miss major speaks: Conversations with a black trans revolutionary

Review by Joel Keith

What is it that moves so many of our brilliant, problematic writers, when they’re at their best, to tell on themselves? To not only refute, implicitly, their own worst impulses, but diagnose, expertly, perhaps unconsciously, those impulses’ logic? “The entire history of women’s struggle for self-determination has been muffled in silence over and over,” wrote Adrienne Rich in 1979. “One serious cultural obstacle encountered by any feminist writer is that each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.” And so, in describing how patriarchy has worked to delegitimise women’s literature by wilfully ignoring its history, Rich articulates precisely the method she herself will use to delegitimise trans people: by passing over us, by and large, in telling silence, so that when we do, very occasionally, arise—as we do in her 1978 essay ‘Motherhood: The Contemporary Emergency and the Quantum Leap’, in which she cites The Transsexual Empire, the unabashedly hateful and theoretically gymnastic urtext of what today is called gender-critical feminism, which Rich helped bring to publication—we appear as rootless aberrants, without context or history. Not only does Rich articulate this strategy of “[muffling] in silence”; in doing so, she tells us from whom she has, consciously or unconsciously, learnt it. “There is a danger run,” she warns elsewhere, “by all powerless people: that we forget we are lying, or that lying becomes a weapon we carry over into relationships with people who do not have power over us.” And: “Lying is done with words, and also with silence.” It is both into and from this lying silence—that is to say, the trans-people-sized hole that for so long lay at the heart of gay and lesbian narratives of queer history—that (forgive me) Miss Major Speaks. 

The book, out from Verso, is drawn from roughly “a thousand hours” of conversations between the transgender activist and elder Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and the writer Toshio Meronek, who has recorded, condensed and arranged them into ten loosely-themed sections. These conversations’ hodgepodge origins—“in airports and cabs and greenrooms before speeches”—help explain their freewheeling ease. As Major’s longtime assistant, Meronek has developed a rapport with his idol that feels loving and lived-in, and a fluency with her history that could fuel a PhD thesis or Tumblr fanpage (Meronek, one senses from his excellent introduction to the book, is deeply, perhaps incurably, millennial). This fluency is key to the book’s success. To criticise Miss Major Speaks for its digressiveness would miss the point entirely—the book is, in a sense, all digression, just as Miss Major’s life, and queer life more broadly, is itself a digression from the main “arc”, so to speak, of narrativised history, which as we know is straight, male, capitalist, colonial, and deadly on impact—but it’s thanks to the expertise with which Meronek is able to guide these conversations that its digressiveness does not become, or only rarely becomes, meandering. He always seems to know the right name to supply, date to provide, or old remark of Major’s to quote back to her; even when their conversation returns to events it has already covered (which it does fairly often), it is to illuminate something new and interesting about them. Grace Paley once described plot as “the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” Miss Major Speaks could easily have ended up dutifully, dully historical, entombing the living, breathing Miss Major in the facts of her own past; instead gives us a sense, in all its digressive unpredictability, of the open destiny of her life, as she continues to live it. 

Born into a middle-class Chicago family in (or near) 1946, Miss Major’s queerness was not, shall we say, embraced by those around her. After high school, her parents sent her to college in Minnesota; she moved back home after one term, having being outed by her roommate. At nineteen, her father kicked her out, and she and a friend, unable to get a cab to stop, stole a car to drive to New York. They were pulled over for speeding, and Major spent six months in jail. From there she bought a bus ticket, finally, to New York, where she worked first at a morgue overseen by her aunt, then as a drag performer, and finally as a sex worker and occasional cab driver. Sex work paid comparatively well, but meant routine harassment, violence and sexual assault at the hands of police, who paid “not in cash but in fewer arrests” (as per Meronek’s introduction). If she didn’t want to get a cop off, it meant time either in jail, or in Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, for conversion therapy. Eventually she’d had it, and, after committing a string of robberies with a boyfriend named Tex, landed in Dannemora Prison for five years (she never heard from Tex again).

Here she met Frank “Big Black” Smith, an organiser of the Attica Prison Rebellion and her neighbour in solitary. They talked lengthily about the prison industrial complex; strategies for organising, both inside prison and out; and the importance of solidarity, of leaving none behind. “He was the instrument for my politicisation,” says Major; “My mentor. My love.” Once out of prison, she formed Angels of Care, a collective of gurls (the name Major uses to refer to her wide, wide trans femme circle). The Angels worked as nurses for people with HIV, whom the medical establishment and even many of their own families largely disdained to touch. In the late 70s she moved to California, where she formed another Angels of Care collective in San Diego, and drove San Francisco’s first (extremely controversial) needle exchange van. While in San Francisco, she worked mostly in the Tenderloin neighbourhood, a relatively safe area for trans and otherwise queer residents that endured constant efforts from various agents of gentrification—governments, real estate moguls, prison conglomerates—to dispel that queer population. Working at the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Centre (TARC), Major turned a next-door apartment that was vacant into GiGi’s Place (for “Griffin-Gracy”), a drop-in centre for the gurls of San Francisco. And so she has gone on for decades since, becoming one of the world’s most determined, eccentric and beloved trans activists, mentors and, to many, mothers. She has advocated tirelessly for trans gurls in prisons and on the street to queer non-profits run by white cis men, who would otherwise have been quick to forget them; spoken on, become disillusioned with, and at times fierily quit, panels for U.S. presidential candidates and the U.N.; befriended and influenced Angela Davis; and opened another drop-in centre in 2016, this time in Little Rock, Arkansas, which doubles as her own home. 

“Remember your history,” Major reminds us. It’s an injunction that resonates throughout the book, from Stonewall—“The fags took Stonewall from us before the firefighters could get a hose to put out the fires all throughout the Village”—to the increasing contemporary acceptance of police into Pride parades (hello Midsumma!)—“Police are never not a problem…You can’t let them catch them alone. In New York [during the sixties and seventies], it was simple as ‘Wear a dress—go straight to jail.’” It’s an injunction that might be most notable, though, for the premise it contains: You have a history to remember. Since the gays began hopping the barbed-wire fence into the Garden of Marital Acceptability (congrats to Sam Kerr), the right, whose sex has gotten no better, have set their quivering sights on trans people, identifying us (correctly) as the hottest meat of the day. Part of the right’s strategy has been to try and shoddily amputate trans people from history itself—to frame us as an invading, corrupting force from that most horrible of foreign countries, the 21st century; a move that finds a model, heartbreakingly, in the women’s movement (hello Adrienne!), as well as the more respectability-oriented gay and lesbian camps of the 20th century. It’s cathartic, then, to have someone with a wit as sharp and hand as heavy as Major’s to cut through the bullshit. “I want the younger kids to know that transgender people have been around since the beginning, and what we’ve done to survive,” she tells us. As for those who believe queer freedom should be predicated upon respectability (as if those terms aren’t already contradictory), or that trans people should have to attempt to pass as cis? “‘Child, I’m just a gay guy with tits.’ Shocks the hell out of them.” As for the desire to throw anyone, whatever the strategic incentives may be, busward? “If we don’t save all of us, none of us are saved.” 

And as for the octogenarian—but, let’s face it, probably immortal—Miss Major herself? “It’s not what I did then that’s important,” she insists; “it’s who I am now.”

Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary by Miss Major and Toshio Meronek is published by Verso books. You can currently purchase the book instore at NIBS.