Miss Major, Faltas, Kings and Queens

I have been reflecting on the life and work of Miss Major after her passing this month at the age of 78. As an activist, organizer, and cultural icon, it is remarkable how much she accomplished and the ways that her impact resonated and grew over decades. In recent days, I have seen many people working for diverse causes speak to the influence she had on their work.

I have been especially grateful for Miss Major Speaks, the 2023 book written with Toshio Meronek. In a series of conversations, Miss Major tells her story and shares her wisdom. It is a generous and joyful book, rich with lessons on organizing, healthcare, trans history, freedom, and building community. I am interested in political and artistic lineages, and was especially excited to revisit the story of how Miss Major learned from Frank “Big Black” Smith and other veterans of the Attica Uprising while they were all placed in solitary confinement near each other in the 1970s. Smith was a pivotal organizer in the uprising, and Major’s history with him reminds me how directly the work of incarcerated people built the movement for gay and trans liberation.

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 riot or getting justice done—stuff like that—you can’t throw anybody under the bus. You can’t leave anybody behind. And that’s become my favorite thing to say to people: I won’t throw anybody under the bus, and I’m not leaving anybody. It has to include us all, or it’s not going to work. It was mind-altering. It was like that epiphany that rings a bell in your brain. Bong! That’s what it did. And so I’ve spent the next forty years trying to find out what bell I can set off to wake up my community.

You can purchase the book here, or request a copy from your local library.

Between beatings and torture from the prison guards, Major and Smith passed long hours talking and exchanging ideas. He shared his poetry with her and suggested she read The Communist Manifesto, and shortly after coming home from incarceration, Major began organizing on a different scale. (“You didn’t immediately go out and start organizing,” Meronek prompts. “Uh, no! I had to get pretty first!” Major answers.)

From personal acts of kindness can come incredible reverberations of power. Major also tells the story of meeting Ceyenne Doroshow at the Desiree Alliance conference for sex workers. Doroshow, herself an icon and activist, is Smith’s trans daughter, and his relationship with Major helped him to recognize her and politically mentor her, as well. Today, Doroshow continues working directly in that legacy, including with the organization she founded, GLITS (Gays and Lesbians Living in Transgender Society).

So much work has carried us to this moment. When we lose someone like Miss Major, it is cause to renew our efforts in carrying that work forward in whatever ways we can, large and small. As I write this, I send a small donation to GLITS and to Major’s House of gg. I encourage you to do the same!

It was only two years ago that Miss Major published Miss Major Speaks. Cecilia Gentili published Faltas, a contemporary milestone of trans writing, also only two years before her tragic death. The last decade has seen the emergence of robust and vibrant trans literary cultures on an unprecedented scale, but it was never a given that this would occur. For many reasons, these books could have remained unwritten and unpublished. But gay and trans people have worked to create these possibilities over decades, and we’ll continue to expand our freedom in the decades ahead.

I love the letter in Faltas that Cecilia wrote to her departed grandmother, a woman who cared for and affirmed Cecilia as a child. I would quote the entirety to you, but this is how the letter closes.

All that pain made me strong, of course, but who wants to be strong? I wanted to be happy! And you wanted me to be happy, too. How remarkable to want another person to be happy. This is what I feel when I get one of those girls started on hormones. Who is ever happier than a transsexual starting on hormones? They all call me Mom, but maybe I should ask them to call me Grandma.

At times, when I am watching a movie and I loudly make a comment about what just happened as if someone was with me, even though I am alone, I see Mami all over me. But sometimes when I tell my children I love them, I see you all over me, too. When I think of you, I think of a woman who in her greatest pain was full of joy, and who understood that the joy was not to be kept.

We are all blessed to have lived in the time of Cecilia Gentili and Miss Major and to have their words to carry us forward. Sometimes I feel powerless in the face of the fascist state, but their books remind me that simply showing someone love and making sure they are not left behind can be enough to change the world.

These legacies were on my mind when I went to my local No Kings protest. There were some fantastic signs, delightful inflatable costumes, and the show of community reminded me why I love my rural home. The crowd also tragically recited the Pledge of Allegiance, and immediately after someone put “Born in the USA” on the speakers. When everyone marched on the sidewalk, my partner and I took off to get lunch. Nevertheless, I was grateful to be there and to see my neighbors, undeterred. We all must move forward together now. My contrary brain supplied a refrain, which I remember from jokes during the first round of these protests. Yes, Queens! Yes to all the amazing women who have led the way here. There’s no need to act so respectable, it’s time to follow our many queens into the future. I failed to get the Free Palestine banner from a friend’s house and attended empty-handed, in my street clothes and a mask, but made a plan to coordinate handouts next time. It would have been a beautiful day to tell people about Miss Major, and I think the crowd would have enjoyed receiving a paper about her life and work. I see in other cities that anarchists led breakaway marches, too, teaching the people that they don’t need to obey. Actively refusing respectability, which is another gay lesson!

There are so many reasons to stand against Trump. Never in my life has it seemed more possible for us to all come together and birth the new world.

&c

Miss Major going on book tour and having a baby in her last years—what an affirmation of life. I’m in my early forties, and have been surprised by how many transsexual people have become parents, although we always have! Contrary to the scare tactics, twenty or thirty years of hormone injections hardly seem to make everyone impotent. Major had her first child in the eighties and was a loving parent.

Little Puss Press published Faltas, and they are about to publish the collected Gendertrash From Hell. Wow! Get those preorders in with your local independent bookstore now to help this book get all the attention it deserves.

Ceyenne published Cooking in Heels, her memoir-in-cookbook, in 2012. It’s another classic of trans prison writing. She talks about her relationship with Frank Smith in the documentary Major!