What inspired you to make The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson now?
David France: Marsha died twenty-five years ago this July and her fame—or infamy—has only increased over that quarter century. She’s become a very well-known touchstone within the LGBT movement but very little is really known about her. I wanted to fill in the historical record. In addition, I knew that her death was never thoroughly investigated by the police. In fact, as a print journalist I had begun to investigate her case back in 1992, but never did follow through on that work, so I felt a kind of personal obligation to go back to it, and I felt that that offered an opportunity to really put flesh on this mythical character of Marsha P. Johnson.
Marsha and her compatriot Sylvia Rivera were both incredibly charismatic and powerful people. Can you talk about what it was like to be in their presence?
DF: I knew both Marsha and Sylvia. I didn’t know Sylvia very well and I knew Marsha the way most people knew her, which was in passing and with great affection. Marsha was a fixture in the West Village, known and adored by everybody. She was sometimes homeless and living on the streets but almost always present for decades. If you walked down Christopher Street, Marsha would receive you in the manner of a gracious host. She dispensed cheer and joy. In a way, what she was doing, I realize now, was modeling a kind of freedom that for LGBT people at the time, in the 1970s and ’80s, didn’t exist. She was experimenting with it, trying it on, living it, in a way that other people couldn’t. That was her leadership quality.
Sylvia was more of an intellect. Although she never finished sixth grade, she was politically astute and a sharp observer of political strategy and philosophical junctures and opportunities for the movement. Her presence was much more sharp and much more demanding and direct than Marsha’s. Her leadership was an intellectual leadership. Their partnership was a body-and-soul partnership and a love story, as we see in the old archival footage. Together, they created the impetus for the ideological understanding of, and the first bricks in the foundation for, the modern LGBT movement in 1969.
You have a lot of fantastic footage of Marsha and Sylvia in The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, much of it newly discovered. How did you track it all down and what was it like to watch it when you found it?
DF: Finding the footage was as complicated and complex as any archival project, especially when the archives that you’re mining are not formal archives but rather boxes in people’s homes. That’s where we found the footage. It was gathered by friends of Marsha’s from back in the day. Each one of these rare pieces of video and audio was a thrill to uncover. I was surprised to learn how challenging life was for Sylvia in her middle years—the videotape shows us that. It brings us to her in her place of sometimes despairing hopelessness about the ability of the movement to recognize the transgender community and to incorporate it. She was the original voice demanding that the T be added to the L, the G and the B, and for a great period of time, and at great personal pain and expense. She fought that fight all alone and with little progress. It’s there in the footage—we see it, we see the history. Even going back to the early 1970s we have footage of Marsha and Sylvia and the work that they were doing—before there was widespread proliferation of video technology. Who had cameras back then? They were so expensive and bulky that you needed two people to carry them! So we were really lucky to find some real gems for including in the film. We’d hear rumors about some new piece of footage and we’d chase after those rumors and hopefully find those people and hopefully they still had the footage and hopefully it hadn’t declined from being so old … there was a lot of hoping and a lot of those hopes came true.
The person at the center of the contemporary story of The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson is Victoria Cruz. How did you come to know her and decide to build the film around her?
DF: Victoria Cruz is well known in the LGBT community for the work that she has been engaged in over the past couple of decades in working directly with victims of crime at the New York City Lesbian and Gay Anti-Violence Project. I knew that the Anti-Violence Project had been involved in the early investigation around Marsha’s death, so when I heard that they had an openness to reexamining their files and reopening the case—in recognition of this important anniversary—I talked to Victoria about following her and whether she would allow me to do that. She’s very interested in pursuing the case so she allowed us to use her work as a way to pry open a window onto that past.
The film documents what a brutal world it was for transgender people in the 1970s and ’80s and ’90s when so many just went missing. What's your sense about violence and acceptance in the transgender world today?
DF: One of the reasons I wanted to do this film is to show how much has changed and how much is still the same. We have developed an ability in the lexicon of contemporary culture to talk about and understand the arrival of the transgender community in civic life. But we haven’t done nearly enough to address the systemic prejudice against transgendered people, especially transgendered women of color who are at high risk of physical violence, who have trouble finding jobs, who have greater difficulty finding acceptance of any sort. And the ongoing issue, year after year in these last few years, of fatal violence against young trans women of color is something that has not been adequately tracked or adequately addressed. We discovered in going back and telling Marsha P. Johnson’s story that hers is just one of many similar stories. Another thing I discovered working with a cast that’s almost entirely of color and all LGBT is the difficulty that that community has in finding the strength and power it needs to bring a case like Marsha’s to fruition. The LGBT organizations that represent people of color are grossly underfunded and are struggling on a day-to-day basis to try to respond to the systemic social justice problems that the community faces. The injustice for the whole community is startling. It’s a battle that Marsha fought from the 1960s forward and it’s a battle that still has not been won.
Do you believe Marsha was murdered?
DF: Finding an answer to that question is why we went back and reinvestigated the case. We found old evidence, old witnesses, new evidence, new witnesses, and significant archival footage, all to examine the question of what might have happened to Marsha at the end of her life. And that answer is in the film.
Your previous documentary, How to Survive a Plague, looks at people on the margins who are claiming their rights and their dignity in very courageous and creative ways. Do you see parallels between the two films?
DF: Absolutely. As a filmmaker, I’m trying to tell the stories of people whose stories don’t ordinarily get told, of people whose lives embody that central American myth: that anybody, no matter how you’re born, can find power and prominence. The people whose stories I’ve been telling have changed the world, and although we know that we have enjoyed the legacy of the changes they brought about and the revolutions that they spearheaded, we don’t know them. I want to tell the stories of queer Americans as American stories, as stories that are as central to the culture we’ve inherited and that future generations will inherit as any activist or any innovator from any other community.
Do you have a favorite moment in the film?
DF: I think the most powerful moment in the film comes at a juncture in 1973 when Sylvia and Marsha found themselves pushed out of the LGBT movement, or the Gay Power movement as it was called then, and Sylvia takes to a stage and addresses what appears to be tens of thousands of people in the most angry, extemporaneous, and brilliant speech that I think has ever been recorded on film. I think it’s going to surprise people to see it. It surprises me every time I see it.
What impact do you hope that the film will have?
DF: I hope that people will see that as historical figures, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are great American figures whose stories should be taught in school and whose lives should be celebrated. When we started making this film we didn’t realize we would be entering a cultural period in which the advances we had come to embrace over the last decades would suddenly be imperiled. I think we’ve entered a time where stories of visionary activists and heroic figures are necessary and empowering. I think in that regard The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson is a timely document for today’s political problems.