Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a battler during the major episodes involving trans rights for 60 years, known for the earthy, mordant humor of someone who had lived through the hardships they sought to redress, died on Oct. 13 in Little Rock, Ark.
House of gg, a retreat she started there for fellow Black trans people, announced her death in a statement that did not specify the cause or her exact location at the time. Late last month, her partner, Beck Witt Major, wrote on social media that Miss Major, as she was known, had been hospitalized with sepsis and a blood clot.
According to the birth date on her driver’s license, Oct. 25, 1946, Miss Major was 78. But accounts differed about her age, and Miss Major rarely commented about it beyond saying, “I’m not 21.”
In 2023, the British newspaper The Guardian called Miss Major “the most celebrated trans activist and elder alive today.” Her credibility in the movement was threefold.
She could document her participation in major historical events that affected the trans community, including the Stonewall Riot and the AIDS crisis.
Yet during all that time she was not a public figure. She suffered the perils and indignities of a life lived at the very bottom of the social hierarchy: rejection from her family, summary firings from corporate jobs, homelessness, a living earned by “hooking” (to use Miss Major’s term), imprisonment, and avoiding prison by performing sexual favors for policemen.
She emerged on the other side a nonprofit executive and public spokeswoman. She was maternal but also nonjudgmental with younger trans people. And she was colorfully combative with everyone else, including the mainstream gay and lesbian movement and Pride parades, which she described as too cozy with corporations and law enforcement while being unmindful of the poor and marginal.
“There was a lot more honesty in hooking than in the last couple of Gay Prides I did,” Miss Major said in her 2023 book, “Miss Major Speaks,” a compilation of interviews between herself and the writer Toshio Meronek.
In 2015, Miss Major was the subject of “Major!,” a documentary directed by Annalise Ophelian that screened at festivals around the nation and the world.
Back in the 1960s, Miss Major was something of a regular at the Stonewall Inn, where she would go to get a beer with a friend after hooking on 8th Avenue. She had a mixed experience there, finding that male gay patrons were often disrespectful to trans women.
Accounts vary about what started a fight between bar patrons and the police on the night of June 28, 1969. Miss Major considered the goings-on routine: She was often at gay bars where you would hear the policemen’s nightsticks, see the lights go on and be hustled into a paddy wagon.
But this time, a brawl broke out. Miss Major joined the melee.
She recalled being advised, if you’re ever in hand-to-hand combat with a policeman, do something to anger him so much he’ll knock you out, to avoid an even worse fate. She snatched off one officer’s mask and spit in his face.
“That’s the last thing I remember,” she told SF Weekly in 2015. “When I woke up, I was in the Tombs,” the Manhattan jail.
A tumultuous decade followed for Miss Major, including imprisonment and an attempt to live as a gender-conforming man. Miss Major then moved to the Bay Area. She started an organization called Angels of Care, which connected trans women in need of work with neglected gay men with AIDS. At the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center, Miss Major established the earliest version of House of gg, called GiGi’s Place, a sort of 24-hour living room for the local trans community.
She also drove San Francisco’s first needle exchange van.
Billie Cooper, a trans woman who had struggled with addiction, told Scholar & Feminist, a Barnard College journal, why she and other trans women sought support from Miss Major.
“She understands that sometimes we won’t take the advice,” Ms. Cooper said. “We find in her someone who is caring.”
Miss Major was born and raised in Chicago. Her father was a postal worker and her mother ran a beauty parlor
A traveling drag show associated with the Apollo Theater, the Jewel Box Revue, visited Chicago. She enjoyed the show so much that her mother, alarmed, dragged her away at intermission.
She briefly attended college in Minnesota but quickly left, after word of her women’s clothes got out, and headed to New York City. She took up acting as a showgirl in drag revues.
In the mid-2000s, Miss Major began working at the TGI Justice Project, a nonprofit that sought to help support trans women in prison. She later became the group’s executive director. Scholar & Feminist called her “an invaluable bridge from incarcerated transgender individuals to advocates.”
In her last years, Miss Major was mostly amused to find that people wanted to make T-shirts and mugs with pictures of her face with snappy slogans. But she began saying no to interviews about Stonewall and even declined an invitation from the Obama administration to an event where Stonewall was dedicated as a national monument.
“Stonewall, for my gurls, wasn’t a monumental moment,” she said in her book.
She particularly decried how two other figures of the Stonewall uprising, Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, were, like Miss Major, trans and nonwhite, and were long not included in popular histories of the episode.
She moved to Little Rock after visiting for a screening of her movie and finding both that she felt unexpectedly safe in the city and that her services for trans people seemed particularly needed. In 2016, she founded House of gg, also known as Tilifi, which stands for Tell It Like It Is, with a profanity thrown in for good measure. The site features bedrooms, a pool, a merry-go-round and free meals, all intended to form a safe haven for trans people.
She had a child, Asiah, with her partner, and a son, Christopher, from a prior relationship. A list of her immediate survivors was not immediately available.
In 2021, The Advocate asked Miss Major if she had any friends who were trans and her age.
“I don’t know any,” she replied. Then she thought back to the 1960s, when she lived in a building on the Upper West Side full of trans women. “Of the girls who were in that building,” Miss Major said, “there may be one still alive.”
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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