Afterlives is a production of iHeart Podcasts and The Outspoken podcast Network in partnership with School of Humans.

Just a heads Up.

The following episode mentions homophobic language and discusses racism, misogyny, transphobia, and mental health.

Take care while listening.

We need the paper towels for the house.

We need two paper towels.

Do we need toilet paper?

Now?

This is from a home video taken in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Marsha moved there with Randy Wicker in nineteen eighty two.

They're talking through their grocery list.

Marsha leans against the coffee table, jotting down what they need.

God it's chase, okay now, y'all yeah.

Or you're just playing at the don.

I know this is nothing special.

We've all made grocery lists, but this is Marsha P.

Johnson talking about cottage cheese.

She's not organizing a protest or preparing for a show.

She just needs to get her computer, which is what she calls her brain to juggle a bunch of errands and check out the price.

Waitmen, wait man, my computer.

Any It's a pretty mundane video that captures a shift in Marsha's life stability, consistency, a solid home base, the ability to go to the grocery store and pay for what she needs.

This would be her home for the final decade of her life.

But it was still the eighties, and when we hear about this era in Queer history, we know it's not good news.

The AIDS crisis devastated our community.

Marsha felt that acutely.

Of course, it's a period defined by loss, but those feelings of helplessness gave rise to unprecedented love in the form of caretaking and bold activism.

We'll get to all of these things, the heartbreak and the compassion, the despair and the defiance.

We'll start our story early in the decade, a time when Marcia was sleeping on the street and in bath houses, until one night she was invited inside and discovered a new chosen family.

They called me a ntge because there's how many quaints God that I'm one of the few quaints still.

That few quaints, still, that few points I didn't make expensive every day an.

I'm Rachael Willis and this is Afterlives, Episode six, Profound Acts of Care.

You know it's Tendy Ree's out, and Marcia doesn't have anywhere to stay.

This is Randy Wicker again talking about a freezing night in nineteen eighty two.

Can Marcia stay here's tonight?

The question came from Randy's roommate Willie, a white, blonde nineteen year old from Baltimore.

Randy saw him performing at a Burless's show in Times Square and hoped they'd hit it off, but instead of finding romance, Willie moved in and became more like a son.

He hadn't been at Randy's very long before, asking if his friend Marcia could come over to.

And I said, would she steal?

And he said no, Marcia would never steal.

And he said, and Marshall likes to sleep on hard floors.

Sot, Willie, you don't lie.

How your telling me is still skeptical.

Randy agreed to let Marcia stay the night, but.

It came in and she did sleep on the floor.

And I found out because she had a bullet dodge near her spine sleeping on the hard floor.

She is more comfortable there.

Marcia was not the kind of person Randy was used to being around.

For a long time.

He was mister Madachine Society all about respectability and steering away from anything or anyone that represented gender nonconformity.

But Marcia's charm wore him down.

She stayed another night, then another, and another.

Randy's friends literally laughed in disbelief when he told them he'd taken her in.

By then, Randy no longer found the situation so crazy.

Marcia was the greatest accent in my life.

If you didn't catch that.

Randy called Marcia the greatest asset of his life.

And it's easy to figure out why.

Marcia brought a levity to the home, almost a goofiness.

Randy recalls random moments when she somehow made him burst into laughter.

I'm sitting here, I'm really getting very kind of depressed.

Selling Marcia's up.

Jesus loves me.

How do I know?

Because the Bible tells me so.

And I went from being in the pit of despair, I mean, I was are Where did you learn that?

Randy says, comedians can make you laugh, but with Marcia, it was more than just being funny.

There's something deeper about Marcia.

It was making you feel good.

She had a warmth.

He reveled in the things Marcia brought into their lives.

This surprises that up ended his everyday life.

The parade of attractive and interesting people, the hot gossip from nights spent out on the town.

They settled into their own routines.

Willie cooked, Marsha did the laundry.

She was always putting together new outfits, frequently sourced from a local thrift store run by nuns.

I like to be a fly on that wall.

The sisters over there loveder.

Marcia started off sleeping on the living room floor, but arrangements shifted over time.

Friends and lovers moved in and out.

There were periods where marsh and Willie shared a bedroom.

At points when it was really a full house, marsh and Randy took turns using his bed.

Marsha had come home like four or five in the morning, about.

The time I was getting out and getting dressed and goeting to work, and she and the dog would sleep the under the bed all day.

That dog they had, once upon a time, was a tiny thing, brown and black, part beagle, part Terry, all mutt.

The best one I ever had.

Her name was Cooley knew.

Randy has no regrets, but he has one caution for people who might find themselves in a situation like.

This, Darling, don't hang around with these clitter queens because you're trying to hang your head on a pillar.

You're gonna get each little cutch.

It's amazing.

I could never get rid of the glitter from Marcia.

Rent and groceries were fifty bucks a week.

They had to keep the arrangement on the DL though, so Marsha would get her full Social Security checks.

She still ended up in jail now and then, but Randy helped her manage her money and she didn't have to hustle on the streets so much anymore.

I haven't been having that many grip, yeah, because I'm not on the distress of New York City anymore.

At its best, it was a familial and mutually beneficial relationship.

I don't know how I haven't made it in New York without Randy Wicker.

I mean, Randy's help for.

Me for so many years in New York has been helping me pudget money here and everything.

Otherwise I wouldn't even survive.

Marsha was really a mother.

I called her the house to mother and my extender gay family.

They would all celebrate holidays together, but it didn't always look traditional like this one Thanksgiving when they went into the city.

I had to speak turkey and well he said, oh, we don't want to sit here and have a Thanksgiving dinner.

He said, Let's pack this turkey up and take it up to the gayety theater and we'll give it out to these four people that have nothing better doing Thanksgiving to be sitting in a corner of the theater up in Times Square.

So we patched up the stuff we went up there.

Of course, we were first in line, so we had all the church we wanted.

Things weren't so simple, though.

Dynamics in the house could get challenging.

I can't written much back from this jar brand Ida.

Well per You know, listening back to that home video with the grocery list, you might pick up on some of the tensions that ran through the apartment.

There's typical roommate bickering, along with comments that feel a little edgier, a little meaner.

Got it?

Whatever you see?

No makeup, no fancy, no maling, no maybeling, no hair straighten.

Why God, nothing is your hopeless case.

We can't make use glamorous no matter how much we spend on you.

I really so, why should I spend my good herder money because you want to be glamorous.

Anything you say, Marcia's voice goes flat.

She sounds totally checked out.

Comments like this about her looks, how she made her money, even her race were also a part of life and Hoboken.

Randy wrote Christmas utters every winter, kind of like a recap of the year gone by.

Some are fifteen pages long and provide an incredible window into their life.

They share memories of the good times, but they're also honest.

You can read the retelling of a heated argument, like once when Randy was so mad he threw eggs at Willie's bedroom wall.

There were racist jokes and surs made in their home too.

Their roommate arrangement was also informal, so things could get confusing.

Marcia did the laundry to help out.

She wasn't really a maid, but sometimes Randy called her that.

Occasionally he'd tip her over time, Marcia felt ready for something new.

I don't like Hoboken, honey, I don't like no party jersey.

I wish I was sitting back in the city.

Marcia had things she could rely on in Hoboken, the good and the bad.

But when she got a call from her friend Jane in La Marcia felt opportunity knocking, a chance to get away for a while.

Jamie was an old friend Marsiha met on the streets.

Marcia was a mother to a lot of young queer, transgender nonconforming kids.

She also befriended Jamie, so Marcia and Jamie they had a sense of ease with each other because of the longevity of their friendship.

That's Tourmaline, Marcia's biographer.

She says Jamie really wanted to repay Marcia for all she had done for him back when he was a teenager, so he called her from California in nineteen eighty three, inviting her to make her way west.

Jamie was a sugar baby in Calabassis, which a lot of us know from.

Like the Kardashians, Marcia among California's rich and famous.

She stayed there for a few months, first in eighty three, and return there in eighty four and again in eighty five.

She and Jamie went to rock concerts, discos and shopped till they dropped.

And there's these really beautiful photos of her by the pool, and there's this giant olive tree in front of it, just like luxuriating and just resting by the pool.

It feels good to know that Marcia had this time to delve into rest and pleasure.

I wish more of her life had been so simple.

I wish it could have lasted longer.

In August of eighty five, Marcia and Jamie set off on a cruise.

There's a picture of Marsha framed by balloons, smiling wide as she boards the ship.

Jamie and Marcia went on a cruise that left from Miami, a carnival cruise on the ship called the Holiday.

But this trip didn't turn out to be all fun in the sun.

It was in that moment that Jamie started to get even sticker.

Jamie had aids.

At this point, the virus had been spreading across the world for years.

The crisis was already severe, and this is a moment when it all became deeply personal for Marsha.

That's coming after the break.

Scientists at the National Centers for Disease Control and Atlanta today released the results of a study which shows that the lifestyle of some male homosexuals has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of.

Cancer that's news anchor Tom Brokaw introducing NBC's first report on what came to be known as Acquired immuno deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.

The clip is from nineteen eighty two.

Other outlets started reporting on the epidemic a year before.

A few months after the NBC report, President Reagan was still ignoring all of the death and fear.

Here's a clip from a White House press conference in October nineteen eighty two.

You can hear members of the press corps laughing it off when journalists and Reverend Lester Kinsolving raises the issue.

Gets done as gay play.

Oh it is.

I mean, it's a pretty serious.

Reagan's Press secretary, Larry Speaks treats it like a joke too.

One and every three people that get Misha died, And I wonder if the President would were.

You, I don't have it or you do you?

This dismissal and neglect of the community continued.

Six whole years passed between the first news reports of AIDS before President Reagan made a single speech about the issue.

Six horrifying years with virtually no attention paid at the policy level.

I've seen this as a war on black people, a war on queer people and a war on marginalized communities, and all my friends were dying rapidly around me.

This is Kayenne Doorshow.

She's an elder and the founder of Glitz, which stands for Gays and Lesbians living in a Transgender Society.

This is an organization providing direct services to the trans community.

Today.

I am the executive direct then founder and a mother to a lot of people.

GQ magazine calls me the godmother of the Black Trains Life movement.

I'm just an ordinary person actually just fighting for our lives.

I can co sign Cayenne's tremendous presence in our community.

She's like an auntie to me.

And little did I know Kyenne is also a part of Marsha's lineage.

I worked in New Jersey and right acrosch from my job was this young woman named Coco, and Coco just hounded me and she says, you're going to be my daughter.

When I said, oh, nice, and she says, my mom is Marsha P.

Johnson, And I said, oh.

A lot of people say that.

What I didn't know was she was actually Marsha P.

Johnson's daughter.

And so if Coco is a mother to you.

Do you consider Marsha a grandmother?

Yes, I do, Yes, I do.

Kyenne ran into Marsha from time to time in the eighties.

Once Marsha was giving out sandwiches on Thanksgiving Day to people who needed them, carrying on a tradition she started with Randy and Willie.

Kaye gives us a window into a time when we have little information about the black trans experience.

What made the black trans community so vulnerable in that.

Time stigma, stigma, prejudice.

Historically, when we hear about the ADS epidemic, it's through a lens that focuses on white siscay Men.

I don't hear stories about my own slice of the community nearly enough, what we lost, how we survived.

Cayenne is sixty today, but she was fifteen in nineteen eighty and.

I was terrified.

I was terrified.

She grew up in bush Rock, Brooklyn.

Today it's gentrified as hell and full of queer bars, but back then it was a working class industrial area.

She paints a picture of a time when there were so much fear and the people in power were not giving the crisis any attention.

I remember my minister, he talked about AIDS and how AIDS was designed by God to get us.

As a young, visibly queer child, Cayenne was ostracized even in the place she should have been the safest.

Me being a child, started to witness and see my family members not wanting me to actually eat from the plate where that plastic where to feed us, to feed me.

This mentality wasn't isolated to Cayenne's tone.

A family down her block made their relative with AIDS wear half mad suit.

The dehumanization was intense, and it was everywhere.

By the mid eighties, there were polls showing that the majority of Americans supported quarantining AIDS patients.

Discussions about closing all gay bars, or requiring special ID cards or even tattoos for AIDS patients went mainstream.

These ideas scared people away from getting tested.

It was also part of why Kayan started running away from home as a teen.

She went to queer clubs and got to know a community of trans women people she could be herself around without invoking fear or judgment.

But as the eighties wore on, those connections were disappearing before her eyes.

Many of my friends were young, and within months they were gone.

I had a friend like died right in front of me, Like he went from having a bed sore to having a hole in his back.

And the pain that was connected to us all being young and trying to hold on to this physical body, and they were leaving rapidly and it got to the point where they were too weak to talk, and how we just sobbed.

When we say the AIDS crisis today, it can blur or flatten.

These years, we've heard the stories of people dying of the indifference from homophobic families and the government.

But a crisis is made of many individual people suffering.

Maybe you can remember the early days of COVID nineteen when there were so few answers and so much anxiety.

People were bleaching vegetables and quarantining their mail.

There was a rampant misinformation, and on top of that, Asian folk were the target of racist scapegoating, and we saw a rise in hate crimes.

But the disease itself, it affected everyone, so public health and government channels reacted quickly, But in the early days of AIDS there was so little help available.

The FDA didn't approve an anti HIV medication until six years after the mainstream media talked about it.

It took until nineteen eighty seven before there was a national public health campaign to educate people about prevention and support.

Even when local hotlines and support groups started popping up in New York, they were centered on CIS, gay men, black trans folks were never at the front of the line to get help.

That's why we have so few testimonials from our community during this era.

We had no network to go to for this we like, and especially because I and most of my friends appeared to be quote unquote cross stresses at the time.

Now it's called trends, but we were discriminated from many of these groups where you could get service.

Racism, sexism, and transphobia make for a toxic mix.

Cayenne says.

People weren't talking about safety and prevention or changing habits like sharing needles for hormone shots.

Public health education could have saved lives, but this is how stigma kills.

Being closeted and assimilating isn't a viable option.

Ignoring who we are, neglecting our community's real needs can be fatal.

It wasn't until broadways started dying and white men were affected and white women were dying.

It wasn't until they seen the elite oppressed by HIVD and AIDS that they said, we have made the wrong drugs and we're sorry.

Oh yes, pharmaceutical companies allowed people to take drugs for years that were basically ineffective.

When Marcia's friend Jamie got sick, there were over twelve thousand reported deaths from AIDS in the US.

We don't know a lot about Marsha's experience with the epidemic before the mid eighties, but by this point the queer community was inundated.

When Jamie got sick in eighty five, doctors told him he had only a week to live.

Marcia cared for Jamie, just round the clock.

That's tourmaline again, she says.

Marsha put off plans to return to New York and stuck by his side.

She stayed up through long nights and changed his sheets.

Jamie's immune system was so compromised that being exposed to dust and germs could be fatal, so she made sure his house was spotless.

Marcia also cooks and picked up his favorite McDonald's milkshakes.

Marsha was doing spiritual care work too, so doing a lot of prayer work and seances for Jamie and talked about, oh, I'm really worried that, you know, Jamie's mom is going to think I'm doing some kind of witchcraft over Jamie.

But that was Marcia's care, something that extended Jamie's life for a long time.

He outlived his doctor's predictions and he.

Did beget to live four months on oxyg Jay.

You know, I did the best I could, but let him know that I cared about.

Here's Marsha looking back at that time in a nineteen ninety two interview.

When Jamie passed in the winter, he was one more person behind a climbing death toll.

Marcia helped arrange the flowers at his funeral.

The government may have tried to ignore his death and the deaths of some twelve thousand others up to that point, but he was more than a statistic.

To Marsha, I.

Flowered to church for my branded diabase Jamie in California when he died, and I said it career.

I did it for a lot of people that dietabates.

Marcia's prayer was for her friends to live inside her forever as a flower.

There were several people I made to a flower inside of me.

This was her way of holding them close, filling their spirits.

I'm plower of it forever and ever and ever.

Of anyone who's lost.

Someone knows what it's like to carry their memory some.

Kind of no prayer like that, sure that I remembered it.

By early eighty six, Marshall was back on the East Coast and grieving.

Randy writes in a Christmas letter the quote, A little bit of Marcia's seemed to have died with Jamie.

She returned to Hoboken, more subdued, quieter, scarred, and subtly changed in some indescribable way.

Still she insisted on going out, declaring that she wasn't promised tomorrow.

She had to have a good time for the people who weren't around anymore.

No matter what it, cancer, Poliao, AIDS or whatever.

Decided to make the best of every day anyway.

In nineteen eighty six, the number of deaths from AIDS in the US doubled to over twenty four thousand.

By nineteen eighty seven, it would nearly double again.

Here's an interview with Marcia from nineteen eighty eight, when the US death toll was now over sixty thousand.

I mean they got billions of dollars to throw out on rocket chips, billions of dollars to throw out on wars.

I mean, why can't they spend billions of dollars to help people with a's.

Marcia knew a great injustice was being done.

I mean, like me, as an individual, when I can I threw a penny, a dime, a quarter, or anything I can in AIDS cans.

With her giving spirit, she jumped in to help however she could.

I like to go to work for more AIDS patients, really, because I'm really not afraid of the a's.

This may sound mundane, but in the eighties this was a truly radical idea.

There was still so much fear of being in any kind of proximity to AIDS patients.

But Marcia said this again and again, like in this interview from nineteen ninety two.

I think that you should be ashamed of anybody.

Do you know they have days?

I think you should stand as close to them as you can.

And I think if you got a friend that had days, you should just thank God for the days that you'd have that when you should just stick close to me as you can and hop them out as much as you can.

And help.

Marsha did.

She performed with the Hot Peaches for AIDS patients.

She participated in Danza Don's to raise money for a cure.

She marched, and she mourned with her community.

She joined a historic nineteen eighty seven march on Washington where two hundred thousand demonstrators demanded more funding for AIDS research and an end to discrimination.

What do you think about Washington Distub?

It was a division Washington That march marked the first time act UP, a grassroots protest movement, got national news coverage.

Time magazine called act UP the most effective health activists in history.

Well, I went to act UP and we went over to the UN building and we sat and demonstrated for five hours for fundraising for AIDS patients.

And it was really nice because we all got together and we just walked and carried our banners and chanted.

Marshall went to some act UP meetings and demonstrations, but she wasn't consistently on its front lines.

She gave what she had, including a deeply personal spiritual commitment to the people who had passed, but.

My did without demonstrating and stuff like that.

People don't know that we care about these people.

If you've ever spent nights bedside at a hospital, or changed soiled divers or watched over someone you love suffering, you know how hard it is.

Arguably Marshall's biggest contribution to the AIDS crisis was caretaking.

What she sh showed up doing his like really profound acts of care, changing sheets, taking people to the hospital, getting people medicines, going to the hospital, like staying there, advocating for people to be able to see their loved ones, advocating for people to like actually get care and not just getting ridden off.

But she was tirelessly doing.

That Tourmaline writes extensively about care work as a critical form of activism in her book Marcia, The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P.

Johnson.

Marcia responding to huge kind of like government neglect of care for people who really needed it in the midst of a massive healthcare crisis, and Marcia was trying to fill that gap as best as she.

You have members of Act Up storm the FDA headquarters and chain themselves to the New York Stock Exchange to protest exorbitant drug prices.

As a caretaker, Marcia was also standing up to the systems that were felling her community.

She resisted stigma and silence.

She too, put herself on the line by constantly showing up for people at all hours of the day.

The list is so long of the people that Marcia took care in an actual daily way.

There was no real help, and it was the natural instinct of us is that you're going to help your friends.

You know.

Augusto Machado he hung out with Marsha back in her time Square days and was a frequent visitor of Starhouse.

He was also a caretaker for many people in the community during the AIDS crisis.

They said, how can you change dirty diapers?

And I said, when we were children, someone changed diapers for us, and if we live long enough, we're going to have diapers too.

I mean a philosophy, it's just like it needs to be done.

Augusto also walked dogs, clean apartments, picked up prescriptions.

People would call him and ask for help for their friends.

He was sometimes on call for six or seven people and he couldn't take any more.

A lot of people couldn't handle what Augusto and Marshall were doing.

It was grueling emotional and physical work.

It burns you out, and it left you vulnerable to other people's assumptions surrounding the disease, even within the very community you were helping.

Word had spread Augusto's helping them.

He may carry the you're and so stop going to gay bars, because I noticed people might acknowledge you and wave across the room, but they wouldn't come over, and they'd sort of, oh, excuse me, I haven't got time to talk.

It was an acute kind of cruelty.

The care work that was so desperately needed could leave people so isolated and.

So little by the little.

The subtext is I was not safe or insanitary or what have you, because I was helping people.

When I asked Augusto if he considered this activism, he said no.

I asked what made him so fearless.

He said he wasn't.

In his eyes, this was just doing the right thing for the people.

He loved that simple.

He and Marcia shared a generous heart that way.

I don't think I've been extraordinary.

I've just been working in the gay movement for twenty three years.

Off and now Marcia gave it was her way in the world but it took its toll.

It was hard to take care of herself, but she needed to.

I had AHIV.

I have HIV for about two years.

Marcia was diagnosed with HIV in nineteen ninety after watching so many friends pass I can't imagine processing that diagnosis.

Understandably, she had a mental breakdown.

She also started showing early signs of the virus like shingles, a blistering rash that can be extremely painful.

Marcia's case was so bad she had to be hospitalized, but still it didn't stop her from helping others.

It was about the same time that Randy's lover David got very sick after living with AIDS for a few years.

I remember one tape David actually was laying on a couch here and he fell on the floor.

That's Randy again.

David had moved in with him Marcia and another roommate named George.

George was in the early stages of AIDS two.

Randy writes in one of his holiday letters that he and Marsha were both troopers, never complaining at any hour of the night.

When David needed help.

He said he had fallen Imusha, Russia and just saw him on the floor and just whooped him up in her arms and put him back on the bed.

For the most part, David was taken care of at home.

They made a few trips to the hospital, but it could be hard to get meaningful medical attention.

One time, David spent six days and six nights lying in a hospital's hallway waiting for a room.

Marsha was with him in that hallway.

Eventually they checked out and went back to Hoboken.

They knew what was coming, but first David and Randy got married.

Same sex marriage wasn't legal then, but a priest did come to bless the union.

Friends gathered around what would be David's deathbed to surround them both with love.

One friend wrote a poem that we asked Randy to read.

David and Randy got married today with a real priest and every champagne flowers, two tiered kate and lots of friends.

David and Randy got married today as we gathered around David's bed, no sweeter altar anywhere.

Don't you always cry at weddings?

David and Randy held hands today, exchanging valves life partners.

Now David has a ring.

It's official.

He says, I can die in peace.

David and Randy got married today to having to hold in sickness and in health.

Till death do us part?

Don't you always cry at weddings?

David died three weeks later.

He was loved and he loved everyone and that house.

Marcia was there for him in his final moments.

I thought that he would be screaming and hollering everything, but he didn't do any of those things.

You didn't stop raising all.

All of a sudden, another tragic loss.

Randy was bereft.

Marcia was not okay either.

When I did yet, I had a break.

Dad minded it when signed myself in a.

Hob of more after the breakw.

It was times of people that had been sick for the Maid's virus had just finished out.

My roommate's lover.

Who die debates Welcome back to after Lives.

Although Marcia didn't shy away from helping people who were sick, she was open about how it weighed on her.

In different interviews, she talks about the people she's lost.

I can't serve Dad had to go to anymore.

There was my friend Poka.

And the people she was still helping, and that We've.

Been helping my friend Mike from Little Bitchess Winter, who has called Brownie.

It was an impossible time.

Marsha grieved.

She had multiple breakdowns.

She had to manage her own care on top of everyone else's.

That's extra money that I would have, but I had to spend on something.

Mouse that had to buy all these medications and everything.

Lately.

Her mother, Alberta, also passed away during this fraud period.

It was shocking to me.

It was devastated.

Marcia and her mom always had a complicated relationship, but there was love between them and they stayed in touch.

With so many tragedies that just kept coming, Marcia relied on her spirituality to carry her forward.

No matter where are go, life can always get dead.

Hawker's crisis, we deal with me.

Marcia also learned to take us when she felt a breakdown coming on.

It would help to get away from New York.

As Tormaline says.

She was burnt down, you know, just like very plainly.

She was exhausted, like the trips to La and the Fire Island, going to the cave.

She found out ways to get geographical distance in order to feel a level of spaciousness in her life.

I did basically get on the planet traveling.

And with my nurse and you know, just forget about it.

Just about everything is happening where I am and go out and get fresh air.

You know.

Marcia still made regular trips to California.

She was in LA when she did the nineteen eighty eight interview with Jim Kaepner.

You've heard throughout the series.

I've never seen you in Dragon, I mean during my drag anymore.

But I'm picking about going back in.

In the interview, Marcia still has her usual mannerisms and flares that make her look firm to me.

At least.

She's wearing a sweater with pink flowers on it, paired with a more butch leather jacket and a visor.

Just her natural hair, no wig, no makeup.

I'm thinking about, you know, doing some more drag because I'm going to beauty school now around the corner here, Yeah, I'm going to Newbery in February.

First, it's a relief to know Marcia had these pleasures that she knew to make her activism sustainable, she needed to recharge, be in the sun and learn new things.

Like these moments where she knew it was a vital important to care for herself and rest and recover and not be in service to anyone else other than her own well being, I think is the real part of her story.

How long will the schooling take now?

Oh, well, forty two years out telling you it's going to take me a year to go to schal But I'll be able to help poor people with their hair.

Could to help me with my hair?

Yes?

They know how to let me tell you, I bet you they do.

They know how to weave a wig on that it looks like your own hair and everything.

I mean.

I hope to die my hair in law next week or something.

I'd run a new intrigue for Hollywood.

With everything she had lost, it would be easy for Marcia to dwell in the past.

But no, Marcia is still dreaming of the future, a future of helping people, a future in Hollywood.

I've not just only helped these people in the past.

I plan to help them in the future.

But I take restis and this is my rest in California where I'm going to school.

Marcia helped so many people, and she lots of help and return.

In one interview, she talks for three straight minutes about all the people who have lent her a hand.

You have so many, thousands and thousands of people that helped me.

All through my life.

She mentions all kinds of folks.

A man named Rob who she met at her favorite club, the Anavil.

He was restaurant manager, and even after he passed, the folks at the restaurant would help her out.

You still give me five.

And ten dollars now and then, of course, she mentions that Randy helps her out.

Then there's her friend from the Hot Peaches, Tony.

Tony Fish gives me help every now and then gives me a few hundred dollars, or gives me ten dollars here and ten dollurs over here, and it really ends up.

She lists some people from the theater scene too, and they are the friends of friends, folks who have stores on Christopher Street, her sisters Jeanie and Norma, and her brother Robert.

I got so many people in this world.

As Marcia struggled, but she knew she was cared for.

I think that counts for a lot.

In the mid eighties, she was honored by the community with a special place in the Christopher Street Liberation March.

A seat inside the Stonewall Car.

I've been in the movement for like ever since nineteen sixty nine.

I'm in everyday march and I only skipped too.

Ed Murphy, who was a Grand marsha for the Stonewall Ride contingent.

He wanted me to ride in the car.

It was an honor in some ways for Marcia.

That was I think a really beautiful pivotal moment.

She found that she was really receiving her flowers.

She was being recognized as a person who set the whole movement off.

She was a guest of the Grand Marshal.

Even the Mayor marched in the demonstration that year.

Randy wrote in one of his annual letters that she was undeniably a living legend in New York.

But I want to take a moment for all of the people in our community that we lost in the eighties and that we've lost to AIDS ever since.

Our ancestors could have should have been so much more abundant with talents to share and stories to tell, but we'll never get to witness that.

This episode is dedicated to the many caregivers during the AIDS epidemic, including the lesbians, trans people, and gender nonconforming folks who aren't often given the spotlight for their tireless work during the crisis.

I want to leave you with Augusto, who has found a beautiful way to memorialize the people he took care of and all those that have been lost.

We talked about honoring all the missing queens on our street and so forth.

Augusto had a deep desire to memorialize the many, many people he lost.

The crisis peaked long before cell phone cameras, so instead of photos, he started collecting objects left behind.

Little mementos.

Even if it was a dried flower, this belonged to x y or Z.

Over the years, Augusto's collection grew and grew.

He told me how one of his friends described him recently.

This old queen.

She's a hoarder.

She buys awful art from street people.

She collects everything, she says receipts, she has ticket steps.

But these objects became a snapshot of people no longer with us in places too.

They are remnants of a downtown New York that was changing rapidly, even as Augusto stayed in his same studio apartment on Third Street.

One day, Augusto's friend the one who called him a hoarder, mentioned the collection to a couple of art galleries.

They came to see Augusto's decades of stuff.

Thank god, Sam and Jacob braved getting into my apartment.

They risked their lives because I had stable boxes up to the ceiling.

He had things piled everywhere.

Several of the objects were turned into shrines.

They came and very bravely said we'll give you a show in a year, and I thought, what show?

And they put up that the shrines were come Stare Craig.

It was art.

Augusto has always been an artist, even in times he didn't realize it, whether performing street theater with Marcia, experimental shows at La Mama or cat Fecino, or these shrines like Marcia, Augusto's life was about making art, whether or not it was officially recognized.

What I was doing through the years in rooming houses and so forth was.

Art, and then it was recognized.

Augusto had his first visual art show in twenty twenty two at the Gordon Robieshow Gallery on Seventeenth Street.

And thanks to them is that in this latter chapter of my journey.

I'm very grateful it happened now, and I think I'm still getting a little too much attention because the pieces were about the pioneers, the people who did it, who braved and lived their life the way they wanted to.

One piece was even acquired by MoMA.

When they took the shrines, I thought, what is it.

Going to be?

It's what does it mean?

And now I can't believe.

Of art.

It's on display still.

You can see it.

A white cabinet with six shelves.

There are photographs and newspaper clippings.

There are dolls and beads.

There are fake flowers and plastic fish, a stuffed animal.

Next to the shelf stands a yellow paper sign.

It says justice for Marcia.

That's next week on After Lives.

And I just went up to her and I just told her I loved her, actually, and I told her thank you.

Marcia was pulled out of the water light over the edge here.

You would never kill usself.

We knew that we bought it.

We were handling up to sixteen hundred cases of anti gay Wesleyan trans violence every year.

We go to this church, and this church is pat to the gills pat.

This was the most awesome spectacle I've ever seen in my life.

Thanks for listening to Afterlives.

You can find this episode in future ones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Please leave us a rating and review to let us know what you think.

Afterlives is a production of The Outspoken Network from iHeart Podcasts in partnership with School of Humans.

I'm your host and creator Raquel Willis.

Dylan Hoyer is our senior producer and scriptwriter.

Our associate producer is Joey pat Sound design and engineering by Jess Krincic, Story editing by Julia Furlong, fact checking by Carolyn Talmage.

Score composed by Wise Murray.

Our production manager is Daisy Church.

Executive producers include me, Raquel Willis, and Jess Krinchich from The Outspoken podcast Network, Amelia Brock, Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Elsie Crowley from School of Humans and The Cats Company.

The image of Marsha in our show art is provided by the Leslie Lowman Museum of Art Founder's gift p.

Fifteen dot six nine nine dot one oh six.

A special thank you to everyone who provided archival tape, including Marcia nineteen ninety two by Michael Casino and Marsha at Tony Nunziata's by Michael Casino, courtesy of Michael Casino.

The Randy Wicker and Marsha P.

Johnson Papers at the LGBT Community Center National History Archives and Interview with Marsha P.

Johnson nineteen eighty eight from one National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries