Unveiling Marsha P. Johnson: The Untold Story of Joy, Defiance, and Revolution in Tourmaline’s New Film
As AIDS began its hideous crawl through New York, claiming many of Marsha’s friends, she provided care, cleaning messes, laundering sheets covered in shit, visiting the sick, participating and organizing AIDS walks and dance-a-thons. She continued all of it even in the wake of her own HIV positive diagnosis in 1990.
Protease inhibitors were in the very near future and not a reality for Marsha. She began to talk about “crossing the River Jordan,” her euphemism for death. Still, Marsha performed, though less often and no longer touring. She nurtured, gave care, marched, including at the head of New York’s 1992 Pride Parade, alongside her close friend Sylvia Rivera, who she’d known since her Times Square days.
