Curio Cabinet

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Happy Fourth of July! It might interest you to know that Independence Day actually falls on several dates, according to history. In fact, Founding Father and second President John Adams believed that July 2, 1776, would be the date to mark on our calendars. This is because the Second Continental Congress declared colonial independence from Britain on July 2, 1776. Congress passed the Declaration of Independence two days later on the Fourth of July, though it still needed to be signed. Instead, a hasty printing was released and disseminated that night, publicizing the Fourth as the day we claimed our independence. In reality, the Declaration was floating in limbo because the Founding Fathers were spread thin: the British were swarming New York City and the Liberty Bell was ringing in Philadelphia. The night of July 9, 1776, George Washington read one of the copies of the declaration to a rabble of American soldiers and sailors on Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan. In a patriotic frenzy, the militiamen proceeded to tear down a nearby statue of King George III and melt it into 42,000 musket balls. (They called him their "melted majesty".) Still, nobody had signed the bill yet. It wasn't until August 2, 1776, a month later, that the first signature was scrawled on it. The last didn't come until 1781, five years later, when Thomas McKean contributed his signature. By then, the first informal celebration of the Fourth had already happened in 1778, when Washington hooked his troops up with double rations and rum. Congress eventually made it an unpaid holiday in 1830, and then a paid federal holiday in 1938. As for John Adams, who adamantly believed that the second of July was our special day? He died on July 4, 1826, likely hearing fireworks and patriotic calls outside his window. I can't imagine he minded being wrong!
 

Image credit & copyright: The Library of Congress
 

On today's date in 1961, famed author Ernest Hemingway ended his own life. It had been a complicated but epic one—one marked by the publications of the novels The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as war exploits and globetrotting adventures. But today, we're talking about Hemingway's non-literary legacy: his six-toed cats. The story begins in the 1930s when the writer purchased his home in Key West, Florida, that is known today as the Ernest Hemingway House & Museum. According to legend, Hemingway was drinking himself silly at the local Sloppy Joe's Bar, as he was one to do, when he met an equally inebriated sea captain. The two immediately hit it off and drank into the wee hours of the night, at which point the captain gifted Hemingway a cat named Snow White from his ship. Curiously, Snow White was polydactyl, meaning she had an abnormal amount of toes on her paws (six). The story continues that Snow White became the progenitor of the 40-50 some cats with polydactyly genes currently residing at Hemingway House. That last detail carries some credibility. Hemingway fawned over his cats and named them after celebrities, in spite of his manly persona. Names have included "Hairy" Truman, Marilyn Monroe, and Truman Capote. Today, the caretakers of Hemingway House continue to watch over the residing six-toed cats. In fact, a vet checks up on the cats weekly. The felines are very friendly with the caretakers, and are also given special burials and tombstones in the garden behind the home. During Hurricane Irma in 2017, the caretakers called the cats inside and none were harmed. It's a heartwarming story all around—a fitting counterpoint to Heminway's characteristically tragic endings, both real and imagined.
 

Image credit & copyright: Wochit News
 

Stonewall's unsung hero.

As one of Time magazine's "100 women of the Year" and a frequent subject of Andy Warhol's art, Marsha P. Johnson is undoubtedly a powerful figure in the history of LGBTQ rights in the U.S. But in spite of the transwoman's bigger-than-life presence and politics, Johnson's legacy was marred by violence, mental illness, and a gay rights movement that proved increasingly hostile to her identity.

 

Marsha P. Johnson was born on August 24, 1945, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and assigned a male gender at birth as Malcolm Michaels Jr. After experiencing discrimination from a young age, she left for New York City at the age of 17. Holding only $15 and a bag of clothes to her name, she came to Greenwich Village in 1966, at a time when the location was known for its radical cultures. It was the perfect setting for Johnson to behave less and less like Malcolm Michaels—a skittish and angry person—and adopt the drag show-based identity she would inhabit the rest of her life: floral crown-wearing woman, Marsha P. Johnson. The surname was taken from a New York City hotel, and the P stood for "pay it no mind," in reference to her gender and what business it was to others.
 

Johnson made a name for herself in political drag shows and as a figurehead of queer black youth, who were often kicked out of their homes. Her politics weren't just centered on rights for homosexuals, but an early form of intersectional activism in which discrimination against people based on race, gender, disabilities, sex work, and poverty were addressed. During the era of the Stonewall Riots, Johnson and other drag queens (bearing in mind "transgender women" was not a culturally common term at the time) were also regularly subjected to demeaning stop-and-frisks and arrests from police officers. Unrest built. The homophobic Stonewall Inn raid on the morning of June 28, 1969, was the flashpoint, resulting in the historic riot. Johnson denied being at the six-day riot at all, for legal reasons. Eyewitness accounts mostly corroborate that Johnson climbed a pole and dropped a brick-filled purse onto a police car, breaking its window.
 

Soon after, Johnson joined the militarized Gay Liberation Front and marched at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade (the first Pride parade) to mark the anniversary of the Stonewall riots. With her friend and fellow trans-rights activist Sylvia Rivera, Johnson co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or STAR. In 1972, they established a STAR House for homeless queer youth, and paid for the rent with money they made as sex workers.
 

However, not all was well in gay activism following Stonewall. Organizers of the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade feared the image of drag queens would hurt their political agenda. As the gay rights movement veered more into assimilationist values like legalized marriage and military service, Johnson's advocacy for the rights of society's least cared for citizens fell out of fashion. In a shocking turn of events, Johnson was found dead, floating in the Hudson River just hours after the New York Pride parade in 1992. With law enforcement lacking any interest in investigating a potential murder, and gay rights organizations turning away from Johnson's values, she was all but abandoned by the city and movement that she had forged.
 

In recent years, trans and gender non-conforming activism has seen a rise, and with it a renewed interest in Marsha P. Johnson's legacy. In 2018, the New York Times published an obituary for her, and the next year, statues of Johnson and Rivera were announced as monuments that would be erected in Greenwich Village. Even though she was lost to time for a while, intersectional activism is ensuring that Marsha P. Johnson and her legacy will never be ignored again.
 

Below: Johnson marching with Rivera, and also her standing next to one of her Warhol silkscreen portraits.
 

Image credit & copyright: Gaysi, Leonard Fink, Raldolfe Wicker