The Debt We Owe: How Miss Major Griffin-Gracy Showed Us What Solidarity Means

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy died on October 13, 2025, at her home in Little Rock, Arkansas, surrounded by family and the chosen community she spent 78 years building. Her death comes as America, and more pointedly, America’s LGBTQ community faces a question we have answered badly before: when solidarity becomes inconvenient, do we protect our most vulnerable, or leave them behind?

When Trans Women Saved Gay Men

In the early 1980s, when mothers and fathers refused to enter hospital rooms where their gay sons were dying, when disease transmission was a mystery, and the government stayed silent, Miss Major did what she always did: she organized.

She founded Angels of Care, mobilizing trans women in New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to care for dying gay men. Many of the them were sex workers with no medical training, stepping into the void left by government inaction and familial abandonment. "No one wanted to take care of those gay guys when they first got AIDS," she later said. "And a lot of my transgender women stepped up to the plate to do it."

It wasn’t charity, it was survival. Mutual aid. Trans women needed work in a society that offered them none. Gay men needed someone willing to touch them without fear. Miss Major built a community-based health network on the principle she learned from fellow organizer Frank “Big Black” Smith in the 1970s: you don’t leave anyone behind.

By the 1990s, she was driving San Francisco’s first mobile needle-exchange van, bringing harm-reduction services directly to people who had nowhere else to turn. At the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center, she founded GiGi’s Place: a drop-in site with a refrigerator for HIV meds that needed cold storage and washing machines so unhoused people could clean their clothes. Her colleague Yoseñio Lewis called these “small interventions that removed major barriers to care.”

When her partner, Joe Bob Michael, died of AIDS in 1995, her resolve only deepened. “The best trait an organizer can have is to listen,” she said decades later, “and to listen closely to what the people want…find out what it is they need.”

That ethic could not be more relevant today. Structural discrimination and systemic neglect have created conditions where Black trans women face HIV rates 26 times higher than other Black Americans, and trans women overall experience 42% HIV prevalence, not because of who they are, but because of who society excludes. Barriers to care, job discrimination that forces many into survival sex work, and incarceration that disrupts treatment continue to drive these disparities. Despite 92% awareness of PrEP, only 32% of eligible trans women have recently used it, a gap born of access barriers, not ignorance.

In 2025, as structural cuts unravel the safety nets meant to protect the same communities Miss Major once organized, those with the least access and the greatest burden of disease again bear the weight as the L, G, and B reap the benefits of privilege and attempt to discard those they deem “problematic” to their politics. Her method - meeting people where they are, removing practical barriers, and listening first - remains a blueprint for survival when institutions fail and care becomes a collective act. Forty years later, the people she fought alongside still face epidemic-level HIV rates as funding collapses around them. The trans women who cared for gay men when no one else would are still waiting for the community to return the favor.

Stonewall's Inconvenient Truths

The historical record shows that trans women and drag queens were on the front lines of resistance when police raided the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969. On the second night of rioting, Marsha P. Johnson climbed a lamppost and dropped a heavy bag onto a police car, shattering the windshield. Miss Major was knocked unconscious by police and thrown in jail. Sylvia Rivera, though her presence that first night remains disputed by historians, became a fierce advocate for trans rights immediately following Stonewall, co-founding Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with Johnson in 1970.

At the first Pride parade in 1970, organizers asked trans people to march in the back, but they refused. "The trans community said, 'Hell no, we won't go.' We fought for this as much as you did, or even started it," said Victoria Cruz, who was there. "And we just mingled throughout the crowd." By 1973, organizers barred drag queens including Johnson and Rivera from speaking at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally, claiming they would give the movement a "bad name." Rivera grabbed the microphone anyway during a speech by lesbian feminist Jean O'Leary that was critical of drag queens. The mostly white, cisgender crowd booed as she shouted: "I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been thrown in jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment for gay liberation and you all treat me this way?"

Before her death in 2002, Rivera said: "I gave them their Pride, but they have not given me mine."

The pattern repeated in 2007 when Representative Barney Frank introduced an Employment Non-Discrimination Act explicitly excluding gender identity protections, arguing there weren't enough votes for trans-inclusive legislation. The Human Rights Campaign endorsed this strategic abandonment. Over 400 organizations formed United ENDA in opposition, but the message was sent: when political calculus demands it, trans people are expendable.

Miss Major was characteristically direct about this long history of exclusion. "The shame of it was that after it [Stonewall] happened, most of the Black girls that had been involved in it, we got whitewashed out of it," she told SF Weekly. "The gay and lesbian community just took it over and acted not only as if we did not exist, but that we weren't even there."

She was equally clear about the cost of these betrayals: "If these are my allies, well, I'll take my chance with my enemies because at least my enemies might have enough decency to stab me in the front."

In January 2025, the Trump Administration removed the word "transgender" from the Stonewall National Monument website, literally erasing trans contributions to the history trans women created. The erasure continues.

The Bodies Piling Up

This is not an abstract debate about political strategy. Real people are dying while our community calculates costs.

In 2025, 965 anti-trans bills have been filed across 49 states plus 81 federal bills. Twenty-seven states have banned gender-affirming care affecting approximately 120,400 transgender youth - 40% of all trans youth in America. Six states classify providing such care as a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

The Trevor Project documented a 72% increase in suicide attempts in states with restrictive policies compared to states without such laws. Already, 46% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered suicide in the past year. The day after the 2024 election, the Trevor Project's crisis services saw a 700% volume increase, with 40% of contacts from trans and nonbinary youth.

In 2024, at least 36 trans people were murdered, with 50% being Black trans women despite Black people representing just 13% of the population. The youngest victim was Pauly Likens, murdered at age 14 in Pennsylvania. In U.S. data, trans people face nearly double the mortality rate of non-trans peers, and some estimates place their median life expectancy about 7 years shorter.

Republicans spent $215 million on anti-trans television advertisements during the 2024 election cycle, with Trump's campaign alone spending $95 million in the final two weeks - more than on housing, immigration, and the economy combined. Yet polling consistently showed 80% of Americans agreed both parties "should spend less time talking about transgender issues." Trans people represent roughly 0.5% of adults and 1.4% of teenagers, yet became scapegoats for a conservative movement seeking cultural wedge issues.

Some Democrats have responded to this onslaught by going quiet on trans rights, calculating that defending trans people was politically costly. The bodies keep piling up regardless of political strategy. Twenty-nine percent of trans people live in poverty compared to 16% of the general population. Forty-seven percent have been fired, not hired, or denied promotion for being trans. Forty-seven percent of Black trans people have been incarcerated at some point, compared to 16% of all trans people.

Miss Major spent her final months despite declining health traveling to let young trans people "see and touch me. I'm alive. There aren't that many Black girls still alive. Let them know that they can get here too."

She kept fighting because she understood what some in our community seem to have forgotten: "You can't throw anybody under the bus. You can't leave anybody behind," she insisted. "It has to include all of us, or it's not going to work."

The question facing the LGBTQ+ community is whether we believe her. Trans women cared for gay men when we were dying of AIDS. They fought at Stonewall while others watched from windows. They built our movement while we pushed them to the margins. Now they're dying, from suicide, from violence, from AIDS related complications, while we debate whether defending them is politically expedient.

Miss Major would ask what she always asked: What kind of community are we? Are we one that protects its most vulnerable members, or do we abandon them when solidarity becomes inconvenient? Her mantra echoes as both eulogy and call to action: “I'm still fucking here. We're still fucking here.” The debt remains unpaid.