Each generation of young LGBTQIA people learns to navigate a world that is openly hostile to them. Some may feel that they’re the only people on Earth who have had to learn the necessary skills. But a pair of books by authors Caro De Robertis and Tourmaline show that there are legacies of strength and resistance that new generations can draw upon from genderqueer elders who fought for and won civil rights battles, often simply by being themselves.
De Robertis’ So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color brings together the stories of 20 LGBTQIA elders who learned to live their unique identities in a world that, when they were growing up, didn’t even have words for such people.
“The people in the book hail from all over the world,” says De Robertis, a celebrated nonbinary novelist of Uruguayan descent living in Oakland. “There’s immigrants from the Philippines, Argentina, Cuba, and then people who grew up all over the country. For example, Sharyn Grayson grew up in Houston, Texas, and talks about her mother seeing who she really was in the 1950s. You know, this Black lady in the 1950s just saying to her child, ‘I see who you are, and I’m going to embrace and support you, even though I’m scared for you, and it’s hard enough to be Black in this world.’ And Sharyn Grayson went on to transition in the 1960s and is now, in her 70s, an iconic Black trans leader.
“There are people like Bamby Salcedo, who is the founder of the TransLatin@ Coalition, who grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico, and is a beloved transgender leader in her community,” De Robertis continues. “Ms. Billie Cooper is also a lifelong activist. There’s Nikki Calma, who was known as Tita Aida in the community. She did these Filipino performances during the AIDS crisis to educate people in gay Filipino communities about HIV prevention. There’s KB Boyce, who is a Black trans masculine musician who formed a punk band at the age of 15 in New York, and that was his vehicle for getting free. Now he runs an organization called Queer Rebels. There’s people like Landa Lakes, who identify as Two Spirit. J Miko Thomas is their given name and Landa Lakes is their drag name, which, embedded in that name, is a profound interrogation of the stereotypes of Indigenous people.”
De Robertis’ subjects shared stories about transitioning, about their relationships to their communities, to immigration, to art. Hearing about the importance of drag in their lives, De Robertis devoted a chapter to the art form in their book, profiling Nelson Perez, who, at the age of 17, dropped out of high school in Cuba and began renting mansions to hold drag shows.
“She had a day job in construction, and then she would host these glamorous drag shows, and they would just make things out of whatever they had on hand and 200 people would come,” De Robertis says. “It was very underground, and she was arrested and tortured many times because it was illegal to do drag and to hold events at the time in Cuba. And now she’s an elder in San Francisco and she says, ‘You know, I don’t regret one bit of it.’”
De Robertis begins So Many Stars with a chapter titled “Glimmers in Childhood,” weaving together the elders’ remembrances of feeling their genders as children. “Something they all had in common is that they all grew up in a time and place where there was no true vocabulary for everything they were,” De Robertis explains. “And yet they experienced themselves. And yet they knew things about their internal truth and about their gender.”
That genius for knowing one’s self and embracing it is part of the legend of New York trans activist Marsha P. Johnson. Johnson moved to the city in 1963 at the age of 18, living on the street and fashioning a life as an artist and a leader of the Gay Liberation movement. She was in the vanguard of the Stonewall uprising, modeled for Andy Warhol, co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, demonstrated for AIDS awareness, and earned the honorific “the Saint of Christopher Street” before her untimely death in 1992.
Tourmaline, a writer, filmmaker, and artist whose work has appeared at the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, and in other such spaces, was 19 years old when she first visited Christopher Street in 2002. “It was like Marsha was talking in my head,” Tourmaline remembers. “Something just brought me there. And little by little, I got to be friends with her loved ones and her siblings and her nephew, and I really started to understand: This person was cultivating a life that extended well beyond the reaches of their embodied experience, that extended for generations on. And I’m really the beneficiary of that.”
Johnson’s presence has burned within Tourmaline ever since. In 2009, she and Sasha Wortzel documented the work of Johnson’s close friend, the transgender rights activist Sylvia Rivera, and the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in the film STAR People Are Beautiful People. In 2018, Tourmaline and Wortzel released “Happy Birthday, Marsha!,” a short film which imagines Johnson initiating the Stonewall riots by throwing a shot glass at a pair of police officers, a distillation of several legends that, true or not, have grown up around the activist.
Now, Tourmaline has released Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, which brings her research together. “It felt so important to have all of this knowledge in one place, so people could understand and make connections with each other about what Marsha was doing across a vast, expansive landscape,” Tourmaline says, “whether it’s activism and organizing around things like housing and health care, whether it’s art, performance, and spirituality – all of those things.”
Tourmaline echoes De Robertis’ observation that it takes a certain kind of genius to, in De Robertis’ words, “unfurl your truest queer and trans life” when the world wants to erase you. “Marsha wasn’t gonna let some random passerby or police officer or politician determine how she felt about herself,” Tourmaline says. “She was in charge of how she felt about herself, and so fearless. So much of all of our communities’ ability to show up and show out and be vibrant, to free ourselves, is because of the work that she was doing decades before, to lay the groundwork for them.”
De Robertis believes the mainstream media, when it talks about trans or nonbinary identities, is disproportionately focused on youth – as though these identities are an invention of the young, a fad that can be easily dismissed or legislated away.
“I think that does young people a disservice,” De Robertis says, “to think they don’t have an inheritance, or that they are not part of a long and beautiful lineage. So my hope with So Many Stars, and what I also see very much with Tourmaline’s incredible book, Marsha, is that they offer a different perspective that opens the pathway for understanding transness and nonbinaryness as having deep roots and a rich, powerful history that we are all contextualized in and part of.”
De Robertis emphasizes that the elders who make up that lineage and that history have changed the way our society feels about gender – and that the concept needed to change. “Crystal Mason is an artist and activist who said something that struck me so deeply that the book is actually named for it,” they share. “I asked them what it meant to them to start using they/them pronouns in their 60s. And they said, ‘If you look at a sky full of stars out in the countryside, you can think of each of those stars as a possibility. And the more stars there are in the sky, the more possibilities there are for human expression and ways of being. The more stars there are, that might mean one more person feels less alone.’
“And sometimes people get anxious about, ‘Oh, my goodness, there’s so many more words in this alphabet soup of LGBTQIA+ people these days.’ But they had this other perspective. They said more stars means more possibilities. And the more words we have, the more ways of knowing, the more expansive our culture can be, and the more room we can make for all of the different stars.”
Elders and Icons: Legacies of Queer Resistance
Saturday, Nov. 8, 10:15am
Kirkus Tent
This article appears in November 7 • 2025.