4 ARTS
8 UNDER THE ARCH
‘Call of Duty: Vanguard’ Demands historical distortion
Beneath the stars, stripes
6 CULTURE
10 OPINION
More than a mooncake: Students celebrate Mid-Autumn
Recent gropings highlight NYU’s weak approach to sexual misconduct
VOLUME LVII | ISSUE 3
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2021
Guerrilla memorial is NYC’s first statue of a trans person
SIRUI WU | WSN
The statue of Marsha P. Johnson, decorated in a wreath and flowers, stands in Christopher Park. This monument honoring the gay liberation pioneer was installed by a local artist without city authorization.
The unauthorized statue of gay liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson in Christopher Park amplifies the silenced Black transgender voices of the LGBTQ+ movement. By RACHEL COHEN Deputy News Editor In 2019, New York City announced plans to install a monument honoring gay liberation pioneer and Black transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson down the street from the Stonewall Inn, a historic safe haven for the LGBTQ+ community. After repeated delays due to the pandemic, Jessi Pallotta — an artist, sex worker and transgender activist — was tired of waiting for the statue to materialize. At a New Year’s Eve party in 2020, Pallotta and their friends decided to
take matters into their own hands. Pallotta, a trained sculptor, began by hanging 100 photographs of Johnson on their wall to sketch. “It was a three month process of sculpting, and I had this moment when I f inally got her eyes after days of trying to f igure out her gaze and just started crying,” Pallotta said. “I felt like I could really see Marsha for the f irst time. This person who I thought about for years and years when I was really struggling was super present.” The completed statue of Johnson has stood in Christopher Park across from the Stonewall Inn since Aug. 24 without the city’s approval. It is the f irst monument of a transgender person in a New York City park and the f irst to depict a Stonewall riots participant. Since then, Pallotta has submitted a First Amendment permit through the National Park Service to protect the statue. They plan to temporarily install the statue at the LGBTQ Community Center in Manhattan in the coming weeks.
“We never attempted to go through the city,” Pallotta said. “I was hoping that Marsha’s beauty is so impactful on its own that people would not mind that it was there — and it actually seems to be working. I anticipated that it would be taken down within two to three days, so I was prepared for that.” Johnson — a key f igure in the 1969 Stonewall riots, co-creator of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power — spearheaded a f ive-day sit-in at NYU’s Weinstein Residence Hall in September 1970 after the university refused to provide the LGBTQ+ community access to on-campus facilities for meetings and dances. “The issues that were being raised in those protests remain absolutely central at NYU,” Emmaia Gelman, an NYU lecturer teaching a course called Queer NYC, said. “The fact that the Weinstein occupation of protests lives on as part of queer NYU memory is a testament to the fact that the
work they did in leading these rowdy, unruly and unbounded protests continues to be incredibly important.” According to Pallotta, the statue of Johnson, located directly adjacent to the “Gay Liberation” sculpture created by NYU alum George Segal, comments on the existing rhetoric of the Queer Liberation Monument, which continues to exclude the voices of transgender people — and, in particular, trans people of color. Marc Robert Stein, a professor of history at San Francisco State University and editor of “The Stonewall Riots,” said the sculpture symbolizes the diversity and intersectionality of the LGBTQ+ community, since Johnson was Black, gay, transgender, poor and a sex worker. “Her embodiment of those identities served and serves as a reminder of divisions and hierarchies within queer and trans worlds,” Stein said. “Although I haven’t seen the statue yet [in person], its placement in proximity to George Segal’s ‘Gay Liberation’ work — often described as featuring
two standing white men and two seated white women — might also serve to create conversation and dialogue about the gender, class, race and sexual politics of artistic representation.” Gelman added that it is important that Johnson is being honored by the public today, since she did not receive recognition during her lifetime. “At the time, people were really focused on activism and concerned about respectability and coherence,” Gelman said. “Not everyone, but many organizers and also the spaces in which people organized didn’t necessarily understand people who were breaking the mold as leaders. It’s painful to have watched folks like Marsha and Sylvia experience so much rejection in their lives and now be celebrated.” Chris Woods, the director of NYU’s LGBTQ+ Center, declined to make a statement to WSN, but said he visited the monument and that he was excited that Johnson is receiving recognition. CONTINUED ON PAGE TWO