The Hudson River Body

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.