# The Hudson River Body
*A Biography of Marsha P Johnson* — Legendary Biographies No. 023

- **Subject:** Malcolm Michaels Jr. (Marsha P. Johnson)
- **Written by:** Solomon Treadway
- **Shelf:** Movements / Civil Rights
- **Published:** 2026
- **Extent:** 206 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink
- **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 206 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-059-1)
- **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-204-5)

Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/023-the-hudson-river-body.html

## About this book

July 6, 1992, the Hudson River off the Christopher Street Pier in Manhattan. A body is recovered from the water. Marsha P. Johnson, forty-six, the Black drag-queen activist who had been at the front of the June 28, 1969 Stonewall uprising and who had co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with Sylvia Rivera in 1970, has been missing for six days. The Medical Examiner rules the death a suicide. Friends, lovers, and the survivors of the late-1980s ACT UP and Queer Nation chapters spend the next thirty years arguing that it was not.

Solomon Treadway's biography opens earlier — in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Malcolm Michaels Jr. was born in 1945, the fifth of seven children of a General Motors assembly-line worker and a domestic worker — and follows the arc through the move to New York in 1963, the Greenwich Village hustling years, the Stonewall uprising, the STAR house with Sylvia Rivera and the abandoned trailer on East 2nd Street, the modelling for Andy Warhol's Polaroids of the early 1970s, the ACT UP organising of the late 1980s, and the long afterlife in which Tourmaline's 2017 Pay It No Mind documentary and the de Blasio administration's 2019 monument announcement made her name central to the movement she had helped found.

What emerges is a portrait of a Black drag-queen activist whose twenty-three years on the front lines of the gay-liberation movement American institutional history wrote out of the record for thirty years — and whose death the police never properly investigated.

## Contents

1. Malcolm
2. The City
3. The Village World
4. Before the Brick
5. The Morning After
6. STAR
7. The Factory and the Flowers
8. The Piers
9. The Body and the Mind
10. The Plague
11. Sylvia
12. The Activism Years
13. Pay It No Mind
14. The Last Years
15. The River
16. The Archive
17. Mother of Pride
18. The Flowers
19. The Monument

## Questions

**Who is The Hudson River Body about?**

Malcolm Michaels Jr. (Marsha P. Johnson). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Hudson River Body — and the name goes on the line underneath.

**Is this an authorised biography?**

No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.

**Can I read some of it before buying?**

Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,086 words of the book.

**How long is it?**

About 64,000 words, 19 chapters, 206 pages in the paperback.

**What is the printed book like?**

6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.

## The writer

Solomon Treadway is a Chicago-born culture critic whose biographies focus on Black American writers, intellectuals, and the post-war public sphere. His research utilizes deep archival investigations to reconstruct the social circles, political struggles, and literary debates that shaped mid-century American thought.

In works like The Chairman, Passing the Torch, and The Papers, Treadway traces how ideas move from private correspondence into the broader cultural consciousness. His writing emphasizes the everyday realities and collaborative networks behind major intellectual shifts, avoiding dry academic jargon in favor of clear, character-driven narrative history.

He lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as an independent researcher and spends his weekends volunteering at local community archives and bookshops.