Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a nationally acclaimed organizer and activist for transgender people, the LGBTQ community, sex workers, and incarcerated people, died Oct. 13 at her home in Little Rock, Ark.

Her passing was announced by the Little Rock-based Griffin-Gracy Educational Retreat and Historical Center, also known as House of gg, a transgender support and services center she founded in 2019.

“Miss Major – known as ‘Mama’ to many – was a Black, trans activist who fought for more than 50 years for trans, gender nonconforming, and the LGB community, especially for Black trans women, trans women of color and those who have survived incarceration and police brutality,” the statement announcing her passing says.

“Major’s fierce commitment and intersectional approach to justice brought her to care directly for people with HIV/AIDS in New York in the early 1980s and later to drive San Francisco’s first mobile needle exchange,” the statement says.

It adds, “House of gg was born out of her dream to build a center that would empower, heal and be a safe haven for Black trans people and movement leaders in the Southern U.S. – a space for our community to take a break, swim, enjoy good food, laugh, listen to music, watch movies, and recharge for the ongoing fight for our lives.”

A Wikipedia write up on Griffin-Gracy says she was born and raised in Chicago and came out as trans in the late 1950s. It says her parents were not accepting of her gender identity, prompting her to leave home at a young age and work for a while as a showgirl at the Jewel Box Revue theater in Chicago before moving to New York.

In a 2014 interview with the Bay Area Reporter, she said that after moving to New York in the 1960s she became a regular patron of the Stonewall Inn gay bar, at which trans women were known to gather. She said she was there at the time of the 1969 police raid that triggered the Stonewall rebellion when patrons fought police in the historic action credited with starting the modern-day LGBTQ rights movement.

Griffin-Gracy began work in community services, including services for trans women, after moving to San Diego in 1978, according to the Wikipedia write-up, and later performed home health care work during the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. 

It says she moved to San Francisco in the 1990s and worked with multiple HIV/AIDS organizations, including the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center. In 2004, she began work at the San Francisco-based Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) and later became executive director of the organization. The organization provides support services for trans, gender variant, and intersex people in prisons.

Shortly before traveling to Chicago in 2024 to attend the Democratic National Convention as an honored guest of the National LGBTQ+ Task Force Action Fund, Griffin-Gracy participated in an interview with the Washington Blade via Zoom from her home In Little Rock. Among other things, she told of her support for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris against Donald Trump  in the 2024 presidential election.

“I plan on going to every place Trump goes and speak to the tender loving people in those places and tell them what a liar he is and how insane he is and that they just shouldn’t vote for him,” she told the Blade.

Among those praising Griffin-Gracy’s work and lamenting her passing was David Johns, CEO and executive director of the D.C.-based LGBTQ advocacy group National Black Justice Collective.

“Her pioneering work to center and uplift Black trans women, particularly those who have been incarcerated and faced police brutality, made space for the most powerful and most marginalized members of our community and set the foundation for the freedom work so many of us continue today,” Johns said in a statement.

“At a time when the rights and dignity of trans people are again under relentless attack, Miss Major’s life reminds us of what it means to persevere in the fight for equality that all LGBTQ+/same gender loving (SGL) people can live freely an authentically,” Johns said in his statement.” Her spirit  will continue to guide us as we fight for a world where every Black trans person can thrive and live a joy-filled life.”

An excerpt from the Blade’s August 2024 interview and profile of Griffin-Gracy follows:

Those who are familiar with Miss Major’s brand of activism might be surprised by her work with the Task Force Action Fund, her appearance at the DNC, and perhaps especially her commitment to criss-crossing the country to talk voters out of supporting Donald Trump and into supporting Vice President Kamala Harris’s historic bid for the White House.

As shown in “Major!” the 2015 documentary about her life, and a 2023 memoir comprised of interviews with journalist Toshio Meronek called “Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary,” the activist’s foremost concerns have always been centered around providing for her trans brothers and sisters.

Her work on this front is never ending: [Griffin-Gracy’s assistant Muriel] Tarver gave the Blade a virtual tour of Miss Major’s property, which she has used as a refuge for trans folks who are free to stay and relax on the well-kept grounds, which are complete with a guest house and a pool.

Where she may have sidestepped electoral politics in the past, however, there is “so much happening to whereby you had to get involved in it now,” Miss Major said. “But before it was just — my community has suffered so bad for so long, so often, that you’ve got to do something to help them navigate the bullshit that goes on in the world.”

This usually means ensuring that basic needs are met. “And I don’t feel as if politics helps that,” she said, because “it’s got to be people and the relationships you build and what you build together with another person that makes it better.”

Miss Major added, “I want things to be better for all of us. You know, transgender and non transgender people.” And as society has begun to make space for those with non-cisgender identities, the backlash has been vicious. “They’re so afraid of opening up to us,” she said.

When it comes to political candidates, she said, “As an ordinary person, you know, I’m concerned about food and gas and clothing and shit like that. And, you know, who else cares about this? I need to know the person who’s in charge cares and is going to do something to alleviate the stress on me to get it.”

By the time President Joe Biden announced his decision to step aside on July 21 — well before that pivotal moment, Tarver stressed — Miss Major and the Task Force Action Fund were ready to spring into action.

“It was quite a service act that he did for the country,” Miss Major said. “Because I really believe that he could have gone further, but he just didn’t have what it took. And so when he stepped out and made her the nominee, he invigorated, and he poured such joy to this country, and hope, and belief that it can be done, that [Trump] can be stopped.”

“As we all heard about the potential for Biden stepping down and putting aside his personal and political interests for the sake of democracy, which is a pretty historical and brave thing, we all wanted to be ready to respond to what would happen,” Task Force Action Fund Communications Director Cathy Renna told the Blade by phone.

Issuing a joint endorsement of Harris was historic for both Miss Major and the Task Force Action Fund, Renna said. “We have not endorsed anyone since Jimmy Carter, which was shortly after our founding, right? So, we’re talking about almost 50 years ago.”

“We wanted a bold choice,” she said, “and we also understand what’s at stake in this election.”

Miss Major sees the contrast between the two candidates as clear and compelling; the difference between sanity and insanity, competence and chaos. “Do you want someone who lies to you? Or do you what someone who tells the truth?”

Trump spreads filth and disorder like the character from Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts” comic strip who is perpetually surrounded by a cloud of dust and detritus, she said.

Harris, on the other hand, represents the future. “She’s breaking the ceiling. There’s a glass ceiling. And when she breaks through, she’s gonna go on,” Miss Major said. “And after this, something like 10s of 1000s of people are gonna go through that, too. It’s just going to be phenomenal.”

(Christopher Kane contributed to this report.)