October 15 2025, 08:15 
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, trans rights advocate and veteran of the Stonewall Riots, passed away yesterday at 78, according to a statement from her non-profit, the Griffin-Gracy Educational and Historical Center, commonly known as the House of gg. Miss Major spent over 50 years fighting for trans rights and
“Her enduring legacy is a testament to her resilience, activism, and dedication to creating safe spaces for Black trans communities and all trans people–we are eternally grateful for Miss Major’s life, her contributions, and how deeply she poured into those she loved,” House of gg said in their statement.
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Miss Major suffered a stroke in 2019, but continued to make public appearances. In September, she was hospitalized with a blood clot and sepsis. She passed away “in the comfort of her home and surrounded by loved ones in Little Rock, Arkansas.”
Born in Chicago in 1946, Miss Major came out to her parents at 12 or 13, she told SF Weekly in 2015. After telling them that “this existence that I had, it just didn’t feel right,” her parents took her first to a psychiatrist, and then to a church to have “the demon excised from me.” In her memoir, Miss Major Speaks: Conversations With a Black Trans Revolutionary, written with Toshio Meronek, she claimed to love her parents “despite their recurring attempts to smack the queen out of her.”
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“Then they waited for me to grow out of it,” Miss Major said. “I’m still waiting to grow out of it myself.”
Miss Major attempted to go to college in both Minnesota and Illinois but was kicked out of both for wearing women’s clothes. She moved to New York City in the 1960s, where she found work in a hospital morgue and performed in drag shows in the Jewel Box Revue, but made most of the money she lived on from sex work.
In those years, Miss Major also became a regular at the Stonewall Inn, which led to her being in the bar on June 28, 1969, when the establishment was raided by police in riot gear. Miss Major explained to SF Weekly that her experiences with police and jail in Chicago had taught her that it was better to be knocked out quickly than to enter a prolonged fight with police and be beaten further.
She pulled an officer’s mask off and spat in his face. “He knocked my
“I guess we were just sick of their s**t,” she wrote in her memoir with Meronek. “Suddenly we were fighting, and we were kicking their ass.” While the Stonewall Riots are credited with jumpstarting the modern queer civil rights movement, Miss Major noted that too often that movement excluded trans people.
The years that followed helped transform Miss Major into a full-fledged political activist. Her friend Puppy’s death was attributed to suicide, but she always suspected that Puppy had been murdered and the police chose not to investigate. After that, she was arrested on a robbery charge and housed in a men’s prison. There she met Frank “Big Black” Smith and other leaders of the Attica Correctional Facility Riot. Smith opened Miss Major’s eyes to the political world and helped her to learn more about African American history.
Upon her release from prison, Miss Major moved towards activism and advocacy, especially for Black trans women who had been housed in men’s prisons, and who had survived police brutality.
In 1978, Miss Major moved to San Diego with her young son, Christopher, where she became a patient liaison for the San Diego AIDS Foundation. “No one wanted to take care of those gay guys when they first got AIDS, and a lot of my transgender women stepped up to the plate to do it.” She went on to found Angels of Care, which organized trans women to provide care for those dying of AIDS in both LA and New York.
She also became a health educator with Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center in San Francisco, where she founded a drop-in program called Gigi’s that offered transgender support groups and provided information and resources related to gender issues.
When Alexander L. Lee founded the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) in 2004, Miss Major became its first executive director. The grassroots organization writes letters to incarcerated trans people and supports them when they are released. Miss Major also mentored incarcerated trans people. She retired from TGIJP in 2015.
In 2019, she founded the House of gg as a place for Black trans people to heal from “the trauma arising from generations of transphobia, racism, sexism, poverty, ableism, and violence, and nurture them into tomorrow’s leaders.”
After stepping back for a few years, Miss Major returned to the fight for trans rights full-throated in her final years. In response to the rising tide of anti-trans legislation getting passed, she found she had to get back out there, she told The 19th, “I decided, well, someone’s got to do something. And then it dawned on me, well, no one’s going to do it but me.”
She went on to meet with White House officials, trans people, and the younger generations. “These kids don’t know what it was like then, what we had to go through, how we had to fight. Somebody’s gotta light a fire under their ass.”
Miss Major served as the grand marshal for the NYC Pride parade in 2024 and delivered a fiery speech at the DNC in Chicago, where she closed her remarks by saying, “I’m not going back. I refuse to go back. And if [Trump] thinks we’re going back, f**k him in his ass.”
Miss Major is survived by chosen and traditional family that includes but is not limited to her partner, Beck Witt, her sisters Tracie O’Brien and Billie Cooper, her sons Christopher, Jonathan, and Asaiah, and her chosen daughters, including Janetta Johnson, executive director of the TGI Justice Project.
Her story was told in the 2015 documentary Major!
