Marsha P. Johnson, born on this day in 1945, was a civil rights activist, founding member of the Gay Liberation Front and the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.), and participant in the Stonewall Uprising of 1969.
Johnson was one of the first drag queens to go to the Stonewall Inn after they began allowing women and drag queens inside; it was previously a bar for only gay men.
On the early morning hours of June 28th, 1969, the Stonewall uprising occurred. While the first two nights of rioting were the most intense, the clashes with police would result in a series of spontaneous demonstrations and marches through the gay neighborhoods of Greenwich Village for roughly a week afterwards.
According to the New-York Historical Society, “While there are many conflicting stories about the uprising’s start, it is clear that Marsha was on the front lines. In one account, she started the uprising by throwing a shot glass at a mirror. In another, she climbed a lamppost and dropped a heavy purse onto a police car, shattering the windshield.” After Stonewall, Johnson became more involved in activism, helping found the Gay Liberation Front.
To help provide a home for vulnerable trans youth, Marsha and her friend Sylvia Rivera together formed the Street Transvestite Activist Revolutionaries (STAR). The first STAR House was in the back of a seemingly abandoned truck in Greenwich Village, housing nearly 24 people.
One morning, they returned to the truck just as its driver was pulling away with STAR residents sleeping inside, who were then forced to jump from a moving vehicle. Marsha and Sylvia then rented and fixed up a dilapidated building to house STAR residents for eight months before being evicted.
Shortly after a pride parade in 1992, Johnson’s body was discovered floating in the Hudson River. Police ruled the death a suicide, but Johnson’s friends and other members of the local community insisted Johnson was not suicidal and noted that the back of Johnson’s head had a massive wound.
Johnson was cremated and, following a funeral at a local church, friends released her ashes over the river.
The 2012 documentary “Pay It No Mind – The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson” heavily features segments from a 1992 interview with Johnson, filmed shortly before her death.
“Darling, I want my gay rights now”
- Marsha P. Johnson
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Legions used to do it but Roman roads aren’t the same as modern ones. I wonder if you could just get a bunch of people unfamiliar with roads coordinating with skilled labor and people who can like manage both effectively. Or if it’s better just to have specialists on it.
Also, fuck roads anyway should be rail.
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American and Canadian infrastructure is pretty shit for a modern Western economy tbh, far below the average Western country. Not just the quality but also the inherent structure and design of it (hyper specialized for car transportation)
So much of the wealth and progress is concentrated into technology, science, and finance that I think these two countries would actually have to focus a lot om efficiency o improve their infrastructure, especially if they lose all their dirt cheap overseas resources and global currency abuse
The transit options in the GTA (and “extended GTA” like Kitchener-Waterloo) in southern Ontario is abysmal, given its population density. KW has half a million people and is only about 100Km from downtown Toronto, and the weekend transit option to get to/from Union station is an hourly bus to a Go Transit station that’s still an hour away from Union by train. And it’s so ridiculously overcrowded that some people have to stand up on the bus for the hour-long ride on highway 401. And we only got even that basic hybrid route this year.
Proper weekend commuter train service is still years away while Metrolinx builds the most basic, saddest, low-speed train infrastructure to bypass the cargo train routes that take priority. 2 hours to go 100Km in the densest part of the country. What the fucking fuck.
Meanwhile, endless cash is thrown at expanding the ever-more-monstrous 401, the most harrowing highway in the country. It’s bumper-to-bumper traffic at 120KPH. All the worst aspects of urban and highway driving somehow combined into one terrifying experience.
You forgot about the VIA Rail in Kitchener that costs 40 dollars for the cheapest seats and is regularly late by up to an hour
But yea, I totally forgot how much worse it is outside of GTA, Metro Vancouver, and Montreal
Yeah, VIA is technically an option. But it’s schedule is so inconvenient (not just schedule slips, but the actual timetable even when on time) and frequently sold-out that it’s just not worth considering most of the time.