The mother of a movement

It’s increasingly rare that a day goes by, at the bookstore where I work, without someone asking for books on trans culture and stories reflecting our lives. People are always searching for literature as a guide on their path to freedom. Talking with trans youth about their days at school, recommending books to loving family members, helping people pick out gifts for friends recovering from surgery, and working with trans writers and legends is the part of my work that I most enjoy.

Now I have a new recommendation to put in people’s hands. I have been waiting for a book on Miss Major Griffin-Gracy for so long and am delighted that one is here during her lifetime. In May, Verso Press published Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary, a collection of oral histories assembled by Toshio Meronek, who worked as Major’s personal assistant and recorded their conversations over many years. Miss Major Speaks is a radical addition to the trans literary canon. I spoke with Miss Major about her Chicago roots, the connections between prison abolition and trans liberation, and what it’s like to realize her dreams. 

Major was born in the 1940s and raised in Chicago, where one of her early formative experiences was seeing the Jewel Box Revue. The Jewel Box Revue was an elegant queer performance ensemble, a traveling act that featured song, dance, and comedy. Her parents brought her there for the first time “to teach me a lesson, and it didn’t work.” She later convinced the staff to let her perform onstage as a showgirl. “I walked to ‘You Are Beautiful.’ I remember being out there with diamonds coming out of my hips. It was very lovely. My mother came to the show and she recognized me. From then on, it was not the same.” Major’s mother often tried to institutionalize her, sending her to see a psychiatrist at Bridewell, a detention center, for what we’d now call conversion therapy. She notes, “I left because I had to; it was the fact that my mother thought Chicago wasn’t big enough for the both of us, so I had to leave. Otherwise I would’ve stayed.”

Miss Major says she didn’t have much care when she was first coming out. She met a friend on Cottage Grove who introduced her to the local scene. “She hipped me to what was going on. I wound up staying with her and found out I could dress the way I felt like. She took me to my first ball, and I got to see all sorts of girls perform and do their thing.”

She would later walk in the balls herself. Black queer and trans nightlife was a lifeline to Major in opening doors to her self-expression. Ball culture also showed her a new way of forming family. In the book she remembers, “I knew Crystal Lebejia and the House of Xtravaganza when the ballroom scene started. The premise of houses looking out for their kids . . . it’s opening up some people’s minds to the possibility of queer families, of non-blood families—that you shouldn’t need marriage licenses and birth certificates to prove any damn thing to anyone.” 

Major is well-known as a mother figure herself. When asked if mothering came naturally to her, she said, “Yes it did. When the first girl asked me [to be her mother], I remember I cried because that was so endearing of her and every girl since then that’s seen me the same way. You only have one mother, and it was something I believed in, due to the fact that mine was so austere. It was very sweet. It’s something that always makes me feel good inside.”  

The first activist meeting she attended was with the Chicago chapter of the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights organization in the U.S., founded in 1950. She was taking notes at the meetings, but that didn’t last very long. “The sad thing for me about the Mattachines was always: why would someone want to assimilate into something that was so hateful? Into this society that couldn’t care less if we went extinct?” She didn’t care for their assimilationist politics and their strict suit and tie uniform that fit with the group’s desire to blend into straight society. 

Major also disavows the whitewashing and centering of Stonewall within the queer and trans movement. She was at the Stonewall Riots, but is frustrated that “Stonewall for my girls wasn’t a monumental moment,” adding, “Most monuments are for one person, or one thing that some person did in their life.” She is not stuck in that moment—she’s done so much political organizing since that time, including providing home health care when HIV/AIDS began devastating New York, driving a needle exchange bus in San Francisco, and working as the executive director for the Trans, Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP). 

When asked why prison abolition is essential to trans liberation, she says, “It’s simple, if prisons didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have any place to go [laughs]. They arrest us, and where do they think they’re gonna put us? A long time ago it was mental hospitals. In New York, it was Bellevue; in Chicago, it was Cook County. People don’t need those things—they need health care, a place to live, to work and grow, where they can go and be themselves. They don’t consider us to be a viable human being, they think of us as trash, something to be thrown out. That’s not true. I’m not trying to be anything I’m not.”

While imprisoned at Dannemora, she met Frank “Big Black” Smith, who became a mentor and friend. She speaks lovingly of their relationship and credits him as the “instrument for my politicization. The first question Black asked me was, ‘What do you go by? What’s your name, baby?’ He’s the one that let me know that during things like the [Attica] riot or getting justice done, you can’t throw anybody under the bus. You can’t leave anyone behind.” He also taught her about prison geographies, how entire towns are constructed around a prison economy. She mourned when a poem he wrote for her was lost in a repossessed storage unit.  

I asked her about how close a world without prisons and police feels, where everyone has the resources they need to survive. “I dream of that world because, what a wonderful world that would be. To be free of people’s judgement and ridicule. To be accepted for who you are, what you can do, what you can provide . . . I believe that if you keep striving, you’’re bound to get it.” 

One of Major’s longtime dreams has come true in recent years through the House of GG in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she now resides. She describes the House of GG as “a culmination of all of my dreams, hopes, and aspirations. We must survive, and this place is all of that, rolled up into one. I get girls who come out here to relax, to just take time to enjoy the grass, the sun, the rain, anything that nature has to offer because it’s free. Take a deep breath, think about why you got in this field, what you want to accomplish, and why you’re doing it. When you go back, you give the motherfuckers absolute total hell. 

“We have a pool, a jacuzzi, a swing, a merry-go-round, it’s heaven. They find it hard to believe—relaxing and feeling good . . . that’s one of the bases of being human! Finding out what your needs are, being able to trust yourself and the people that are around you. I finally have the space that allows transgender people to do it, to enjoy and realize they’ve never had the chance to simply relax.”

Miss Major’s legacy is one of unconditional care. She reminds Black trans women, folks who are incarcerated and who’ve been abandoned by their families, along with movement activists, and people around the world, that they are deserving of the utmost love and care. She shows us that trans people can provide that for each other, even when the world wants to eradicate us. When asked what she hopes this book will accomplish, she says, “I just want people to know that somebody out there cares about them—somebody cares.”

Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Toshio Meronek
Verso, paperback, 176 pp., $19.95, ebook, $5.99,  versobooks.com/products/2787-miss-major-speaks