetically open regarding his sexuality, which was rare at the time, but intolerance towards his being gay cost him opportunities and forced the brilliant organizer to take a back seat during the historic movement.

After being arrested in California in 1953 for sexual activity with another man, Rustin resigned from the Fellowship of Reconciliation. When he and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, other Black leaders voiced concern that Rustin’s sexuality would damage the civil rights movement — Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell even threatened to falsely accuse King and Rustin of having an affair in order to get King to cancel a march he and Rustin planned. King capitulated to Powell’s demands and distanced himself from Rustin (who stepped down from the SCLC) to the dismay of young African Americans.

From there, Rustin organized the March on Washington alongside A. Philip Randolph, and although he played an undeniably pivotal role in the event, he was once again forced out of the spotlight by other leaders who feared the impact his sexuality might have on the movement. Throughout the following decades, Rustin continued his advocacy, and in the 1980s, he addressed his sexuality more publicly and openly advocated for gay rights.

It’s truly unfortunate that Bayard Rustin is often left out of mainstream narratives when it comes to the March on Washington, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and other Civil Rights achievements simply due to his sexuality.

But hopefully we can continue to pay tribute to those like Rustin who were denied their flowers despite their brilliance and power. And while Rustin was forced to sacrifice one part of who he was for the sake of another, the fact that he never denied who he was and always lived truthfully is the very thing that made him a great leader and man of integrity.

After all, according to Rustin, “To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true…”

We can learn so much from Bayard Rustin, from the meaning of non-violent protest to how divisions in race and class are rooted in socioeconomic inequalities. But we can also learn from how he lived his life. That to know yourself, to live in your truth, to speak truth to power, is to be fearless.


About the author.
Sam Mani writes about work, creativity, wellness, and equity — when she’s not cooking, binging television, or annoying her cat.

June 28, 1969. The Stonewall Inn, a known gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, was raided by the NYPD. This was nothing new. What was new was the response — the gay community stood their ground and fought back. Many people who were there that night identified Marsha P. Johnson, a 23-year-old drag artist, as one of the main instigators. Days of protests and riots followed, activating a movement in the LGBT community to fight for their right to exist without the threat of violence and police harassment. A fight that continues to this day.

Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1945, Marsha began wearing dresses at age 5 but stopped shortly after that due to the violence and harassment she experienced as a result. Her mother told her that being homosexual made her “lower than a dog,” so as soon as she got her high school diploma and turned 18, she crossed the river to New York City with nothing more than $15 and a bag of clothes.

Marsha P. Johnson was a character known in the Village and throughout the City for more than just her eccentric fashion.

She constantly showed up with a friendliness that came with no agenda — always the type to say “hello” whether she knew you or not. The P in her name iconically stood for “Pay it no mind,” which was her response to anyone who questioned or challenged her gender expression.

Marsha knew the dangers and hardships of living on the streets as a Black trans woman and working NYC’s Westside piers as a prostitute. Along with fellow trans activist and friend Sylvia Rivera, she founded STAR, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, which provided resources to trans youth living on the streets — including STAR House, which offered them safe shelter. Marsha’s generous spirit defined her activism. She was constantly giving all she could and was committed to taking care of the community and folks that came through STAR House.

In the 1970s, the mainstream gay rights movement shifted away from the populations that started it all.

The rights and visibility of white, middle-class homosexuals began to take priority over the street queens and trans women of color. Heritage of Pride, who ran the Gay Pride events, went as far as to ban all transvestites from the parade because they claimed that the drag queens were seen as too “different” and “other” in a way that would hinder the progress towards rights for white homosexual men. So, instead of marching in the parade, Marsha and Sylvia instead marched IN FRONT of the official parade. As leaders in the movement for gay liberation, they took their rightful place in leading that parade.

When the AIDS epidemic hit, Marsha took care of patients when others would often stigmatize and ostracize them as they suffered. She challenged the notion that AIDS somehow made a person dirty or undeserving of respect; she believed you should “stand as close to them as you can and help them as much as you can.” She advocated for remembering those who died of AIDS for all the courage they had fighting the disease.

She was known as Saint Marsha to the many folks who knew her throughout the City. The magic of Marsha P. Johnson was her kindness and generosity, and that built her legend. She would spend the last two dollars she had on a box of cookies and then walk through the Village to the Piers, handing them out. She knew what it was like to be hungry and living on the street, so she knew that gift of a chocolate chip cookie to a starving street queen was a great gift. If there was anything she had, even just a bag of potato chips, she would hand that over to homeless queer youth she would come across.

Every year, she marched because Marsha knew the fight was never over — even as Pride events began leaning more towards celebration than protest — sharing that:

“You never completely have your rights, one person, until you ALL have your rights. And I think as long as one gay person has to walk for gay rights, God, all of us should be walking for gay rights.”

Marsha P. Johnson died in June of 1992; her body was found in the Hudson River.

She put her life on the line fighting for LGBT rights — while the police ruled her death a suicide, there was no thorough investigation into her death. Those that knew her highly doubt the validity of that ruling. Marsha would sometimes get harassed on the Pier, and many queens had been subject to violence in that area. Despite those circumstances, the police did not investigate it any further. Hundreds of people showed up to her funeral, overflowing the church, and they had to shut down 7th Avenue for her procession.

At a time when gay people were expected to hide who they really were and conform to the standards of straight American norms to survive, Marsha’s decision to authentically present as herself every day was a radical act of rebellion. While she actively fought for gay liberation, ending police brutality, and AIDS awareness, she was an advocate for the fundamental human right to exist at the core of it all.


About the author.
An award-winning creator and digital health, wellness, and lifestyle content strategist—Karina writes, produces, and edits compelling content across multiple platforms—including articles, video, interactive tools, and documentary film. Her work has been featured on MSN Lifestyle, Apartment Therapy, Goop, Psycom, Yahoo News, Pregnancy & Newborn, Eat This Not That, thirdAGE, and Remedy Health Media digital properties and has spanned insight pieces on psychedelic toad medicine to forecasting the future of work to why sustainability needs to become more sustainable.