Victoria

Victoria is a beautiful name. And Thomas doesn’t just think so because it belongs to the most gorgeous girl in his class. (She really is—her hair is beautiful, shoulder-length ringlets of dirty blonde hair, her eyes seem to reflect the sky, and there are just the right amount of freckles dotted around her face.) She looks like the movies. Thomas has had the fantasy of taking her out to one, pressing a kiss onto her gorgeous laughing face each time that the actors do. He’s thought about this for as long as they’ve attended high school together. It used to be a normal thing, romantic and sweet. Something he would hide in his heart because it was too sweet. It was embarrassing for a man. 

It began to be, however, that Thomas squirreled this fantasy away for other reasons, because Victoria’s smile (a cute thing, lips curled up perfectly pretty and dainty at the corners) turned more into his (an ugly thing, lips pulled up into an awkward grin, as if he were being puppeteered). Her golden hair flattened out, in colour and shape, assuming the dark wavy locks on his head. Her freckles smoothed out and blended into the rest of her skin, darkened complexion matching auburn eyes. The boy pressing kisses onto her now nonexistent freckles became vague and nameless. 

* 

The Stonewall riot begins on June 28th, 1969 at around 2am. Thomas is not present. Who is present is Marsha P. Johnson, whom Thomas had met at a nightclub a few years prior. They had spoken briefly, a shouted introduction over generic music– 

“WHAT’S YOUR NAME” 

“WHAT” 

“NAME” 

“THOMAS” 

“BLACK MARSHA” 

“BLA- what?” 

They’d talked about menial things–simple small talk, really–for a few minutes, before a natural pause came into their conversation. Then, she’d looked him up and down, eyes squinted in the flashing lights. She leaned close, so she could speak softly into his ear. 

“You should come to Stonewall next weekend! It’s a bar in Greenwich, I think you’d like it.”

* 

Thomas had gone a few times over the years. He’d seen Marsha in drag, colourful wigs and extravagant makeup, and was once again faced with what he’d deemed the ‘Victoria Dilemma’, (it probably said something that this had come up so often that he had to name it,) which was when he wondered if he was in love or jealous. Once he’d decided that he didn’t like the conclusion (the same conclusion he’d come to every time he was faced with the Victoria Dilemma) he stopped going. 

This, coincidentally, turned out to be half a year before the Stonewall riots. 

* 

Contrary to popular belief, Marsha did not throw the first brick at the riots. They’d already begun when she arrived, as she recounted to him next time they met in the midst of another raucous crowd, dancing to too loud music under too bright lights. She was among the frontlines, along with Sylvia Rivera, whom she spoke of with great fondness. Thomas tried not to feel jealous at this, after he sat in his rotting studio apartment every Saturday night. Like many other things he tries to suppress, the feeling persists, settling as an ache in his chest. 

As time goes on, it acts more like a parasite, a growing pressure that gnaws away at his sanity. When he passed a poster advertising the Hot Peaches and saw Marsha on the front, sporting extravagant makeup and wearing a gorgeous flower crown, he felt it tear off a chunk of his chest and rip open an artery. When he heard that she’d started STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) with Sylvia Rivera, working for gay and transgender rights and housing queer youth, it left a hollow between his ribs. 

Her AIDS diagnosis comforted him, in his single, cisgender heterosexual life, but the fact it brought him reassurance made him sicker with disgust than the parasite had ever made him. Her work with ACT UP in bringing attention to the AIDS epidemic did not help settle Thomas’ self-hatred, which was able to settle comfortably in the cavity that had been left in his chest. It nestled right next to his heart (for now surviving the parasite’s ministrations), too flush, in fact, as it restricted the should-be steady beat. 

This almost empty space was left untouched for years, in a limbo of almost entirely consumed but still scarcely living. During this time, Thomas stayed away from the news, and Marsha largely stayed out of it, struggling with her mental health and going in and out of psychiatric hospitals. 

*

Marsha P. Johnson died in July, 1992, body found floating in the Hudson River. It was ruled as a suicide, despite contrasting evidence (a head wound, and, despite her mental health struggles, never any suicidal ideation). When Thomas heard of her death, the parasite swallowed his heart whole, and then died within his chest. A false sense of realness, it filled his chest in a way that felt close to normal. In a way that he could ignore for three decades. 

* 

“On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive action stating that the U.S. government will now recognize only two sexes, male and female. The directive takes aim at what it describes as gender ideology extremism, and it tries to do away with some federal programs and policies designed for transgender people.”

Thomas is 79, and he has not been to Stonewall Inn in over half a century. Neither has he visited the Stonewall National Monument website, not until he read that all mentions of transgender individuals had been erased from the site, including the shortening of the acronym LGBTQ+ to LGB. This change occurred just barely a month after Trump’s executive order that the government would only recognize two official sexes. 

In those four weeks, she realized very distinctly the step backwards this was, and the change in choosing and being forced to erase herself. 

In the time between February 14th and June 29th of 2025, the date of the New York City Pride Festival in Greenwich Village, Victoria let her hair grow out and weaved a flower crown into the longer strands, because her history was being erased, and she refused to let her be forgotten.

Levy, Michael. “Gay Rights Movement.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 17 July 2015, www.britannica.com/topic/gay-rights-movement. 

“Marsha P. Johnson | American Drag Queen and Activist | Britannica.” Www.britannica.com, 2 July 2025, www.britannica.com/biography/Marsha-P-Johnson. 

McCammon, Sarah. “A Look at Trump’s Executive Order That the Government Will Recognize Only Two Sexes.” NPR, 22 Jan. 2025, 

www.npr.org/2025/01/22/nx-s1-5268876/a-look-at-trumps-executive-order-that-the-government-will-recognize-only-two-sexes. 

Mueller, Julia. “Trump’s First 100 Days: A Timeline.” The Hill, 30 Apr. 2025, thehill.com/homenews/administration/trumps-first-100-days/5273236-trumps-first-100-d ays-a-timeline/. 

Rothberg, Emma. “Marsha P. Johnson.” National Women’s History Museum, 2022, www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/marsha-p-johnson. 

Sarnoff, Leah, et al. “Transgender References Removed from Stonewall National Monument Website.” ABC News, 14 Feb. 2025, 

abcnews.go.com/US/transgender-references-removed-stonewall-national-monument-website/story?id=118804553. 

Upadhyay, Brajesh. “Transgender References Removed from Stonewall Monument Website.” BBC, 14 Feb. 2025, www.bbc.com/news/articles/cglywwn29n6o. 

Wolfe, Elizabeth. “‘Transgender’ and ‘Queer’ Erased from Stonewall Uprising National Monument Website.” CNN, 14 Feb. 2025,

edition.cnn.com/2025/02/13/us/stonewall-inn-national-monument-transgender. Accessed 24 July 2025.

“The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson.” Netflix, 2017, https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/80189623.