Miss Major Griffin-Gracy - Nominee

“You can’t throw anybody under the bus. You can’t leave anybody behind. And that’s become my favorite thing to say to people: I won’t throw anybody under the bus, and I’m not leaving anybody. It has to include us all, or it’s not going to work.”

– Miss Major Griffin-Gracy

Legendary LGBTQ+ activist, author, community organizer, surrogate mother to many young trans women, and Stonewall Riots (Uprising) participant Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (known as Miss Major to the public) was born on the South Side of Chicago in 1946 (she disputes the official records of her birth year which she claims was earlier than 1946). When she came out as a trans girl to her parents during her middle school years they responded negatively which included forcing her to undergo psychiatric treatment and go to church. According to Miss Major’s 2023 memoir (that she wrote with Toshio Meronek) that primarily focused on trans people of color’s collective liberation, Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary, she said she loved her parents “despite their recurring attempts to smack the queen out of her.” Miss Major also said trailblazing trans woman Christine Jorgensen was an influence on her. She said that when Jorgensen received gender-affirming care a budding black market of hormones sprung up that she took advantage of. Miss Major was unable to finish college because she was expelled for having and wearing feminine clothes. She joined the Jewel Box Revue, America’s first racially inclusive female impersonators traveling revue, and performed in both Chicago and New York City with them. Miss Major also became a sex worker in Chicago and in New York City when she moved there. On the first night of the Stonewall Uprising, Miss Major was present and helped fight back that night, including spitting in a police officer’s face. She became friends with Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Crystal LaBeija and Stormé DeLarverie during this time. She was frequently arrested due to her status as a sex worker and/or because she was a trans women and spent time in Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric wing and incarceration at Attica Correctional Facility and the Clinton Correctional Facility in New York. Due to her experiences in prison, she became an activist opposed to the prison-industrial complex for the rest of her life. Miss Major had to resort to criminal activity in order to survive since no one would give her a job due to her status as a Black trans woman. She faced years of being unhoused and on welfare to keep herself alive. Miss Major decided to move to San Diego, California in 1978 where she worked in community services at a food bank and specifically helping trans women. During the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980’s, Miss Major’s work expanded into the home health care realm through the organization she founded called Angels of Care. She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1990’s and continued her HIV/AIDS work at the City of Refuge in San Franciso and the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center. Miss Major became the first executive director for the newly formed Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project (renamed Miss Major Alexander L Lee TGIJP Black Trans Cultural Center) in 2004, a now 20-plus year old organization that provides transgender, gender variant, and intersex people in prison support services. In her executive director role, she testified before the California State Assembly and spoke at a United Nations Human Rights Committee gathering in Geneva, Switzerland on the issue of human rights violations in prisons. One of Miss Major’s adopted daughters Janetta Johnson leads that organization. Miss Major said that transgender people who are low-income, people of color, or have criminal records are excluded from the broader LGBTQ+ movement in a 2011 interview. In 2014, Miss Major was chosen as the community grand marshal of San Francisco’s Pride Parade and in 2024 she was the grand marshal for NYC LGBTQ+ Pride Parade. She said of the honor, “We’re finally getting some recognition.” Miss Major’s activist and mentor life in the trans community was chronicled in a 2015 documentary called Major! and the 2016 Tourmaline film Personal Things. She was also the 2021 docu-series Trans in Trumpland executive producer. When Miss Major visited Little Rock, Arkansas for a Major! screening she decided to move there. It was there that Miss Major created and led an informal retreat center House of gg—the Griffin-Gracy Educational and Historical Center (she gave it the nickname Tilifi, the acronym for Telling It Like It Fuckin' Is, in 2023) for trans people that included a guest house, pool, hot tub, merry-go-round, various gardens and over 80 palm trees. This retreat center became a sanctuary for trans and gender nonconforming people in Arkansas. Miss Major continued to travel the country to fight for trans rights, especially in the most recent years before her death due to the onslaught of anti-trans legislation that continues to be passed and signed into law in GOP-controlled states. In Miss Major’s 2023 memoir she said, “We were fighting for our lives. They’re still killing us; they’re still not giving us the respect we’re due for putting up with their shit all these years.” Among Miss Major’s other contributions were for the oral history collections Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, The Stonewall Reader, and The Stonewall Generation: LGBT Elders on Sex, Activism, and Aging. Miss Major had three biological sons—Christopher (born 1978) through her relationship with Deborah Brown, Asiah Wittenstein Major (born 2021) with her longtime partner Beck Witt Major (a trans man) and Jonathan, three adopted sons and countless other younger trans people who called her mama. In Miss Major’s later years, she suffered a second stroke (2019) and was hospitalized after a bloodstream infection. She died in 2025 in her Little Rock home while under hospice care.