This June, I decided to spend the month researching figures from Black queer history, with a particular focus on trans and gender-nonconforming people. I had assumed I already possessed a decent grasp of this history, but that belief was quickly unsettled. I learned so much and yet still only scratched the surface, particularly because much of this history has been preserved orally and therefore remains sparsely documented, if documented at all. Nevertheless, I thought it pertinent to post about one Black person I encountered each day, some already familiar to me and others entirely new. The notable, the intriguing, the defiant, and the too-often forgotten. From the first queen of drag to the guardian of lesbians who helped spark Stonewall, these are our brothers, sisters, and gender-nonconforming kinfolk, people who were owed far more than this world ever gave them.
For many of these people, the exact nature of their gender can be difficult to name with certainty, especially when they lived before our current language existed or when the records left behind were written by people with little interest in understanding them. In those cases, I use the language that seems most appropriate based on the available historical sources, while recognizing that I may not always get it right. Corrections are appreciated.
Because I am African American and an English speaker, this list mostly focuses on figures from that history and linguistic background. That is where I am most familiar, and where I have the easiest access to reliable research material. I’m well aware that this skews my perspective, and I hope to improve on that in the future.
Note: This originally began as a series of posts in The Black Left itself, which I have since compiled here.
JUNE 1 — MARY JONES
One of the earliest known Black gender-nonconforming people documented in the United States. Despite efforts by authorities to turn her life into a public spectacle, Mary Jones endured and remains an important figure in the history of Black gender nonconformity.
JUNE 2 — FRANCES THOMPSON
A formerly enslaved disabled Black trans woman who testified before Congress after the Memphis Massacre. Her testimony forced the United States to confront the sexual violence it inflicted upon Black people.
JUNE 3 — WILLIAM DORSEY SWANN
Born into slavery, Swann is the first known person in recorded history to identify as a “queen of drag,” what we would now call a drag queen. He built spaces of Black queer joy and resistance under threat of state violence, making him one of the earliest known organizers in American queer history.
JUNE 4 — RALPH KERWINEO
Kerwineo was a Black and Indigenous trans man living in early 20th-century Milwaukee, working, marrying, and building a life under this identity. After his former partner exposed him to police in 1914, he was arrested and put on trial for disorderly conduct, but the charges were ultimately dropped. Though newspapers declared the end of Ralph Kerwineo, he continued living as himself for years afterward.
JUNE 5 — LUCY HICKS ANDERSON
Lucy Hicks Anderson was a chef, entrepreneur, hostess, and respected figure in Oxnard, California, where she built a life as herself for decades. When the courts tried to deny her womanhood and invalidate her marriage, she declared, “I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman,” refusing to let the state define what she already knew.
JUNE 6 — PAULI MURRAY
A lawyer, poet, priest, and civil rights strategist whose relationship to gender exceeded the language available in his lifetime. Murray often described himself as having a “he/she personality” and spent years seeking answers from a medical establishment unwilling to listen. Long before many victories of the civil rights and women’s movements, she helped develop the legal arguments later used to challenge segregation and sex discrimination throughout the United States.
JUNE 7 — WILLMER “LITTLE AXE” BROADNAX
A Black transmasculine gospel singer whose voice helped shape postwar gospel quartet music. He lived as a man without apology and became a respected figure in our sacred Gospel tradition, carrying Black joy through song until the Lord called him home.
JUNE 8 — CRYSTAL LABEIJA
A Black trans woman and ballroom mother, Crystal LaBeija refused to accept the racism of the pageant world or beg for a place inside it. With Lottie LaBeija, she helped found the House of LaBeija, creating a home, a lineage, and one of the foundations of modern ballroom culture for Black and brown queer people.
JUNE 9 — MISS MAJOR GRIFFIN-GRACY
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy was a Black trans elder and revolutionary organizer who spent her life fighting for our people behind bars, on the street, and under siege. Through TGI Justice Project, she defended those most movements were willing to abandon.
JUNE 10 — SIR LADY JAVA
In 1960s Los Angeles, Black trans performer Sir Lady Java challenged laws used to police trans and gender-nonconforming performers. She turned performance, beauty, and public defiance into a direct confrontation with the state.
JUNE 11 — MARSHA P. JOHNSON
Many people remember St. Marsha as a symbol, and for her prominent presence at the Stonewall uprising in 1969. Those who knew her remember someone who fed people, housed people, protected people, and shared what little she had. Through STAR, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, she helped build a lifeline for trans and queer youth abandoned by everyone else. The wealth of her contributions to the queer movement cannot be understated and are too extensive to list.
JUNE 12 — GLORIA ALLEN, “MAMA GLORIA”
Mama Gloria was a Black trans woman, a sister, a mother, and a mentor to trans youth in Chicago. Through her charm school, she taught dignity, confidence, and survival, passing down the kind of wisdom only our elders can give.
JUNE 13 — TRACEY “AFRICA” NORMAN
Tracey was a Black trans model whose beauty carried her into rooms that were not built for women like her. After being outed, she believed she had lost everything, but Tracey still found ways to express her beauty among people who loved her. Her career, and later return to public recognition, remind us that Black trans beauty was never absent from history, only hidden.
JUNE 14 — EARLINE BUDD
A Black trans activist who spent decades serving trans people facing homelessness, HIV/AIDS, and poverty in Washington, D.C. Long before institutions took notice, she was doing the daily work of keeping our people alive.
JUNE 15 — MONICA ROBERTS
Monica Roberts knew that when the world misnames our dead, it is trying to kill them twice. Through TransGriot, she documented Black trans life with care and discipline, making sure our people were remembered by their names and not by the lies of police or media.
JUNE 16 — KYLAR BROADUS
Kylar Broadus is a Black trans lawyer and organizer who brought our people into rooms that were never meant to hear us. He founded the Trans People of Color Coalition and became the first openly trans person to testify before the United States Senate.
JUNE 17 — OCTAVIA ST. LAURENT
A legendary ballroom mother and Black trans woman, her life embodied the power of self-invention. In fashion, ballroom, and public life, Octavia imagined possibilities for herself that the world had not yet made room for, and in doing so, helped make room for countless others.
JUNE 18 — ALEXANDER JOHN GOODRUM
A Black trans man, writer, educator, and organizer whose work centered disability, poverty, health, and survival. Through TGNet Arizona and decades of advocacy, he fought for people too often left at the margins. In 2002, he died by suicide while a patient at La Frontera Psychiatric Health Facility, an institution whose failures were serious enough to trigger investigations and changes after his death. Still, Alexander’s life was more than what failed him: he built community, told the truth, and left behind a vision of liberation broad enough to hold all of us.
JUNE 19 — REV. LOUIS MITCHELL
Reverend Mitchell is a Black trans elder whose ministry has always been rooted in service to the living. Through faith work, HIV/AIDS advocacy, and community organizing, he has spent decades helping Black trans people survive, heal, and find one another.
JUNE 20 — STORMÉ DELARVERIE
A Black butch performer, singer, drag king, and guardian of lesbians in New York. Many remember Stormé’s fight with police as the spark that set off the Stonewall Uprising, a reminder that queer liberation was never handed down by the state, but won through the people’s willingness to resist it. Long after she left the stage, Stormé continued watching over her people in the Village, patrolling its streets and protecting those vulnerable to violence. Her life embodied a simple truth: our safety has never come from institutions alone, but from the bonds we build with one another through communal protection, collective resistance, and the willingness to defend our own.
JUNE 21 — THE LADY CHABLIS
Born in Quincy, Florida, The Lady Chablis made a life for herself across the South, from her first performances in Tallahassee to becoming Savannah’s Grand Empress. A Black trans performer, actress, and author, she brought her wit, beauty, and nerve from the club stage to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, becoming one of the first trans performers many Americans ever saw on that scale. In a world that loved to talk over women like her, Chablis told her own story instead.
JUNE 22 — WILLI NINJA
Known as the Grandfather of Vogue, Willi Ninja helped carry ballroom from Harlem’s drag ball scene to the world. As the founder and mother of the House of Ninja, he helped create family for Black and Latino queer youth pushed out by racism, homophobia, transphobia, poverty, and abandonment.
JUNE 23 — CEYENNE DOROSHOW
Ceyenne Doroshow is a Black trans organizer, author, and New Yorker shaped by the same conditions she now fights to change. After being pushed onto the streets as a child, she found family among older queer people, then became that kind of family for others. Through G.L.I.T.S., she has built housing, healthcare support, leadership programs, and asylum assistance for trans people and sex workers, carrying forward the lesson she learned from Flawless Sabrina: never leave a sister behind.
JUNE 24 — BIG FREEDIA
Before Big Freedia became the Queen of Bounce, she was a New Orleans kid shaped by church choirs, neighborhood gatherings, and the people who made room for her. Out of Central City, she helped carry bounce from local clubs and community spaces to international stages without losing her connection to the city. After Hurricane Katrina scattered so many New Orleanians, her shows became one more place where people could find each other again, celebrate, and feel at home.
JUNE 25 — DR. LOURDES ASHLEY HUNTER
Dr. Hunter’s work sits at the meeting point of Black trans liberation, disability justice, and reproductive justice. As a Black disabled non-binary trans organizer and co-founder of the Trans Women of Color Collective, she has helped build community funds, safe houses, wellness programs, food support, and spaces where trans women of color can tell their own stories. Her work is not only about responding to violence, but making sure Black trans people are affirmed, resourced, and celebrated while they are still here.
JUNE 26 — TOURMALINE
Tourmaline’s work treats Black trans memory as something worth protecting, not something to be left at the mercy of institutions. Through film, archives, writing, and organizing, she brings elders like Mary Jones, Marsha P. Johnson, and Sylvia Rivera back into view with care. Her art holds history and imagination together, giving shape to the freer worlds Black trans people have always deserved.
JUNE 27 — J MASE III
J Mase III writes from the meeting place of faith, grief, humor, and Black trans life. As a Black trans poet, educator, organizer, and co-editor of The Black Trans Prayer Book, his work tends to wounds that material justice alone cannot reach. He insists that Black trans people are owed more than survival: language, spirit, tenderness, faith, and a world willing to recognize them as sacred.
JUNE 28 — CECE MCDONALD
CeCe McDonald became a symbol of Black trans self-defense after surviving a racist and transmisogynistic attack, only to be punished by the same system that failed to protect her. Her case sparked an international campaign for her freedom and forced more people to confront the violence Black trans women face both in public and behind prison walls. Since her release, CeCe has continued speaking against incarceration, state violence, and the cages used to disappear the people most failed by this society.
JUNE 29 — FOR THOSE TAKEN FROM US
This day is for the Black trans and gender-nonconforming people whose names were never recorded, whose stories were buried, and whose lives were taken before anyone thought to preserve them. For those misnamed by police, mocked by tabloids, abandoned by supposed loved ones, ignored by movements, or remembered only through the violence that ended them. In a world built on anti-Blackness, disappearance is not an accident in the record; it is part of the order of things. Some lives are denied not only safety, but even the dignity of being made legible after death. They were more than what this world did to them. They had jokes, habits, dreams, lovers, favorite songs, private names, and full lives that deserved to be known. We must see them not just as symbols, but as our family. May they rest in power.
JUNE 30 — FOR THOSE STILL HERE
This final day is for the Black trans and gender-nonconforming people living now. For those raising families, creating art, caring for one another, preserving faith, making room for joy and leisure, and becoming themselves within an order structured to criminalize, erase, and abandon them. Across this month, we have remembered ancestors, elders, organizers, artists, mothers, writers, fighters, and those whose names were stolen from us. But history is not only behind us. It is also being made by every Black trans person who wakes up in a world built on anti-Blackness and still chooses life.
To breathe is to resist as a Black person, and to be Black and queer is to carry that resistance to its conclusion: to rest in a world that wants you exhausted, to be cherished in an order organized around your disposability, to assert your humanity against a society that feeds upon your dehumanization, and to live beyond what this world has prescribed for you. If that is you, then this final day is yours.