Marsha P. Johnson was bold, fearless, kind and complicated. A key activist in Stonewall, the Black trans drag artist also founded STAR to care for trans people, and was an enigma that anybody who met her could never forget.

However, Marsha’s life ended abruptly at the age of just 46 in 1992 when her body was discovered in New York’s Hudson River. While she said the P in her name stood for ‘pay it no mind’, the story of her incredible life — and the circumstances in which she died — calls for the exact opposite.

‘She was a visionary who held an idea of what the world could be at a time when conditions didn’t reflect that,’ says activist Tourmaline, who spent 20 years studying Marsha, and wrote the first biography and film Happy Birthday, Marsha! ‘There’s always a new facet of Marsha to di

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