As a part of their International Women's Day celebrations, the New York Times released a feature called 'Overlooked', in which they profile 15 historically influential women whose obituaries were not printed by the outlet of the time of their death.
One of these women is Marsha P. Johnson, an icon of queer history. A transgender woman of colour, drag queen and sex worker, Johnson is anecdotally known as the person who threw the first brick in the 1969 Stonewall riots.
She, along with Sylvia Rivera, was the founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) to assist young transgender people. She and Rivera also acted as mothers at STAR House, a home for young queer sex workers, transgender people and drag queens who were homeless in New York City.
In later years, Johnson worked with ACT UP, and provided care for people during the 1980s AIDS crisis.
In July of 1992, Johnson passed away under mysterious circumstances. Her body was found in the Hudson River and officials ruled her death a suicide, but several people — her loved ones as well as LGBTQI+ activists — came forward to argue that Johnson was not suicidal, and her case should be further investigated. Johnson's death is now ruled 'undetermined', and her case has officially remained open since 2012.
"Marsha P. Johnson could be perceived as the most marginalised of people — black, queer, gender-nonconforming, poor,” Susan Stryker, an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona, told the Times. “You might expect a person in such a position to be fragile, brutalized, beaten down. Instead, Marsha had this joie de vivre, a capacity to find joy in a world of suffering."
"She channeled it into political action, and did it with a kind of fierceness, grace and whimsy, with a loopy, absurdist reaction to it all.”
The New York Times states that many notable women have been forgone from their prestigious obituaries section:
“Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries: of heads of state, opera singers, the inventor of Stove Top stuffing and the namer of the Slinky,” the paper notes. “The vast majority chronicled the lives of men, mostly white ones; even in the last two years, just over one in five of our subjects were female.”
Other women featured include Ida B. Wells, Henrietta Lacks, Margaret Abbott, Emily Warren Roebling, Ada Lovelace, Qiu Jin, Sylvia Plath, Nella Larsen, Charlotte Bronte, and more.
The outlet now plans to retrospectively honour women and non-male people in a regular 'Overlooked' section in the NYT obituaries.
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