
Marsha
The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Pre-order for $20.25
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Tourmaline
-
By:
-
Tourmaline
About this listen
Featured in The New York Times's Nonfiction to Read This Spring
Black transgender luminary Tourmaline brings to life the first definitive biography of the revolutionary activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the most important and remarkable figures in LGBTQIA+ history, revealing her story, her impact, and her legacy.
“She is the preeminent and foremost scholar on Marsha P. Johnson. . . . To us, Tourmaline is the expert.”—Janet Mock, Allure
“Thank god the revolution has begun, honey.” Rumor has it that after Marsha P. Johnson threw the first brick in the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, she picked up a shard of broken mirror to fix her makeup. Marsha, a legendary Black transgender activist, embodied both the beauty and the struggle of the early gay rights movement. Her work sparked the progress we see today, yet there has never been a definitive record of her life. Until now.
Written with sparkling prose, Tourmaline’s richly researched biography Marsha finally brings this iconic figure to life, in full color. We vividly meet Marsha as both an activist and artist: She performed with RuPaul and with the internationally renowned drag troupe The Hot Peaches. She was a muse to countless artists from Andy Warhol to the band Earth, Wind & Fire. And she continues to inspire people today.
Marsha didn’t wait to be freed; she declared herself free and told the world to catch up. Her story promises to inspire listeners to live as their most liberated, unruly, vibrant, and whole selves.
©2025 Tourmaline (P)2025 Penguin AudioCritic reviews
**One of Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2025**
**One of The Mary Sue's 15 Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books of 2025**
“This long-overdue biography of Marsha P. Johnson is a revelation! With meticulous research and a tender touch, Tourmaline brings this groundbreaking activist to life, revealing her brilliance, her humor, and her unwavering dedication to freedom and our collective humanity. We learn not only of Marsha's pivotal role in the Stonewall Uprising, but also of the depth of her love for her chosen family and community, her fierce advocacy for Black trans lives, and the enduring power of her artistic spirit. This literary tribute, adorned in garlands and glitter, is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the true cost and the enduring legacy of an LGBTQIA+ icon's fight for liberation.”—Janet Mock, author of the New York Times bestseller Redefining Realness
"The depth of Tourmaline's storytelling is historic, an enduring and urgent reminder from Marsha P. Johnson that history is not inevitable, it is made."—Meena Harris, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling book Ambitious Girl
“Tourmaline continues her practice of creativity as a revolutionary act, this time to illuminate the remarkable life of Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha's story and Tourmaline's unique voice blend seamlessly, in a narrative that will break your heart and put it back together again, leaving you better than when it found you. This is a book for our times, full of inspiration, community, truth and—at its core—radical love.”—Lena Dunham, actor, director, producer, and author of the #1 New York Times bestselling book Not That Kind of Girl
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Corked with Marc Fennell
- By: Marc Fennell
- Narrated by: Marc Fennell
- Length: 4 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How can you cheat… at drinking wine? It turns out you can. And when you do, a whole world of power, ego and money will unravel. Corked is the scandalous saga in the glamorous, competitive and mysterious world of fine wines.
By: Marc Fennell
-
So Many Stars
- An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color
- By: Caro De Robertis
- Narrated by: Caro De Robertis
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
So Many Stars knits together the voices of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and two-spirit elders of color as they share authentic, intimate accounts of how they created space for themselves and their communities in the world. This singular project collects the testimonies of twenty elders, each a glimmering thread in a luminous tapestry, preserving their words for future generations—who can more fully exist in the world today because of these very trailblazers.
By: Caro De Robertis
-
The Devil Three Times
- A Novel
- By: Rickey Fayne
- Narrated by: James Fouhey, Robin Miles, Joniece Abbott-Pratt
- Length: 14 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Yetunde awakens aboard a slave ship en route to the United States with the spirit of her dead sister as her only companion. Desperate to survive the hell that awaits her at their destination, Yetunde finds help in an unexpected form—the Devil himself. The Devil, seeking a way to reenter the pearly gates of heaven, decides to prove himself to an indifferent God by protecting Yetunde and granting her a piece of his supernatural power. In return, Yetunde makes an incredible sacrifice.
By: Rickey Fayne
-
The Compound
- A Novel
- By: Aisling Rawle
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door. Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: why would she, when the world outside is falling apart?
By: Aisling Rawle
-
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club
- Surviving Iran's Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes
- By: Sepideh Gholian
- Narrated by: Ashraf Shirazi
- Length: 3 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors: they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet—in spite of anything and everything—they resist: they bake. They console each other, cry together, dance together. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a call to stand up for Woman, Life, Freedom by a woman still fighting for a free Iran.
By: Sepideh Gholian
-
Kuleana
- A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai'i
- By: Sara Kehaulani Goo
- Narrated by: Sara Kehaulani Goo
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From an early age, Sara Kehaulani Goo was enchanted by her family’s land in Hawai‘i. The vast area on the rugged shores of Maui’s east side—given by King Kamehameha III in 1848—extends from mountain to sea, encompassing ninety acres of lush, undeveloped rainforest jungle along the rocky coastline and a massive sixteenth-century temple with a mysterious past. When a property tax bill arrives with a 500 percent increase, Sara and her family members are forced to make a decision about the property: fight to keep the land or sell to the next offshore millionaire.
-
Corked with Marc Fennell
- By: Marc Fennell
- Narrated by: Marc Fennell
- Length: 4 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How can you cheat… at drinking wine? It turns out you can. And when you do, a whole world of power, ego and money will unravel. Corked is the scandalous saga in the glamorous, competitive and mysterious world of fine wines.
By: Marc Fennell
-
So Many Stars
- An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color
- By: Caro De Robertis
- Narrated by: Caro De Robertis
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
So Many Stars knits together the voices of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and two-spirit elders of color as they share authentic, intimate accounts of how they created space for themselves and their communities in the world. This singular project collects the testimonies of twenty elders, each a glimmering thread in a luminous tapestry, preserving their words for future generations—who can more fully exist in the world today because of these very trailblazers.
By: Caro De Robertis
-
The Devil Three Times
- A Novel
- By: Rickey Fayne
- Narrated by: James Fouhey, Robin Miles, Joniece Abbott-Pratt
- Length: 14 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Yetunde awakens aboard a slave ship en route to the United States with the spirit of her dead sister as her only companion. Desperate to survive the hell that awaits her at their destination, Yetunde finds help in an unexpected form—the Devil himself. The Devil, seeking a way to reenter the pearly gates of heaven, decides to prove himself to an indifferent God by protecting Yetunde and granting her a piece of his supernatural power. In return, Yetunde makes an incredible sacrifice.
By: Rickey Fayne
-
The Compound
- A Novel
- By: Aisling Rawle
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door. Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: why would she, when the world outside is falling apart?
By: Aisling Rawle
-
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club
- Surviving Iran's Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes
- By: Sepideh Gholian
- Narrated by: Ashraf Shirazi
- Length: 3 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors: they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet—in spite of anything and everything—they resist: they bake. They console each other, cry together, dance together. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a call to stand up for Woman, Life, Freedom by a woman still fighting for a free Iran.
By: Sepideh Gholian
-
Kuleana
- A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai'i
- By: Sara Kehaulani Goo
- Narrated by: Sara Kehaulani Goo
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From an early age, Sara Kehaulani Goo was enchanted by her family’s land in Hawai‘i. The vast area on the rugged shores of Maui’s east side—given by King Kamehameha III in 1848—extends from mountain to sea, encompassing ninety acres of lush, undeveloped rainforest jungle along the rocky coastline and a massive sixteenth-century temple with a mysterious past. When a property tax bill arrives with a 500 percent increase, Sara and her family members are forced to make a decision about the property: fight to keep the land or sell to the next offshore millionaire.
-
Dirty Kitchen
- A Memoir of Food and Family
- By: Jill Damatac
- Narrated by: Jill Damatac
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Interweaving forgotten colonial history and long-buried indigenous traditions, Dafilmmaker Jill Damatac takes us through her time in America, cooking her way through Filipino recipes in her kitchen as she searches for a sense of self and renewed possibility. With emotional intelligence, clarity, and grace, Dirty Kitchen explores fractured memories to ask questions of identity, colonialism, immigration, belonging, and to find ways in which the ritual, tradition, and comfort of food, can answer them.
By: Jill Damatac
-
Great Black Hope
- A Novel
- By: Rob Franklin
- Narrated by: Justice Smith, Rob Franklin
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not. It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, the daughter of a famous soul singer, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as lingering questions around how well he really knew his closest friend.
By: Rob Franklin
-
Strangers in the Land
- Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America
- By: Michael Luo
- Narrated by: Eric Yang
- Length: 17 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1889, while upholding Chinese exclusion, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field characterized them as “strangers in the land.” Only in 1965 did America’s gates swing open to people like Luo’s parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Today there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States and yet the “stranger” label, Luo writes, remains. Drawing on archives from across the country and written with a New Yorker writer’s style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is revelatory and unforgettable, an essential American story.
By: Michael Luo
-
Authority
- Essays
- By: Andrea Long Chu
- Narrated by: Andrea Long Chu
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers. Authority brings together Chu’s critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1.
By: Andrea Long Chu
-
Parents Weekend
- A Novel
- By: Alex Finlay
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the glow of their children’s exciting first year of college at a small private school in Northern California, five families plan on a night of dinner and cocktails for the opening festivities of Parents Weekend. As the parents stay out way past their bedtimes, their kids—five residents of Campisi Hall—never show up at dinner.
By: Alex Finlay
-
So Gay for You
- Friendship, Found Family, and the Show That Started It All
- By: Kate Moennig, Leisha Hailey
- Narrated by: Kate Moennig, Leisha Hailey
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the early 2000s, Kate Moennig and Leisha Hailey—both young artists trying to figure it all out—met at auditions for an unknown little TV show. Given that it was a show about lesbians living in Los Angeles, with the first ever ensemble cast of openly queer female characters, Kate and Leisha knew the project was going to be unlike anything else out there—that is, if it even got picked up.
By: Kate Moennig, and others
-
Audre & Bash Are Just Friends
- By: Tia Williams
- Narrated by: Jordan Cobb, Torian Brackett
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
MEET AUDRE. Junior class president. Debate team captain. Unofficial student therapist. Desperately in need of a good time. MEET BASH. Mysterious new senior. Everybody’s crush. Tall, floppy, great taste in jewelry. King of having a good time. It’s the last day of school at Cheshire Prep, Brooklyn’s elite academy—and Audre Mercy-Moore’s life is a mess. Her dad cancelled her annual summer visit to his Malibu beach house. Now? She’s stuck in a claustrophobic apartment with her mom, stepdad, and one-year-old sister (aka the Goblin Baby).
By: Tia Williams
-
Yoko
- The Biography
- By: David Sheff
- Narrated by: Max Meyers
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Yoko’s life, independent of Lennon, was an amazing journey. Yoko spans from her birth to wealthy parents in pre-war Tokyo, her harrowing experience as a child during the war, her arrival in avant-garde art scene in London, Tokyo, and New York City. It delves into her groundbreaking art, music, feminism, and activism. We see how she coped under the most intense, relentless, and cynical microscope as she was falsely vilified for the most heinous cultural crime imaginable: breaking up the greatest rock-and-roll band in history.
-
-
Great Book, Horrible Narrator
- By Mg on 03-28-25
By: David Sheff
-
In Tongues
- A Novel
- By: Thomas Grattan
- Narrated by: Daniel Henning
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It’s 2001, and twenty-four-year-old Gordon—handsome, sensitive, and eager for direction—takes a bus from Minnesota to New York City because it’s the only place for a young gay man to go. As he begins to settle into the city’s punishing rhythm, he gets a job walking rich Manhattanites’ dogs. But it isn’t until he stumbles into the West Village brownstone of two of his clients, the powerful gallery owners Phillip and Nicola, that Gordon learns how much the world has hidden from him—and what he’s capable of doing in order to get it for himself.
-
-
Engaging, smart and witty storytelling!
- By Bruce Cannella on 09-30-24
By: Thomas Grattan
-
Mark Twain
- By: Ron Chernow
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 44 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain.
By: Ron Chernow
-
Atmosphere
- A Love Story
- By: Taylor Jenkins Reid
- Narrated by: Kristen DiMercurio, Julia Whelan, Taylor Jenkins Reid
- Length: 14 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.
-
Open, Heaven
- A Novel
- By: Seán Hewitt
- Narrated by: Sebastian Croft
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other’s lives. James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries.
By: Seán Hewitt