Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, an activist and defining figure in LGBTQ+ liberation movements, has died, according to the House of GG Facebook account. Griffin-Gracy was 78.
“It is with profound sadness that House of GG announces the passing of our beloved leader and revolutionary figure in the TLGBQ liberation movement, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy,” the organization wrote in a post, noting that the activist had died on October 13. “Her enduring legacy is a testament to her resilience, activism, and dedication to creating safe spaces for Black trans communities and all trans people—we are eternally grateful for Miss Major’s life, her contributions and how deeply she poured into those she loved.”
Griffin-Gracy had been admitted to the hospital with a blood clot and a sepsis diagnosis in September. She was released to receive in-home hospice care earlier this month.
Over the span of her life, Griffin-Gracy’s work as an activist ranged from her work on behalf of people suffering with HIV and AIDS in the early 1980s, to launching San Francisco’s first mobile needle exchange, to her championing of the abolitionist movement, often prioritizing trans women. Some of this latter work was done as the executive director of the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project, which she joined in 2005. In 1969, she resisted police violence in the Stonewall Uprisings, largely viewed as the launch of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.
“The shame of it was that after it happened, most of the Black girls that had been involved in it, we got whitewashed out of it,” she told SF Weekly in a 2015 interview about that landmark event. “The gay and lesbian community just took it over and acted not only as if we did not exist, but that we weren't even there.”
Griffin-Gracy went on to launch the Griffin-Gracy Educational and Historical Center, known more popularly as the House of GG in 2019. She was still doing her work as recently as August, when she spoke at the Trans Equality Summit in Minneapolis. Griffin-Gracy is survived by her sons Asaiah, Christopher, and Jonathan as well as her partner Beck Witt. She has served as mother and grandmother to generations of trans people, many of whom were featured in the 2015 documentary Major!
“What we have to do is be prepared to fight back by any means necessary,” Griffin-Gracy told ACLU attorney Chase Strangio in a 2022 conversation for Them about the current legislative attack aiming to restrict the trans community and trans kids from receiving things like healthcare and basic self-determination. “They are not going to take us at our word. They’re going to keep thinking whatever they think about us, and that has to stop. And the only way I’ve seen that done is by fighting them.”
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy was born on October 25, 1946 in Chicago, one of three children in a middle-class Catholic family. A psychic told her mother to give her “a name of importance,” so her mother named her Major, according to a 2023 profile in The Guardian. “Growing up as a kid, I was excited about everything because to me tomorrow always brings something new,” she said in a 2016 interview with The Outwords Archive. “Even as a teenage person, I was never worried about who I was going to be. It’s like I’ll be whatever it is when I get there.”
She came out to her parents at 12 or 13, according to a 2015 interview with SF Weekly. “I told them that this existence that I had, it just didn't feel right. You know inside when something isn’t meshing right,” she said. Her parents first sent her to a psychiatrist before sending her to church to have “the demon excised from me.” Still, in her teens, she started to wear her mother’s clothes and shoes around the house.
Though Griffin-Gracy began attending college in Minnesota at the age of 17, she was kicked out because she wore women’s clothing, and returned to Chicago. She tried to attend another college there, but she was once again kicked out. She took a part-time job as a receptionist at Mattachine Midwest, which is widely considered one of the first successful gay rights groups in the city. But, as with many transfeminine people of the time, the steadiest labor available to her was sex work, as she told SF Weekly, which exposed her to frequent police abuse.
It was at house parties and balls in Chicago that Griffin-Gracy began to meet other trans people in a thriving ball scene that dated as far back as 1935. When the Jewel Box Revue came to town for a run of performances, a traveling drag and impersonation troupe she had first seen with her family as a child, she managed to perform with them briefly. While on the scene in the late 1950s, she met her friend and mentor, Kitty, whom she credits with helping her embrace her transness and her height, specifically. But, in 1962, she left the Second City for New York.
“My mother drove down [to The Loop,] chased me down, threw me in the back of the car, took me back to their house on the South Side and let me know: ‘You can’t be here doing this, cause we live here. Chicago is not big enough for the both of us’” Major recalled in a 2017 interview for the NYC Trans Oral History Project.
Stonewall Inn, a small bar in the West Village that would birth the modern Queer Liberation Movement, became home for Griffin-Gracy once she moved to New York. While in the city, she worked a brief stint in a hospital morgue but then returned to the glamour of the Jewel Box Revue, now housed at the Apollo Theater. Prominent members of the group included queer and trans icons of the time such as drag king and fellow Stonewall veteran Stormé DeLarverie and ballroom mother Dorian Corey. But in her off time, Griffin-Gracy became a regular at Stonewall, a dive bar that allowed trans people in when most gay bars in the city were quick to turn them away.
"Stonewall was a great bar, a transgender bar,” Griffin-Gracy told SF Weekly. “You could be someplace and you didn’t have to explain who you were. There were friends there. You were accepted there."
Between Stonewall and the uptown building she lived in on Amsterdam Avenue and 85th Street, Griffin-Gracy enmeshed herself deeply in New York City’s burgeoning trans community spaces, which involved mutual care and resource-sharing. At the time, it was common for police to raid bars like Stonewall, often physically assaulting patrons and arresting them without just cause.
One fateful night, June 28, 1969, patrons of the bar including Griffin-Gracy, had had enough. The police attempted to raid the Inn, the customers fought back, and the rest is history—one that Griffin-Gracy herself came to embody as a founding foremother and singular protector of the queer liberation movement.
“All I know is all of a sudden you were fighting for your fucking existence,” Griffin-Gracy told SF Weekly of the ensuing riots.
Rather than fight the police in a prolonged interaction, Griffin-Gracy has said her strategy was to piss off an officer to get knocked out early so they wouldn’t continue to beat her, possibly causing serious injury. To do this, she said that she pulled a mask off a nearby policeman and spat in his face.
“He knocked my ass out,” she told SF Weekly. “That’s the last thing I remember. When I woke up, I was in the Tombs [holding cell], and the next day they just let us all out.” The events at Stonewall, which lasted for days, were commemorated with an event that has since become New York City Pride.
Following the Stonewall uprisings, Griffin-Gracy’s close friend Puppy died, which deeply impacted her political consciousness. While the police deemed her death a suicide, Major suspected that a client had murdered Puppy, and that the authorities simply didn’t want to investigate a trans woman’s death.
“Puppy’s murder made me aware that we were not safe or untouchable and that if someone does touch us, no one gives a shit,” Griffin-Gracy told A New Queer Agenda. “We only have each other. We always knew this, but now we needed to take a step towards doing something about it. So I started looking out for myself and the girls who worked on the street with me.”
Though Griffin-Gracy is perhaps best known for her presence at the Stonewall uprisings, she was also lauded for her decades-long commitment to organizing for prison abolition. In 1970, she was incarcerated at Clinton Correctional Facility, where she met and befriended Frank “Big Black” Smith, one of the leaders of the Attica prison rebellion of 1971. In Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary, a collection of oral histories assembled by former personal assistant Toshio Meronek, Griffin-Gracy credits him as “the instrument for my politicization.”
Griffin-Gracy and her long-term girlfriend moved to San Diego in 1978, shortly after the birth of their son, Christopher, where she eventually joined San Diego AIDS Foundation as a patient liaison. As the crisis raged on and the US government turned its head, she went on to found her own organization, called Angels of Care, that organized trans women in New York and Los Angeles to help care for patients dying of AIDS when no one else would.
“No one wanted to take care of those gay guys when they first got AIDS," she recalled to SF Weekly, “and a lot of my transgender women stepped up to the plate to do it.”
Her work didn’t stop with that crisis. Her time in prison and friendship with Smith imprinted the importance of abolition on her, inspiring her to continue her work even on the brink of “retirement.” Alongside Alexander Lee, she co-founded the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project, which works to combat the rampant transphobia in prisons and fight against the prison industrial complex.
“It has to include everybody, or nobody is going to get saved,” she told Teen Vogue in 2020 of the movement. “There’s always that nagging suspicion that it doesn’t include my community and that I’ve got to make sure that it does.”
Griffin-Gracy’s body of work over her 78 years is a vast tapestry of impact that has been foundational to much of the modern trans liberation work that has blossomed since Stonewall. Some of the highest-profile trans people of our time—such as Janet Mock, Ceyenne Doroshow, Chase Strangio, Raquel Willis, and Laverne Cox—all look up to Griffin-Gracy. For many, including those who followed her at TGIJP, she was not just an organizer, but a mother and spiritual elder of sorts.
“I’m trying to follow in the lane of my spiritual ancestors like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and elders like Miss Major—activists who stood up for trans folks,” Willis wrote in 2020 for The Cut.
Her work included not only speaking and putting her body on the front lines, but writing personal letters to incarcerated trans women and others to let them know they are valued.
“When I think of Major, I think of the monthly calls and voice messages she leaves for me with such tenderness, embracing me despite the distance, letting me know that someone is proud of me, thinking of me, caring for me when oftentimes I may not care for myself, or feel I am doing enough, or am enough,” Mock told Out in 2019. “We all deserve such a person, and Major has been that for hundreds of trans women aching to be loved and affirmed. She's the mother we all deserve.”
Even during her last weeks of life, while navigating her declining health, Griffin-Gracy always stood by her mission: trans people—particularly Black trans women—should be at the forefront of the LGBTQ+ right movement, never an afterthought. If her legacy represents one thing most clearly, that trans people, and especially trans women, should be prioritized.
“I will let these motherfuckers know in a heartbeat as far as I’m concerned that T should have been first,” Griffin-Gracy told Autostraddle.