“I’m still fucking here.”
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is sitting in her living room in Little Rock, Arkansas, on a recent morning, laughing about the enemies she’s defeated and outlived in her more than five decades fighting for the liberation of transgender people.
The Black trans activist has survived being knocked unconscious at the 1969 Stonewall riots; overcome years of abuse in prison; outsmarted the white gay non-profit leaders who didn’t want to serve trans sex workers; and built radical programs to defend the most neglected and mistreated queer people in communities across the US.
“All these people who challenged and fought me – where are they? They’re gone. I’m here,” says Miss Major, who is coy about her exact age but says she was born in the 1940s (Wikipedia says she’s 82, her ID says she’s 76 – it’s not clear either is accurate). “If I didn’t do all that, I wouldn’t have all this.”
“This” is her latest project – a sanctuary for trans and gender-nonconforming people that she built on the property where she lives in the southern conservative state. She first called it House of GG, after her initials, but recently renamed it Tilifi, which stands for Telling It Like It Fuckin’ Is, something Miss Major is exceptionally good at doing. Nextdoor to her house, connected by a path she painted bright yellow, is the Oasis, a guest home where she invites trans leaders and loved ones to stay, with a singular goal: to rest and relax.
“I’ve gotta make joy here, because it doesn’t exist in the normal world,” says Miss Major, gesturing to her pool and hot tub, surrounded by a luscious green backyard where she’s placed 81 palm trees, flowers, rock gardens, a swing, a hammock and an old-school merry-go-round that reminds her of New York City playgrounds from her youth. Her doormats say “Welcome bitches”, “Fuck off”, “Come back with a warrant” and “Home, where the ho & me come together”.
“When the girls come here, they don’t have to worry about anything. I’ve wanted this for so long, but I couldn’t figure out how. Who’s gonna let me own property? But I finally have it. It’s in a red state, but I don’t care. It can be whatever color, I’m still gonna be here.”
No matter how many anti-trans bills Arkansas adopts, the lawmakers can’t stop her from enjoying the tranquility of life inside Tilifi and sharing that with others. “They’re not here at my door,” she says. “And if they come knocking, I’ll be ready.” On the wall in her living room is a painted portrait featuring her “I’m still fucking HERE” mantra, now a rallying cry for so many Black trans women who aspire to defy expectations and live long, full lives like Miss Major.
***
Miss Major is, by many measures, the most celebrated trans activist and elder alive today. When I arrive at her home the first week of Pride month, she and her assistant encourage me to spin on the merry-go-round to relax and “feel like a kid again”.
It’s this maternal, caretaking nature that has made her a mother to many trans girls across the country; she stopped counting after 20 daughters. Born in Chicago, she says her mother named her Major after a psychic told her to give her child “a name of importance”, correctly predicting the significant legacy she’d have. Her parents, a postal service administrator and beauty shop manager, took her to her first drag show, but were unsupportive when they realized their child identified with the performers.
They sent her to psychiatric institutions as a teenager to “get the gay outta me”, and her mother burned all her dresses, she says in her new book, Miss Major Speaks, a series of conversations with the writer Toshio Meronek. “Maybe I deserved it, I did ruin all her shoes,” she adds, recounting wearing and bending her mom’s heels. Miss Major went on to perform with a drag show called Jewel Box Revue, in Chicago then New York, supported by a friend and mentor named Kitty, who dressed her, did her makeup, gave her a blonde wig, and helped her embrace being a 6ft 2in girl.
“If it wasn’t for Kitty, I wouldn’t be here,” she says. “She gave me me. I saw I was beautiful, and there was no turning back.” Forced out of college for being trans and locked out of traditional employment, Miss Major survived by doing sex work in New York, where she and other women did their best to keep each other safe from police and dangerous johns.
She had already endured extensive police violence when, on 28 June 1969, NYPD showed up to raid the Stonewall Inn in the West Village, one of the few gay bars where trans people weren’t shunned. Miss Major and others fought back, leading to a melee she finds painful to relive 54 years later: “The cops beat on you till you drop. Everybody that stood up to them went through that. It wasn’t pretty. It was a riot. We were fighting for our lives. It was so sad.” She’d learned the best way to survive police encounters was to anger them enough so they punched you out, instead of slowly beating you, so she spit at an officer, who knocked her unconscious, and she was jailed. The riot continued for days.
Stonewall depictions over the years erased the role of trans women of color like her, Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, and the commemorative white statues that stand outside the bar today honor gay men and lesbians. In her hallway, Miss Major has a photo from 2015 when protesters, inspired by her words, painted the statues brown and placed wigs on them to represent the trans women. (They were promptly re-painted white.)
And while Stonewall is credited as the launch of Pride and the gay rights movement, Miss Major points out it was not a turning point for her community of trans girls, who were abandoned by cis gay people, left to face continued violence and nowhere to be found at the first parade the following year.
“We fought for no reason. It’s a shame the way it turned out. We started the riots and what did we get? Nothing. Nothing,” she says. The gay and lesbian leaders were “ashamed to be seen with us” and dismissed Johnson and Rivera as “drug-addicted, alcoholic, crazy bitches [who] aren’t part of this”, she says in her book. Rivera was booed at a Pride event in 1973 when she demanded the crowd care about trans women in jail.
Miss Major had to forge her own path for herself and her girls.
***
After Stonewall, Miss Major ended up in prison in New York when she and a boyfriend got caught breaking into hotel safes (a “Bonnie-and-Clyde-style” operation, her book says), prompting a police chase that ended in a crash. In solitary confinement, her neighbor was Frank “Big Black” Smith, an activist who’d led the Attica prison rebellion in 1971 and became a mentor: “He was a very kind soul and he wanted what was best for everybody,” she recalls. He taught her about organizing and how “you can’t throw anybody under the bus” or “leave anybody behind”, which became her guiding principle when she was freed.
In the 1980s, Miss Major organized a group of trans girls to be caretakers for gay men dying in the Aids epidemic, calling themselves the Angels of Care, active in New York and California. In San Francisco, she drove the city’s first mobile needle exchange van and created a drop-in center for trans sex workers as part of an Aids non-profit; when the organization’s director thought her program was too radical and tried to dismantle it, Miss Major organized staff to protest, and the director resigned. She later became director of the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), helping trans people coming home from prison. The group is now run by one of her daughters.
She built these groups as the mainstream gay rights movement continued to exclude trans people, focusing on marriage equality, assimilation, participation in the military and anti-homophobia laws that explicitly left out trans protections. Trans people seeking services at gay non-profits would often have the same experience: “A girl walks in and sits all day waiting to see somebody while gays and lesbians come in and out. So she leaves angry. What good is that?”
Miss Major started receiving more widespread recognition in the last decade as trans visibility in media expanded and gay rights groups promised to be more inclusive. But she’s remained skeptical of large organizations’ efforts to serve her girls: “Just because they say they’re going to look out for transgender people doesn’t mean they’re going to. Sometimes they’ve never seen a transgender woman in their life. They don’t know what we need. We say we need socks and underwear, and they say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna give you all sweaters!’ because the people at the top feel so good about sweaters.”
Visibility, she says, means the deaths of her people are now counted, but it doesn’t mean their lives are being saved and protected: “We got gay marriage, yay! But that doesn’t affect transgender people. The girls are being murdered more and more each year.” She rolls her eyes at the order of the LGBTQ+ acronym: “The T should be first. We’re integral.”
She’s stopped speaking at Pride parades or sitting on floats after repeatedly feeling tokenized, ignored or disrespected, including in 2014 in San Francisco, where she watched gay people ignore the speech of the activist Janet Mock, who has called her a mother, and at a 2019 Florida event where attendees made clear they didn’t know who she was: “It does chip away at your feelings, and when you get home, you cry and do whatever you need to let it go, and get out the next day and give the motherfuckers hell. That’s all you can do.”
Miss Major laughs at the way Pride has become so straight, corporate and pro-police: “Who in their right mind invites the cops? The people who handcuff you and take you away? No. Now they have gay cops, transgender cops, but that don’t matter to me. Blue comes first. And then there are banks and fast-food chains at the parade? It’s like, where are the gays, oh, I see two over there.”
While skipping parades, she finds other ways to meet with youth who value her time and crave her wisdom. At a recent trans rights conference in Texas, her assistant scheduled 30-minute one-on-one chats with any attendee who wanted, a process that brings her joy. She shows younger people what’s possible, that you can be a Black trans person who has no desire to conform to gender norms and can survive to be an elder. She likes seeing the shift when they leave those conversations: “They stand taller. They walk like they mean it. Now, get out of their way.”
***
Despite two strokes and other health ailments, Miss Major pressed forward during the pandemic with her longtime dream of creating a space where her girls can enjoy themselves freely and completely. She’s built Tilifi, the refuge at her Little Rock home, at a time of record anti-trans legislation across the US. In Arkansas, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Donald Trump’s former press secretary, has enacted laws that aim to ban gender-affirming care for youth, restrict trans kids’ access to bathrooms and limit drag performances. (The treatment ban was struck down by a federal judge this week.)
“They want us to live in the 1950s. No. Get off our fucking backs and let us live. They try to push us back – well, that means we gotta put the gloves on and fight again,” she says. “We have to get rid of the people in charge – the 70- and 80-year-olds who hold us down, who want to try to suppress us. You get rid of them, and we can build up, and move forward. People have to organize and get it together, and we also must vote.” She adds: “I know the world I would like to live in. It’s in my head, but I try my best to live it now.”
Tilifi, tucked away on a quiet residential street, embodies that world. The initial idea was to offer a place where trans activists could have retreats with workshops, but that ultimately felt too formal, says Beck Witt Major, Miss Major’s partner of 18 years, who helped launch the project. Now, it’s simply about giving guests a sense of peace, a place to “totally be themselves”. Every meal is covered, including homemade breakfasts. If they’re coming from out of town, they fly first class. Her team reminds guests that if there’s anything they want, they can just ask.
Some non-profit leaders were confused at the concept, suggesting there had to be more structure or services, says Beck, while sitting by the pool with Miss Major one afternoon. “She has always done cutting-edge work that people don’t really understand.”
Beck and Miss Major have a two-year-old, Asiah, who climbs over them as we chat.
Addressing Miss Major, Beck continues: “One of the things you have to offer that I’ve never seen with anyone else is you truly enjoy your life. No matter what is happening, and I’ve seen so much chaos and trauma, you know how to relax. So many incredible leaders have risen up in Black trans communities running amazing organizations in the last 10 years. But how do you be in the work that is very hard and still enjoy your life?”
Miss Major tells her guests to put their feet in the grass, smell the flowers and find a feeling of ease that no one can take away from them when they leave: “Because you’re worth it. You’re so worth it.”
