On a December night in downtown Berkeley, “The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson” took place.  A thoughtful panel on art and advocacy, the event was organized by the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Gender Equity Resource Center, and the Multicultural Community Center. 

The writer-activist Tourmaline has received extensive acclaim for her advocacy for Black trans liberation and joy. She was named a BCRW Activist Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and listed in TIME 100 for her insight and influence. In the spring of this year, Tourmaline published her second book, Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, the first biography of Johnson, an extraordinary figure in LGBTQ+ history, and the inspiration behind the night’s event. 

Tourmaline was joined on stage by longtime collaborators Eric Stanley, the Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity and an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley; and renowned political activist and philosopher Angela Davis. 

I’ve long admired Davis’s advocacy and scholarship, both of which are essential to intersectional feminist theory and practice. Her essays, speeches, books, and poetry often center on intersectionality to recognize how gender, race, and class inform experiences of discrimination, oppression, violence, health, and justice. Her beloved books, such as Women, Race and Class (1983), Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), and Freedom is a Constant Struggle (2015), thoughtfully excavate and examine the pressing issues of our time. Davis is distinguished professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has taught courses in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies departments. In 1994, she received the distinguished UC Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies. 

Together, Tourmaline, Davis, and Stanley co-organized Critical Resistance 10 (CR10), the tenth-anniversary conference of the prison abolition group Critical Resistance, held over a weekend in September 2008 and drawing thousands to Oakland, California. Addressing the audience, Tourmaline reflected on the conference and how it continues to inspire and influence her current work: “It really grounded me in this lineage that is so powerful, a lineage of people who look at the harsh conditions that we are constantly aware of and use them as the spring board, the impetus, the catalyst to dream and demand more, to imagine and to know firmly that the world that we exist in isn't one that is fixed. It's actually changeable.” She proceeded to share with us a chapter from The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, one that promised to exemplify “Marsha doing that work of facing the harshness of reality and allowing herself to dream beyond it and to come up with a world that she knew that she deserved.” As Tourmaline read the passage, I was struck by her writing style as much as its contents, and I was moved by her profound thoughtfulness and creativity.  Her beautiful language described wonderful visions of advocacy rooted in hope and resilience. 

In conversation with one another, the breadth of history shared between Tourmaline, Davis, and Stanley — in both experience and knowledge — was unmistakable. “This feels like a kind of homecoming, family reunion, like all the ways that we're connected in this deep web, including many people in the audience,” Stanley said at one moment. The significance of community to both the night’s occurrence and its themes was just as evident, illustrated by the expansive list of people and programs involved in bringing it into being, as well as the sentiments discussed throughout. During the night and long after it ended, I found myself returning to the concept of care: something essential to engender change and shape better conditions, as vital to interpersonal relationships as to advocacy, writing, and research. 

One person who seemed to exemplify this was Miss Major, a trans rights activist and community organizer who worked closely with the three on CR10. “For nearly 20 years, it was this mothership and mentorship of generosity,” Miss Major, who taught Tourmaline how to identify the world’s imperfections — while always striving to imagine something better, and working closely with others to make it a reality. Davis also reflected on her relationship with Miss Major, admiring her fierce habit of showing up for the people in her life, preceded by an admission of her own struggle to stay in touch, even with those she loves and thinks highly of. “What was so remarkable about Major was that she stayed in touch. She called at least once a month, and what's so incredible about that is she did it with everyone,” Davis said. “It's such a wonderful example of how to maintain friendships and how to guarantee that relationships survive time and survive when we're geographically separated.” I recognized the familiar, special feeling often transposed in material expressions of love, those grounded in attention, effort, and care, and was reminded of something I read years ago in bell hooks’ essay collection, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994): “The moment we choose to love, we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.”   

hooks was my introduction to treating love as something worth analyzing, criticizing, investigating, and writing about; not simply a word exchanged between families and romantic partners, but a powerful tool for social change and political advocacy. hooks’s literature on love, including her books All About Love: New Visions (1999) and Communion: The Search for Female Love and Purpose (2002), taught me love’s six essential elements: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. It is transformative to base one’s definition of love on these qualities, rather than on desire, envy, or obligation. 

“A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love, we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong,” hooks writes in All About Love. I recognized hooks’s writing throughout the night’s conversation, particularly in its emphasis on care. “We often think about care in relationship to those who we feel are closest to us, and that limits our capacity to understand our relationality with and our closeness, our affinity with those who might not seem to be as close,” Davis reflected. The panelists demonstrated care in their exchanges with one another, in their messages to the audience, in their selection of critical methods, and in the craft of their work. Davis responded to something Tourmaline said about her book’s earliest draft, which contained extensive research ultimately not included in the published version: “I really was resonating with how you were envisioning this kind of companion, this kind of double of that book — that's so beautiful to think about its twin, right, circulating in different forms and for different audiences and different people.” Allowing stories and experiences to remain special and private, to exist and be appreciated in a quieter, more intimate way, speaks to what Davis called “the ethics of making visible something that actually wanted to stay hidden.” Elaborating on this claim, Davis offered that “a lot of our work is both trying to think about the gaps and what can be reclaimed, but probably as much about what should stay hidden. What we don't want to produce for the dominant culture. What we want to keep for ourselves.”

I thought about how care and privacy relate, particularly when privacy is regarded as a form of freedom that is critical to autonomy. The act of keeping something, held closely to your heart or hidden under your pillow, feels deeply sentimental, capable of inspiring closeness and intimacy, and allowing for processing, healing, and even feeling alive. “In our culture, privacy is often confused with secrecy. Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings - where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to. Keeping secrets is usually about power, about hiding and concealing information,” hooks writes in All About Love. I recognized that, in the case of marginalized experiences, the power found in secrecy is perhaps essential to advocacy.

It’s no surprise that I was frequently reminded of hooks, since the night really was all about love: a space, community, and understanding of advocacy grounded in hooks’s six principles. I regarded Tormaline, Davis, and Stanley’s efforts to envision a better world and strive to make it a reality as a form of love. “Marsha herself imagined her life. And she inhabited that imagination. And that is what we are trying to do in terms of creating a more habitable future, isn't it?” Davis asked. I saw that believing, learning, fighting, writing, imagining are all loving, and I saw what hooks meant: “True love does have the power to redeem, but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”