Miss Major Speaks

A legendary transgender elder and activist reflects on a lifetime of struggle and the future of black, queer, and trans liberation.

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a transgender elder and activist who has survived Bellevue psychiatric hospital, Attica Prison, the HIV/AIDS crisis and a world that white supremacy has built. She has shared tips with other sex workers in the nascent drag ball scene of the late 1960s, and helped found one of America' s first needle exchange clinics from the back of her van. Miss Major Speaks is both document of her brilliant life — told with intimacy, warmth and an undeniable levity — and a roadmap for the challenges black, brown, queer and trans youth will face on the path to liberation today.

Her incredible story of a life lived and a world survived becomes a conduit for larger questions about the riddle of collective liberation. For a younger generation, she warns about the traps of representation' the politics of 'self-care,' and the frequent dead-ends of non-profit organizing; for all of us, she is a strike against those who would erase these histories of struggle.

Miss Major offers something that cannot be found elsewhere — an affirmation that our vision for freedom can and must be more expansive than those on offer by mainstream institutions.