A Thousand Natural Shocks With Gabe S. Dunn · Gabe Dunn | Diamond MPrint Productions

The Activism and Legacy of Marsha P. Johnson with Tourmaline

·42 min·3 clips

Tourmaline found Marsha P. Johnson's revolutionary manifesto hidden in an unlabeled box at the New York Public Library.

Gabe opens with money anxiety and shame, then the episode turns toward Tourmaline, who describes 20 years of studying Marsha P. Johnson through art, activism, education, and organizing. The mood starts warm and gets serious fast. Tourmaline brings in Mary Jones, a Black trans woman in 1830s New York City who lived in Soho, worked in the sex industry, and made room for her life and truth to be seen. Gabe says she had never heard that history. That absence matters because the conversation keeps returning to the way public memory drops names, softens violence, and leaves people to find whole lineages later. Marsha comes through as living history. Tourmaline talks about feeling addressed by Johnson's legacy, less as inspiration and more as a responsibility to keep the work moving. Then Gabe asks how Johnson died. Tourmaline answers carefully, beginning with the violence Johnson had already survived, including being shot by a client in 1980, 1981 and living with a bullet in her back for 11 years. That injury changed daily life. It affected sleep, travel, performance, and her ability to move through the world with the Hot Peaches performance troupe. Johnson called herself a cat with nine lives. Here, the phrase feels less cute than brutally practical: a record of surviving street-based violence and neglect again and again. Her death remains unresolved. Tourmaline names several accounts around July 1992: harassment before Johnson's body was found in the Hudson River, poor psychiatric care, and the possibilities that she walked, was chased, or was pushed into the water. Gabe connects that uncertainty to police narratives, noticing how violence against Black people often gets buried in passive headlines. The episode closes on the road, with Tourmaline naming appearances in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and LA as part of carrying Marsha's message now.

As heard by us

A clear conversation about Marsha P. Johnson, Mary Jones, and the violence that shadows both.

Tourmaline speaks about Marsha P. Johnson, and the discussion widens to Mary Jones, police violence, and how public memory can flatten a life. The best passages keep the person in view while moving out to the larger pattern.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a clear-eyed conversation about Marsha P. Johnson, Mary Jones, and how history gets handled.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from A Thousand Natural Shocks With Gabe S. Dunn