Pay It No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson is not a documentary that you will find on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, Netflix or even your local library. It is available on YouTube and is obviously a labor of love. The sound quality is dreadful. The closed captions are nowhere close to what is being said. The film reflects the person that it pays homage to: it uses whatever and whoever is available to create a life that is all about love, honesty and living freely.
I was brought up fundamentalist Christian, but I also lived in New York City so my thoughts can be divided into a bilingual cultural interpretation of the same creative product. I can see what a fundamentalist Christian may think of Pay It No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson. The film will confirm their belief that this “lifestyle” leads to promiscuity, prostitution, illness, poverty, criminality and death. Johnson’s appearance, voice and life will shock them. They probably won’t get what makes Johnson great.
Because I prefer PBS or expository documentaries, which have chronologically linear narrative, divide lives into distinct themes, are technologically seamless and has a narrator to explain the historical significance, I had to watch Pay It No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson a couple of times. Because it is less than an hour long, it was easy to do. I was determined to learn more about her. She was an important person in Manhattan, the LGBTQ community and American history, but I know nothing about her, and there is not a lot out there about people who are black, trans, poor or a prostitute. History generally does not tell stories about people with only one of those descriptions, and Johnson was every single one. I know that more information is coming, but I didn’t want to wait anymore. Being a Christian is supposed to be counter cultural so I know Jesus would be interested in someone like Johnson.
Context is important, and Pay It No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson does set the stage without being self-pitying. Being different made you a criminal or gave you a one-way ticket to an insane asylum or worse if you did not conform. There was no LGBTQ community. People hid in the corners of society while families proudly rejected those they were supposed to love.
The minute that Johnson arrived in the Village, she lived boldly and bravely, undeterred by violence, pestilence and poverty. She was considered a saint for her generosity and satisfaction in all circumstances, an artist for her inventiveness and imperfections and an activist for fearlessly seeing those who needed a voice to stand up for the most vulnerable. It seems incongruous that the same woman who did not respond to physical threats on her life from johns or verbal threats when her own community did not want to be associated with her whether or not Andy Warhol chose her as a subject responded to police harassment at Stonewall by throwing a shot glass!
Pay It No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson is a memorial so viewers never hear about any of her flaws, which we all have, but it delicately references her “fragility” or struggle with mental illness. Without this fragility, she possibly would not have transcended the usual path that society lays for someone like her. Delusion helps when the real world is insane. Now it is becoming better known that the trans community is vulnerable to discrimination within the LGBTQ community, unemployment, sexual exploitation and a high homicide rate with little hope for justice. Johnson’s life would be plagued with these obstacles, but not defined by them. The P stood for pay it no mind, and she did.
Pay It No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson features her last interview before she died days later. Don’t watch it if you feel like you are going to judge her, scoff at the quality of the film production or have no patience to really pay attention to her story. Watch it if you want to pay your respects to another human being who faced more than you and probably made more of an impact than you or anyone that you know.