Just one month before the city of New York celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, it made a major announcement: two legendary late transgender activists, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, would be receiving monuments in their honor. The Associated Press reported that $750,000 would be allocated to the project as part of "an initiative to increase the diversity of the statues and monuments in public places around New York City."
Although Rivera and Johnson had been integral parts of early LGBTQ+ activism movements in New York (both pre and post-Stonewall), much of their work has gone ignored or unnoticed, and their legacy has been rewritten by historians and filmmakers who cast cisgender, white gay men (and, to a lesser extent, lesbians) as the heroes of gay liberation. This whitewashing has led to wider ignorance of who was rioting and what they were rioting for in the LGBTQ+ rights movement, which is how Christopher Street ended up with a "Gay Liberation" monument that was protested by both homophobes and within the LGBTQ+ community before it was finally erected in 1992. It’s also why some skepticism remains today about Rivera and Johnson finally being memorialized less than a mile away.
Monuments, in general, commemorate a significant moment or persons of the past, so when sculptor George Segal took on the "Gay Liberation" commission, he should have done his homework. Segal, a well-known heterosexual white figure artist, was asked to create the work in 1979 after at least two queer artists (conceptual artists Scott Burton and Louise Nevelson) turned the job down. "There was a real risk still in the 1970s within the sphere of professional art and even within the New York art world of being seen as a gay or lesbian artist," says queer art historian and Stanford University professsor Richard Meyer.
Commissioner Peter Putnam of the Mildred Andrews Fund asked Segal to create work that was “loving and caring, and show the affection that is the hallmark of gay people," as well as having "equal representation of men and women.” It was also expected that the work be displayed in public "or nowhere at all."
"I'm extremely sympathetic to the problems that gay people have," Segal said at the time. "They're human beings first. I couldn't refuse to do it."
At the outset, this description of "gay liberation" was limiting ― many LGBTQ+ activists weren't solely interested in being represented by same-sex love and affection, including Rivera and Johnson. Both trans women of color who had experienced homelessness, their activism was centered around the politicization of Black and Brown bodies, trans bodies, and sex work. Any monument dedicated to "gay liberation" that ignored people of color, trans people, and other marginalized parts of the greater LGBTQ+ community was destined to fail a huge faction of it.
In 1979, Putnam (a wealthy, gay, educated white man) was in a much better position to dictate what could represent gay people, and even his commission of a well-respected artist like Segal wasn't taken to. Segal's "Gay Liberation" was based on four real-life people: two gay men (including artist David Bartlett Boyce) and lesbian couple Leslie Cohen and Beth Suskin, who he'd met through friends. In traditional Segal style, he posed them and cast them in bronze before covering the sculptures in white lacquer. The men stand, one with a hand on the other's shoulder, while the women sit, turned in toward one another, one's hand on the other's knee. Once the statues were unveiled, they attracted immediate scrutiny not only for their stark whiteness, but for what some described as their somber dispositions.
Some found them desexualizing and cold; others saw the entire monument as premature. One protester called them "grotesque stereotypes," which Cohen and Suskin later embraced, wearing T-shirts with that very phrase to a 1980 Parks Committee of Community Board public hearing about the work. It would take until 1992 for the monument to be allowed to be placed in Christopher Park. (It was relocated to Madison, Wisconsin from 1986 until 1991.) In a piece for Curve magazine's Spring 2019 issue, Cohen recounted her feelings of taking on not only homophobes who didn't want "Gay Liberation" in Christopher Street Park, but other LGBTQ+ people unhappy with the limiting depiction.
"This is not meant to be an explicit representation of Stonewall," Cohen told the crowd of over 200 that day. "It is much bigger than that ― it represents liberation by openly showing our love for one another in a visual medium. There is no stronger statement than that in our quest for liberation. The bottom line is our struggle has always been visibility."
The controversy kept "Gay Liberation" out of the city of Los Angeles and Harvard University as well, two other institutions Putnam offered the work to for free. Eventually, a replica was gifted to Stanford University, where it was vandalized several times on campus ― once less than a month after installation in 1984, when a vandal caused $50,000 worth of damage with a ball-peen hammer. Another spray painted "AIDS" across the male couple; a decade later, members of the Stanford football team doused the statues with paint.
Although those involved with the vandalism were caught and charged with counts of either felony or misdemeanor vandalism, LGBTQ+ students on campus held a forum expressing their anger over their inability to charge them with a hate crime. The students began to pose in place of the statues, placing flowers at the site and later bringing flowers to put on and around the sculptures once they were returned.
"To me, that's queer culture at its best, where we don't allow censorship or vandalism to quiet our expression," says Meyer, who teaches Segal's "Gay Liberation" in his queer art classes at Stanford. Meyer believes the vandalism helped spawn a much-needed conversation on campus.
"Censorship produces representation," he says. "It defeats itself if there's some freedom of the press by drawing attention to the very thing it wants to destroy."
Since being accepted and installed in Christopher Park in 1992, "Gay Liberation" has continued to draw criticism, so much so that after trans activist Miss Major cheekily called for someone to "put a couple of statues of people of color and at least make one of them an overly obnoxious transgender woman, 6’5”, three inch heels, blond/red hair, lashes, beads, feathers and put one of those fine white boys next to her," two anonymous activists painted the male figures face's black, dressing them in wigs, bras, and scarves. They left with them a sign: "Black and Latina trans women led the riots. Stop Whitewashing."
This action inspired Chris Vargas, artist and creator of MOTHA (the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art), to stage the Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project, which invited 12 artists of various LGBTQ+ identities to propose their own monuments. The exhibit was displayed at the New Museum in New York City from September 2018 through February 2019. Vargas says that he did research into Segal's "Gay Liberation" for the exhibit, which gave him a new appreciation for how the work inspired conversations about monuments to the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
"Monuments, in general, create the illusion that the struggle is safely in the past, or at least the monuments that I am familiar with do that, or there's a danger of doing that," Vargas says.
Activist Elle Hearns is the founder of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, which aims to protect and defend the human rights of black transgender people. Hearns said she was aware of the want for a Johnson memorial, but heard the announcement from the city along with everyone else. She says she sees the timing as a PR move, specifically timed to coincide with the celebration of the Stonewall anniversary and World Pride.
"I was excited that these women who have contributed so much to what we understand about ourselves and the world in social justice ― I was excited that finally, a city that they gave so much to them is honoring them," Hearns says. But, she continues, "the excitement was short-lived because the reality of what I know is that there are many trans women across this entire globe who will never have the opportunity to be utilized for political gain. I am not satisfied with a monument. I'm much more satisfied with resources being distributed to the women who lives will never have an opportunity for such grandeur."
As of press time, nine transgender women have been murdered in 2019, all of them Black. Hearns says she believes the city is using the monument as a self-congratulatory way to divert attention from the work Johnson and Rivera were doing to help their communities.
"This has absolutely nothing to do with the city being ready," Herans says, noting that the city is offering a monument in place of addressing the concerns Johnson and Rivera had. "[The city is] not actually willing to change any of the conditions that create the reasons why [Marsha and Sylvia] have to be statued in the first place."
Still, Hearns says she hopes a trans artist of color will be given the opportunity to create the monument. She also wants that artist to consult with Black trans organizers who have been working to follow Johnson's lead since her murder in 1992, as she points out that Johnson was not just advocating for LGBTQ+ rights, but for all Black people, sex workers, and other further marginalized people.
"She was much more than just rainbows," Hearns says. "She was Black, and so inherently the demands that she was making around her humanity and humanities of others were Black. "
Vargas says that he'd be thrilled to see any of the artists who participated in his Stonewall Re-memorialization project be given the opportunity to work on the monument, but ultimately, doesn't see a world in which everyone will be happy with the monument, just like Segal's "Gay Liberation."
"I mean, maybe that's not the point," Vargas says. "Maybe that just points to the fact that within the queer community, we're just not all aligned politically and aesthetically."
"I think the reality of Marsha P. Johnson's life is that her life in itself is already a monument," Hearns says. "Whether a city that did not believe her when she was alive honors her or not, her legacy has already been sealed."
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